Recently I went through one of the major ordeals of higher education known as Comprehensive Exams.  As a PhD student in Historical Theology, I had to sit four written exams and one oral.  I sat for an eight-hour exam on Christology and Trinity in the Early Church, and three four-hour exams on The New Testament and other ancient Christian writings, Ancient Philosophy, and Karl Barth (my modern portion).  Who would ever want to sit and write for eight hours on the doctrines of the Early Church?  The crazy thing is that you write it all out and still feel like you only got to share a small portion of what you have learned. 

     I never wanted to be up in the ‘ivory tower.’  As a young Christian, I despised academics.  Those evil, self-interested figures whose careers depend on making you feel small and demonstrating their ability to tear down whatever it was you believed in or found valuable.  I wrote poems about my evil professors in college. I remember one of them was about a Shakespeare professor.  Something about how she would chew and chew the sweetest meat of literature until nothing but a desiccated chunk of formless meat fell from her gaping maw to the floor.  Lifeless, flavorless, and colorless.

     Yeah, maybe I had some bad profs! Others were not so bad.  But some could take filet mignon and turn it into beef jerky. 

Now that’s me.  I’m the authority figure.  I’m the one teaching classes and taking material—some of the most life-giving, full, flavorful, colorful material there is—and sitting judgment over it as I pass it on, authoritatively abridged, to my students.  Ugh.

     Once, education was about building something.  It was about making an educated person.  It was the reflection of the common and core values of a society.  If we have only so many points of fact to share and pass on with later generations, what should they be?  Now it seems more and more about deconstruction.  The center does not hold.  There is no core.  You can’t blame the students.  They want the tools to succeed.  The tragedy is when they are convinced that it is the degree they need to succeed, not the education.  And they may be right.  All too often the degree on the resume is more valuable than the educated mind.

     I did not want to be in the ‘ivory tower’ far from the common world; and there’s a voice in me that sometimes sings, like the people of God by the rivers of Babylon, how long, O Lord? How long?  But other times I catch a vision.  Christians used to believe that education opened up the soul.  Education—learning a language, learning to read, learning a new subject—caused the very soul to expand and helped that soul know God.  Can I share that faith in education?  Do you, reader, believe that all education is helpful?  Or can we be educated away from God?  Some of the most forceful ‘anti-God’ classes wind up bringing people right to the feet of Jesus, don’t they?

     Helmut Thielicke wrote a helpful little handbook early last century called A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.  He said that students of theology put their soul at great peril.  They could easily fall into the pathology of theological conceit.  They could convince themselves that they had explained away their own faith, and so were better than their former selves and their family and friends whose beliefs they once shared.  Too often this is the case.  But, Thielicke says, the Christian theologian must take up the larger tools of Christian dogmatics if he or she is to one day build the larger houses.  They are big tools, and they can do a lot of damage in the hands of a fool.  But they are powerful tools, and there are no other tools to use to build the great edifices of Christian society. We can’t leave it to others.  There must be those who will practice “theology at high altitudes.”

     We may often fear, despise or disdain the ‘ivory tower’, but it remains the only place to climb to gain the larger instruments of edification.  I only hope that the buildings I build are ones that make room for worship, love, and knowledge of God.

     Ecclesiastes 12:12-13