Welcome, students, faculty, staff, President Den Ouden, board members, alumni and friends, to the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year. It’s a delight for me to be able to join you as we celebrate this con-vocation—literally, a “calling together”—at the start of a new year. It is also my hope that we would consider this morning the vocation that we share as an academic community. I want us to reflect on what it is that we are, together (con), called to (vocation). Specifically, I’d like to look at our shared calling to cultivate a Reformed academic ethos.

A “Reformed academic ethos …” you might ask, “what in the world is that?” Well, allow me to offer a definition, starting at the end of the phrase and working back toward the beginning. Ethos, as you budding biblical scholars know, is a Greek word and means “custom” or “character.” (It’s related to the Greek ethikos, from which we get “ethics.”) According to Webster, an ethos is “the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines ethos as “the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; the ‘genius’ [or ‘spirit’] of an institution or system.” It’s the term used to describe the spirit or character of a society or community, as opposed to the tangible things—the buildings, art, music, movies, etc.—that make up the material culture of a society or a community. Different institutions or communities have different ethoses. This year Penn State unseated Florida in the Princeton Review’s ranking of top party schools. You might say that Penn State has a fantastic ‘party’ ethos.

I remember vividly my own first exposure to collegiate ethoses. As a high school senior preparing to go to college, I had to choose between North Carolina, Duke, the US Naval Academy, and a little Christian college on top of a mountain called Covenant. I visited all four institutions. At North Carolina my hosts took me to a sociology class with 500 students and then had me work the keg at a frat mixer. At Duke my hosts took me to a dreadfully boring literary theory class and then went back to their dorm room to play drinking games. At Navy my hosts left me in the dorm room while they snuck off campus and went into DC to drink beer and watch hockey. At Covenant, I came back from a class to find my hosts having a discussion, which had started in the classroom and spilled over into the dorm room, about the degree to which Paul was influenced by Plato in his anthropology—his view of human nature. I think you can see, the ethos on the last campus was very different from that on the others. (Incidentally, I was hooked by that ethos and turned down the other offers, much to my guidance counselor’s confusion and dismay.)

Providence has an ethos, and one of its characteristics is (or, at least, ought to be) that it is academic. We are, after all, a college, so it makes sense that the spirit or character of our community would be defined by the particular intellectual mission of our institution. We are about the life of the mind, and the spirit of our community is—and ought to be—shaped by that fact.

So we have an ethos, and that ethos is academic, but we are about more than just the life of the mind. We are also a Christian college, and more specifically a Reformed college. So what does it look like to have a Reformed academic ethos—a spirit that is shaped not only by our academic mission but also by the particular commitments of reformational Christianity? Well, first let me state what it does not mean. It does not mean that we wear orange blazers and wooden shoes (though you might do just that, especially if you are from Orange City, Iowa). It also does not mean that we wear kilts and blue face-paint (for those of you who come from the Scottish, or Presbyterian, side of the Reformed tradition). It does mean that we carry on in the spirit of the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition. Well then, you might ask, what is that spirit?

Here I’d like to offer some words of definition from one of America’s greatest Reformed minds, the early 20th-century Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield. I share Warfield’s words because I think they help us get away from caricatures and jargon, and closer to the root of Reformed or Calvinistic Christianity. In 1908 Warfield wrote an essay on Calvinism for the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. In it, as he seeks to define what Calvinism is, he writes:

And Warfield continues:

Warfield’s definition of what it means to be a Calvinist (and I’m working here under the assumption that we can fairly substitute “Reformed” for Calvinist) in one sense seems to set a pretty low bar. No mention here of deep knowledge of the Reformed confessions, or of memorization of Reformed catechisms, or of familiarity with the latest debates between neo-Kuyperians and Two Kingdoms’ guys, or of attendance at any of the leading Reformed colleges [like Providence]. In another sense, it’s a very high bar. How many of us daily recognize in the depths of our souls our utter dependence on God? How many of us are determined—I mean, determined—that God would be God over every aspect of our life: over the songs we listen to, the videos we watch, the words we speak, the thoughts we think?

