Education & the Meaning of Life

Dr. William David Beck, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies
Liberty University, Lynch burg, VA
Commencement 2005

At other graduations, the graduates are the focus, or the commencement speaker, or maybe the faculty, or the school… but this is a Christian college and that means that this commencement, like everything else here at New Saint Andrews, is about Christ.  We are here to thank Him for accomplishments, talents and victories.  We are here to praise Him for you graduates, for the college, its faculty, and administration.  We are here to worship Him because He is true Lord and King of Kings.  We are here to glorify Him because He is God and He is sovereign, and apart from His grace nothing happens here at New Saint Andrews College !  He is why we are here today!

To you graduates:  I have sat through many commencements that were wonderful, challenging, inspiring calls to change the world – to achieve, to strive for success, to never quit…and that’s all good. But I think it misses the central point.  So pardon me if I give the commencement address I have never heard but always wanted to hear.  Today is a crucial day, a day that marks an important end and an important beginning:  the end of a phase of training and learning, the beginning of a phase of service and ministry and also continued training and learning.  On this crucial day nothing could be more important than to know what life – and the rest of your life – should be all about.  What is your purpose?  What are you here for?  What is your first concern in life? 

This is, of course, the central question of the discipline of philosophy -- and I am a philosopher.  So please indulge me if I talk about what is crucial to me.  This is a professional hazard when you invite a philosopher to do something practical.  So you'll have to blame Dr. Atwood for inviting me.

I do want to thank you for the kind invitation to be here.  I have been involved from a distance for years and have prayed for you and helped where I could.  But it is a real honor to be with you and share Christ with you today, however briefly, as a friend.  … Now back to the meaning of life!

Let me begin by reminding you of two incidents in the Gospels that illustrate what life is not about.

The first is in Mark 10, verses 17 to 22.  You recall the young rich aristocrat who comes to Jesus. He has kept all the rules and done everything right.  Surely that is a good thing!  So he now asks Jesus what he should do.  So far I have done all that could be expected and more, is there something I have missed … something I don't know about?  But Jesus answers him only with the odd and unanticipated request to “follow me.”

Many Christians are obsessed with doing the right things, obeying the rules, and so on.  And of course, many people in our society seem convinced that they will be happy if they keep to the list: get a good job, work hard, have a family, raise good children, support good causes, give to charity, and so on. And in a sense of course that's good.  Notice in the account that Jesus is sympathetic with this man's desire to do right.  But that doesn’t suffice.  Why?  Because by itself it focuses on me!  To think that I must do things to please God is to be selfish.  It implies that my life is about me – but it isn’t.  It’s about Christ.  So life is not about just doing the right things, even though that’s good.  Of course we should do the right things.

The second account I want us to think about is found in Luke 12, verses 16 to 21.  You remember Jesus’ parable of the successful Idaho farmer.  He is so successful that he needs bigger barns to store his stuff: all the good things he has laid up to keep him happy for many years. This is a story about thinking that life is about success, achieving, winning, never quitting, always driving oneself to new heights.

How many people in our society are convinced that they will be happy if they just have the big house, the Beamer … better yet, a Mercedes, the biggest screen TV, solid investments, a good retirement plan, more stuff, and bigger storage sheds to keep it in. And far too many Christians are among them! Now, again, Jesus says nothing against success or money – verse 21 clearly implies that they are  good things – but it’s not what life is about.  Taken as the meaning of life, Jesus says they are foolish.  Success, too, focuses on me.  And that is what is wrong!  I do not doubt that we should strive to succeed and I would challenge every one of you to make great things happen in this country and in the world. But achieving is not the purpose of life. 

So what is your life all about?  Let me take you to an important passage that in some ways parallels our situation here today.  In Matthew 10, Jesus, having trained his disciples, sends them out.  Notice, he predicts that they will not be highly successful.  But Jesus concludes with this single focusing thought:  “It is enough for the student to be like his teacher.”  It’s enough.  It fulfills all the demands.  It completes what our lives are about.  It is the true meaning of life.  As Paul puts it in Philippians 1:21, “For me to live is Christ.”

Just what does that mean in practice and why does it really work?  Let me put this in the form of a series of questions.

First: Why Jesus?  Why is it all about him?  Why should we be like him?  That one is easy!  In Philippians 1, Paul has proclaimed him to be very God.  In Colossians 1, he is the fullness of God, and so Paul later says that all philosophy must be about him: we understand nothing about the meaning of life unless we see it through the eyes of its creator, the one who holds all things together, the one about whom all of creation speaks.

 Second question: What does that have to do with us?  Answer: Everything! Because you and I were created in his image.  We need, of course, to be careful in understanding this important teaching in Genesis 1.  God is infinite.  We are finite.  There is no way for the two to be the same thing, or become the same thing.  But we were created with the same capacities as persons, especially the ability to freely choose our actions, or values… what kind of persons we will be.  What I am, my character, is my choice.

Third question:  So what does this have to do with our day-to-day lives?  It means that we must be, minute by minute, what we are intended to be:  the image of Christ.  Romans 8, verses 28 to 29, talks about image as a goal, not simply as a description of what we are.  I am a human being with certain capacities to reason and value and decide actions just as God does – and like nothing else in the universe does. 

At birth I have no character:  I have not yet become.  You recall that Luke says of Jesus that he grew, in many ways: physically, socially and even morally.  Not that he ever sinned, but maturity as a human being – especially moral maturity - takes experience.  It takes repeated decision-making under different and difficult situations … again and again.  And in that way we can become like Christ.  That is what your life and my life is all about.  That is what God wants for you and me, and everything, I said everything, else is secondary.  Successes, accomplishments, health, a long life, a pleasant life… all are unimportant in relation to the real goal of becoming like Christ.

