More Than a Framed Receipt: How to Avoid Consuming—or Being Consumed by—College

JACOB SHATZER

(Author’s Note: This piece was originally delivered as the convocation address to begin the 2014-2015 academic year at Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas. Thanks to Dr. Greg Kerr for inviting me to give it.)

A college diploma might be the only receipt that we frame. I mean, think about it—what if you walked into a faculty member’s office and saw a framed receipt for a hamburger, or a book. You’d want answers, right? Why is that framed!?

Perhaps it was a particularly spectacular hamburger that changed the professor’s culinary perspective. Maybe it was the most important book (or the most expensive book!) they’d ever bought. You’d want answers…or maybe you’d just leave the office quickly!

Framing something means it is important. We frame pictures of people and moments; we frame art; and for some reason, we frame college diplomas. We don’t frame receipts.

Now you might be thinking, “A diploma isn’t really a receipt,” and I guess you’d be right. It’s not a receipt. It doesn’t show the cost, what form of payment you used, or the name of the cashier who helped you.

I think this is where we get one clue about what this whole college thing is about. Even though we so often—in the name of wisdom—try to translate everything into a cost-benefit, economic analysis…even though we have to think about things like “How much does college cost?” and “Will I be able to get a job?”, the answers to these particular questions don’t lead us to frame our diplomas. There is no economic reason for framing our diplomas. Those aren’t the reasons we love our colleges.

Have you ever met someone who went to the University of Texas? If you insult them by doing that upside-down Longhorn thing that Aggies fans do, they’re not going to punch you because they felt like the cost-benefit ratio of their UT education was exceptional. That’s not why they love Texas. We don’t frame our diplomas because of the “deal” we got.

So on one level I simply want to challenge each of us today to make a pact to resist consumeristic reductionism. Now there’s a big term! I just mean we need to resist letting the language of the shopping mall dominate our perspectives about why we are here. Your college experience is not the function of money, time, and the job you can get someday.

Students—your professors are not the equivalent of education waiters, meant to take your order and refill your drinks. Professors—you are not information vending machines!

It would be simpler if it were that way—if education were just about information. Here, I have five informations. I will give them to you. Have a nice day.

But education isn’t about information as much as it is about formation. Now information plays a role in that—don’t pull an “I’m all about formation, not information” the next time you fail a quiz because you didn’t study—but the information serves the formation.

What we learn and experience shapes who we become, not just who signs our paychecks (or whether we even get them). Education forms us not just to know certain things but to love certain things, to strive for certain things, to care about certain things.

Examples help this process of formation. In his book Divine Teaching,[1] theologian Mark McIntosh provides various models for thinking theologically, and some of these models can help us think about what it is we’re doing here. I want to highlight three and encourage all of us to be adventurers, pirates, and sages.

First, be an adventurer.

Humans become truly human when we are lured outside of ourselves. Outside of our own limited understanding of reality, and out of our focus on ourselves. McIntosh puts it this way: “Only if human beings are lured out of themselves can they make contact with the really real. Not that the human ego is unreal, but that its mapping of everything in terms of itself inevitably distorts reality, and diminishes it to the ego’s grasp.”[2] In other words, when we are too focused on ourselves rather than others, we reduce our own reality to what we already are. That’s not an adventure. That’s not formation.

Let’s put this in practical terms. Be an adventurer. Stretch outside yourself, outside your comfort zone. Take classes outside of your major! Learn something true and beautiful, something that you’re not quite sure yet how you will USE. Don’t just take the path of least resistance to getting a degree completed. Risk being shaped and formed and transformed in ways you can’t even imagine!

And just as important: open yourselves to others. We like to think we have lots of friends, right? I mean, on Facebook I have literally dozens of friends. Social media can make us feel that we are really getting out there, being friends with people. But really we just curate our own little digital museum—or mausoleum—of put-on faces: studies show that most social networks simply help us surround ourselves with people like us.[3]

So be an adventurer. Make a friend this year, in real life, who is completely different than you. Someone whose sense of humor you don’t understand, who won’t be able to help you get an A on a test. Don’t just use people for your predetermined plan. Adventure outside yourself.

Second, be a pirate.

When you find truth, wherever you find it, take it and run off with it. Don’t leave it behind. Take risks to get it, even if that means you end up walking with a limp. We can think about this in a couple ways. As McIntosh relates it to theology, he says, “God has been using the things humans see to talk to humans… theologians have to rediscover the deep dimension of all good things that has in fact been God-talk, theo-logy, all along.”[4] If our God is the Great Creator of all good things, we should be expectant and watchful for flashes of those good things—in our lives and in our studies.

We can also think about when God saved the Israelites from Egypt. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians gave great gifts when Israel left, and in this way Israel plundered the Egyptians. The theologian Augustine used this idea—“plundering the Egyptians”—to refer to the way Christians can find truth in any discipline and relate it to God. All truth is God’s truth. Wherever we find it, we must take it. Like a pirate.

Third and finally, be a sage.

A sage is a wise person. Be a pirate so you can be a sage. Christians believe that when we know things by faith, we are in a way sharing in God’s knowledge of everything. God’s wisdom.

McIntosh puts it this way: “Try to think about everything and anything with the divine artist’s ideas about things singing in the mind.”[5] Because God’s knowledge is more than just a bunch of isolated facts, but a fuller vision of truth that includes all of the connections and variables.

The Bible gives us a strong sense that wisdom is intimately tied to God’s knowledge of himself and of the world. Proverbs 3:19 tells us, “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens.”

And Colossians chapter 1 connects wisdom and the intelligibility of the world to Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

So be a sage. Not just someone who can spout off a bunch of facts, but someone who sees how each and every fact about the world is connected, because God is One, and because each and every fact about the world holds together in Jesus and glorifies Jesus. That is true wisdom.

Conclusion

But why would we pursue these tasks? Are we just called here by academic necessity or tradition? I think the answer to this question is something that sets Christian colleges apart, that makes Christian institutions of higher education remarkably better. You see, we aren’t called here by necessity, but by a good and loving God. A Father who calls all into relationship with Him through the work of His Son and by the Power of His Holy Spirit.

The word “vocation” refers to this idea of God’s call. It includes God’s call to salvation, and it also extends to include what God calls each of us to do with our lives. 

So let’s all reflect on our common vocation, the common calling that we have from God. Not only a call to accept His Son as our Savior and to worship and follow Him, but to be students, to be staff, to be faculty in this place, this year. Let’s not consume our college—or be consumed by the work we have to do.

And let’s not just labor for framed receipts. The ink will fade; the paper, disintegrate. Let us instead be adventurers, pirates, and sages as we work together, here, to know God, to love God, and to be workers in His kingdom, which will last much longer than any receipt.

[1] Mark McIntosh, Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell).

[2] Ibid., 16.

[3] For instance, see A. J. Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012).

[4] McIntosh, 21.

[5] Ibid., 28.

Jacob Shatzer is associate professor of theological studies and associate dean in the School of Theology and Missions at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.