The point is this: at its most basic, to be Reformed is to be seriously Christian. Perhaps it could mean some other things as well, but the Reformed Christian is certainly one who recognizes his or her utter dependence on God and submits him- or herself to His rule over every aspect of life.

But what does that look like in the context of an academic community? How should our reliance upon, and subservience to, a sovereign God shape the ethos of Providence Christian College? Here I’m indebted to a contemporary Christian author and academic, Mark Schwehn, who is dean of the honors college at Valparaiso University (a Lutheran scholar who acknowledges the contributiton of the Reformed tradition on this subject matter). Schwehn’s book, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, offers some helpful suggestions on what the ethos of a seriously Christian academic community ought to look like. [2] His description is born of a frustration with the state of the academy, and here I have to introduce a little history. (Aside: My Ph.D. is in history, so I like to “introduce a little history” whenever I can.)

What we know today as colleges and universities grew out of schools that were established in major cities in Europe in the high Middle Ages—Oxford, Paris, Bologna. The earliest schools were monastic schools; that is, schools within monasteries that educated novice monks. After a time, these schools began to teach students from outside the monastery, and then non-monastic schools began to spring up in the cities. These schools were always, though, composed of clergy, or clerics. The faculty were clerics, and the students were clerics as well. They lived together in communities that looked like monasteries, and the ethos of these communities was formed by the practice of Christian virtues, such as humility, self-denial, friendship, and charity. For centuries, higher learning flourished in these schools, colleges, and universities that were shaped by the conscious practice of spiritual virtues.

Fast-forward to the late 19th century. A new model for academic communities arose: the research university. In this new model, the virtues that were exalted were not those of the monastic schools, which had come to define the character of colleges and universities up to that point. Research universities celebrated individual accomplishment, the making of knowledge (divorced from goals like human well-being or the public good), and the dissemination of information and skills (disassociated from the formation of character).  They cherished the virtues of diligence, precision [pretty good, so far], productivity, calculation, control, ambition, rationalism, and individualism. Because this model was effective in generating scientific advances it became the dominant model for higher education in the 20th century. It spawned institutions such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cal, and UCLA. (Interestingly, it also sparked the transformation of schools like Harvard from college for pastors to research university.) It is still the dominant model today. I have a younger brother who is a professor at a formerly Christian Ivy League university. I asked him if he could sum up his institution’s ethos in three words—he wrote “excellence without purpose.”

The ethos that permeates our campus ought to be different from that of the research university. While as individual Christians some of us may be called to serve in the secular academy, I would argue that the ethos of our Reformed academic community ought to be infused with the very same Christian virtues that shaped the monastic schools and early universities of the Middle Ages. We are a college that is about the formation of whole Christian persons, not just the passing on of knowledge and skills (though we certainly believe that the two are and should be connected). We are a community of believers seeking truth together—as opposed to individuals seeking to make knowledge alone—so the practice of certain virtues is indispensable to the successful execution of our mission. And the practice of these virtues has implications for our lives both in and out of the classroom.

But what are these “monkish” virtues that ought to shape a seriously Christian academic community? In Exiles from Eden, Schwehn identifies a number of virtues as crucial to the properly constructed Christian academic ethos. Not surprisingly, I think you can find all of these either explicitly mentioned or hinted at in the passage from Philippians (2.1–18) we heard read just a few minutes ago.

First, we ought to value humility as an essential academic virtue. As Christians we know that we ought to think little of our own powers. We shouldn’t assume that we have all the answers. [Outside, of course, those provided to us explicitly in the Scriptures.] We shouldn’t presume to know what other people mean. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions. We ought to humble ourselves and listen. This attitude is a sure-fire antidote for laziness and apathy. We are obligated to work to uncover insights in the views or positions of others. We ought to assume that the thinkers that we read or study have something to say, something to contribute, that they have some authority. We are, after all, finite and fallen people. Humbly acknowledging our limitations and allowing that others have something to teach us is something we are obligated to do as Christians. And this holds true not only for our interactions with our teachers, or with established scholars, or with books. It also holds true for our interactions with our peers. One of the gifts we have been given here is each other, and we ought to humbly take advantage of the insights of our brothers and sisters.

