Three “Great” Priorities for Christ-Centered Higher Education, Part 2

NATHAN A. FINN

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of four blog posts. The material was originally presented at the fourth annual IACE Faculty Development Conference, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, May 22-24, 2024. Read Part One here.

The first “great” priority that animates Christ-centered higher education is the Great Commandments. The Great Commandments are found in Matthew 22:36–40:

But when the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (ESV)

In this passage, a lawyer asks Jesus about the great commandment in the law. Citing the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:5, Jesus says the great and first commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart and soul and mind. Jesus then adds that there is a second command like it. Citing Leviticus 19:18, he says you should love your neighbor as yourself. According to Jesus, all the law is summed up in these two great commands to love God and love our neighbors.

Playing off this passage in part, Augustine of Hippo developed a theology of the Christian life that was characterized by the right sort of loving. Augustine argued that sin has disordered our loves so that we no longer love God naturally or love others appropriately. Part of what it means to have new life in Christ is to have our loves redirected Godward and “neighbor-ward.”

Several theologians in Christian history develop this theme further, including Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards. More recently, Calvin College philosopher James K.A. Smith has followed suit with his three-volume Cultural Liturgies series. Smith argues all human beings are inherently worshipers, lovers, creatures of desire.

Understanding this insight about humanity has implications for how we think about forming Christ-followers in distinctively Christian schools. As Christian educators, we are called to educate our students to be the sorts of women and men who leave our institutions with a deeper love for God and others. We are called to foster campus cultures wherein believing students choose majors and pursue careers first and foremost because of their love for God and love for their neighbors.

Admittedly, what I am suggesting is countercultural; it runs against the grain of American society, even among many Christians. My fear is that too many of our students, even the devout ones, arrive at our schools conditioned to the same disordered loves that characterize the wider culture: money, power, success, prestige (among others). This makes it all the more important that faculty and other academic leaders be first and foremost the right sort of lovers.

This is the point: Christ-centered higher education is for lovers. We cannot embrace worldly love and offer a truly Christ-centered education at the same time. Disordered loves deform our spirituality, our doctrine, and our ethics. Disordered loves also corrupt our teaching, our scholarship, and our service.

As Christ-centered educators, we owe our students, and, more important, we owe our Lord a vision of education that is not just informational by transformational. Of course, this means our own lives as faculty members should be characterized by a commitment to the Great Commandments. We want it to be crystal clear to every single one of our students that we love the Lord and that we love other people, even as we try to model academic excellence and professional competence within our respective disciplines. If I can paraphrase Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, “If we earn the most advanced degrees, and win all the teaching awards, and publish works that everyone talks about, and win the acclaim of our academic guild, and even have a stellar reputation in our religious circles, but have not love, then we are nothing.”

Here are some questions I think faculty can consider as they reflect on the implications of the Great Commandments for the task of Christian higher education:

· What sort of curriculum models rightly ordered loves for our students?

· What sort of pedagogy cultivates love for God and love for neighbor in the classroom?

· What does it look like when faith-and-learning integration is understood at least in part as reconceiving our respective academic disciplines as spheres of love?

· For academic administrators: what sorts of loves are we looking for in our faculty and how do we measure “growth in love” as a key aspect of ongoing faculty development?

· What does it look like to approach teaching, scholarship, and service as acts of love that are ultimately directed toward God and toward others?

Nathan Finn is professor of Faith and Culture and executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University.