Let me apply this point to two specific areas of our experience, and there are, of course, many to pick from.  One is wealth.  Well, at least some have experienced it!  Actually, the truth is that most of us often, even always, have more than what we absolutely need to survive.  Should we regard wealth as a blessing, or perhaps as something that comes to us when we obey God, or even as something that as Christians we are entitled to?  We are, after all, children of the King!  Notice what Jesus said about the wealthy:  that it is very difficult for them.  But notice the real point:  wealth, and the same is true for poverty, is not an end in itself.  It is only a means of producing character.  It is not God’s purpose to make us rich or poor. 

His purpose is that we become loving, humble, caring, just, patient, merciful, giving persons.  It is not good in and of itself, that we be rich, or poor, or in-between for that matter.  It is only good that we be like Christ.  So if God does make you rich and successful, be careful:  He wants that you use that to acquire character.  And if He makes you poor and unsuccessful, be careful:  it is only a means to that very same end.

Second, there is our experience of pain and suffering.  We can’t discuss this, of course, without thinking about Job.  So let’s get right to the point.  Notice that Job recognizes that suffering itself is not punishment, or a sign of God’s displeasure.  It is not an indication that I am out of the will of God.  By the way, note that the reverse is also not true.  A good and pleasant and healthy life is not necessarily a sign of God’s blessing either.  What is crucial is that in this experience Job learns his own vulnerability, God’s sovereignty, and the necessity of living in trust.  Of course there is much more to be said about the experience of suffering, pain and evil in our lives, and I certainly do not mean to ignore the guilt of others for much, maybe most of human suffering.  But in this connection, what we must note, as before, is that both pain and pleasure are means, not ends.  They are intended to produce God’s image in us. 

It is terrible suffering that God often uses to humble us, and it can produce the real depths of love in us if we are willing to submit to God’s sovereign will.  It is hard to think of a better contemporary example than Corrie ten Boom, who in the midst of the unspeakable horror of a concentration camp learned to love her captors.  And God used that love to bring many to himself, including some of those very guards.

Here’s what it all comes down to:  Life is about Christ and being like Him. 

To be like Christ you will have to allow God’s Word to define you – like a mirror with a picture taped on it. I learned this from my oldest daughter.  I watched her once fixing her hair in the mirror with one eye, while keeping the other fixed on a picture cut out of a magazine and taped to the side of the mirror.

To read the Bible effectively you must recognize that it is communication from one person to another – and about one person and what that other person must become. God is infinite, timeless, and so his communication to us in Scripture is not bound by time either.  It is fresh every time I read it. It is part of a living, vital relationship, and if you do not understand that you will miss the real impact.

Remember:  John 5:39-40.  No one knew the Scriptures better, studied them more, and was more diligent in demanding obedience to them than those who demanded that Jesus be crucified. They thought that the Law was about what they should do and missed the point that it was about what they should be.

Now one last point: I was supposed to say something erudite here about education.  So here goes!  Tradition dictates that I start with Aristotle.

It was he who first sets out the rationale for a liberal education.  Happiness, that is, our fulfillment as human beings, is found in becoming what we are intended to be, and this is defined by the virtues.  We, however, are free and so this can occur only when we discipline our choices into habits.  This demands, especially for young persons, a context of education for which society is responsible.  So education is about producing persons of character.

The New Testament adds the missing bigger picture:  First, our fulfillment is linked to our identity as “image of God” and therefore to the nature of God.  Thus God’s nature is consonant with God’s law, which in turn is fitting for human happiness.  Second, it places growth in virtue within the context of the Fall and human sinfulness.  Thus it demands spiritual discipline, and the virtues can be seen as the “fruit of the Spirit.”

Now we have the ingredients that produced the great tradition of the University.  It’s goal is to produce persons of godly character; persons who are good and citizens who are just.  Its method is to provide learning within a context of the discipline of the total person.

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Katz correctly observes that the modern secularized research University has lost its way. He says:

“Liberal education is being asked to carry more freight than it did a century ago, and it is not clear that it can succeed.  As it has expanded throughout higher education, it has suffered inevitable losses and unresolved tensions.  As it spread from what were once primarily church-related colleges, for example, it lost its focus on moral values.  But even the surviving emphasis on an orientation that stresses general values has been an uncomfortable fir in the modern research university, which has increasingly stressed the production of scientific knowledge over the transmission of culture.”

The problem seems obvious:  having lost any notion of objective truth, modern education can no longer converge to a common morality.  That is, it has no idea what human nature is and has denied its connection to God.

The result is that our students are lost in pleasure-seeking and demands for good grades, we, however, have lost any concern for the goodness of our students.

All this to say that the true goal of education coincides with the true goal of life: virtue.  Now I’m preaching to the choir.  New Saint Andrews College exists precisely to counter this vacuum in education.  You parents are to be congratulated for the courage to send that which is most precious to you to what at the time must have seemed to be little more than a possibility.  You did so in faith, and after all, faith is just obedience to God’s declaration of what is good even when it appears risky to us.  So, as we say in the South, you did good!  You put the character of your sons and daughters ahead of lesser considerations.

So, class of 2005, in conclusion here is what I wish most for you, and I know it is what the faculty here has always wanted, too:  that you will fulfill your true humanity as God intended. Be like Christ!  Be like Christ! Beyond everything else, be like Christ!!

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