Second, we ought to embrace self-denial as a necessary virtue. This means that we ought to be willing to risk, and maybe even give up something of ourselves, for the sake of truth. We should be prepared to abandon cherished beliefs in light of truth, even (perhaps especially) when that truth is uncomfortable. This ought to be natural for us in the Reformed tradition. After all, we know well the impact of the fall in our own lives and the dire effects of sin in this world. One of the uncomfortable truths that each of us has to accept is the depth of our own sin and the sham, the deception, of our own righteousness. At times, the virtue of self-denial will require that we be willing to change our minds, which will mean changing ourselves … which is, after all, what we are after: giving up ourselves for the sake of becoming like Christ. And it is much easier for us to undergo this sort of change when we know that we stand on that which is unchanging. I should add that self-denial can also occur on a much simpler level—say, when you have to forgo watching a Packers-Vikings game for the sake of preparing for an exam. But perhaps I’m preaching only to myself here….

Third, as a Reformed academic community we ought to cherish friendship. By this I mean philia, or brotherly love for our fellow travelers, our fellow truth-seekers. We know our limitations (finite and fallen). We know that we need others. We know that interaction with others leads us to insights we wouldn’t gain otherwise and to personal growth that we wouldn’t experience otherwise. Ours ought to be a community where we cherish the pleasures of thinking and speaking together; where the company we keep makes us the kind of people God would have us be, and where we seek to help those with whom we keep company become the kind of people God would have them be. We ought to celebrate the sort of friendship that puts others before self and that points people to Christ. We also ought to celebrate the sort of friendship that is intentional about the sharpening of others for the sake of their service in the kingdom of Christ.

Finally, we ought to dedicate ourselves to charity. “What?!” you say, “Handouts??” No, I’m talking about charity in its traditional and much bigger sense, from the Latin caritas, from the Greek agape, love. Our life as a Christian academic community ought to be marked by love. Self-less, other-focused, God-glorifying love. Love for one another, for those immediately present, yes; but also love for those outside of our community and those with whom we haven’t yet come into contact. Consider, for example, how the work that you do as students at Providence might impact  your ability to contribute to the health and vitality of a church, or your family, or a neighborhood, or a city, in the years to come. Consider, faculty, how the work that you do with your students might contribute, or how the research and writing that you do might contribute. Ought we not pursue these activities out of a deep sense of charity? Bernard of Clairvaux (a Cistercian monk!) captured just this sense of motivation for academic pursuits when he wrote that:

As a Reformed academic community,  we at Providence are called to cultivate an ethos of humility, self-denial, friendship, and love. We ought to model these virtues for one another and we ought to order our life together so that the practice of these virtues is understood and felt as an essential aspect of our college’s ethos. After all, to be Reformed, to be seriously Christian, means to acknowledge and embrace God’s rule over every dimension of our lives, as did Jesus Christ, who provides the ultimate example of humility, self-denial, friendship, and love.

And how do we cultivate this sort of ethos? Let me offer three quick suggestions. First, as we begin a new academic year, do not hesitate to preach the gospel, the good news, to one another; remind one another of who we are in Christ and of what that means for our life together as a scholarly community. Second, pray. We need the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us to live the sort of life to which we’ve been called. Finally, remind one another of that calling. Tell one another the story of what a healthy college looks like, of what a seriously Christian, Reformed academic ethos feels like.

It’s our privilege to gather here and enjoy the blessings and pleasures of life in a community that celebrates and practices the Christian virtues of humility, self-denial, friendship, and charity; to live together in pursuit of truth and understanding, to the glory of God and for the benefit of others. Ours is a wonderful calling. Let’s make the most of it.