Servants of an Unshakable Kingdom: The Aims of Christian Higher Education

Colorado Christian University

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

David Kotter:

Please be seated. My name is David Kotter and it’s my privilege to serve as the Dean of Theology for the College of Undergraduate Studies. And I remember when I was about the age of the students who were here with us today that I found myself in the chapel at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to hear a speaker named Carl FH Henry. And I’d heard that he was an important scholar, but frankly I didn’t know. I had not read any of his books. And it took years, in fact, decades to unfold for me to read and to hear about this man that God used in an amazing way to shape the evangelical world in monumental ways. I think that you were about to have an experience like that today for the students and everyone assembled. Here you are about to hear from a man whom Time Magazine online considers the reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the United States.

And my prayer is that for you to and over the unfolding decades that our speaker will continue to have an impact on your life as he’s had an impact on my life. The first time I heard r Albert Mohler Jr. Speak, I was a young church planter and he was speaking at the a Sovereign Grace Conference for pastors and he was telling about how God in remarkable ways was bringing orthodoxy to Southern Seminary. Dr. Mohler is also a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and womanhood, and we crossed paths there about 10 years ago when I had the privilege of serving as executive director for that organization. And this month Dr. Mohler will celebrate his 24th year as president of one of the largest seminaries in the entire world, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where they combine a robust theological education with practical training to fulfill the great commission. And it was exactly this vision that drew me to pursue a PhD in New Testament. And today I’m wearing the insignia and regalia of that seminary.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I am informed every business day by Dr. Mohler because I listen to his morning podcast, the Briefing, which is a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. And if you have not subscribed, if you regularly listen to it, I’d encourage you to subscribe to that along with 10 million other people. And while you’re at it, subscribe on your smartphone to thinking in public where Dr. Moeller regularly conducts a series of conversations with the day’s leading thinkers. His mission is to address contemporary issues from a consistent and explicit Christian perspective. And that’s something we highly value here at Colorado Christian University. So without a doubt, our speaker today is qualified to speak to us. He’s earned a master of divinity, a doctor of philosophy and systematic and historical theology from Southern Seminary. He’s done ongoing research at the University of Oxford in England. He’s authored six books. He’s the executive editor for the Southern Baptist Theological Journal and you’ll regularly hear from him in major newspapers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the US Today, today or the Washington Post. But finally, Dr. Mohler is an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is a theologian and a pastor, a combination of a pastor scholar that’s incredibly valuable in the church today. So let me invite you to join me in welcoming our speaker, Dr. R Albert Moler Jr.

Albert Mohler:

Well, on behalf of us all, thank you to that magnificent choir, the orchestra and all gathered here, and thank you for making this such a worshipful occasion. Someone is going to notice that this is out of order and someone’s going to be concerned about that. Let me say, as a pastors before many weddings, it always turns out better the way that it actually happens and I’m so thankful that I got to hear that song before I got up to speak and we had a piper piping that doesn’t happen every day. It’s a wonderful addition to this service. Just recently I heard back in Kentucky of an elderly gentleman whose last request was that a bagpiper play at his funeral, everything was arranged. They had to get the bagpiper to drive into rural Kentucky from Nashville and on the way the Bagpiper got lost, he was panicked in the entire affair and very worried he was going to miss the funeral.

And about this, he was tremendously concerned. He eventually found where he thought he was supposed to be. In driving through rural Kentucky, he came across a group of people in a freshly ground dug hole in a mound of dirt. He got out of his car, opened the trunk, got out his bike pipes, and then he just stood up saying anything because the people looked at him as if he were now unexpected. And he came up and he played the mournful tones of the bagpipe beautiful Christian hymns and everyone standing there was actually moved to tears. He himself having finally, although late arrived to do what he came to do, went back to his car, put the bagpipes in the trunk and drove off leaving those assembled to say that was the craziest thing I ever saw. All that for a new septic tank.

You, you’re not in the wrong placer, the piper piped for the right event and what a glorious event. This is how thankful I am to be here with you. And so President Sweeting, Mrs. Sweeting, those who are fellow colleague presidents, academic leaders, faculty, trustees, students and others, I just want to say you should feel the joy and the celebration of this moment. It is one of those very rare occasions if we’re an academic institution, this is one of those milestone moments that ought never to be forgotten. It becomes a part of the memory of this institution. But more than that, pointing to the future, it is a down payment on great hopes that are invested in this school and in this president and in all who are assembled here, who are the friends of this great university, Colorado Christian University and are here to join in the celebration together.

There’s a certain solemnity that befits this kind of occasion and that’s absolutely right. Those of us who are dressed up in medieval regalia do not do this every day when we do. So we’re about a statement. What is this statement saying? It is saying we are joining in a very long line of scholars who have proceeded us that we are the inheritors of a tremendous civilization of learning, of which we are. The university is not invented here. It was invented in the context of a civilization shaped by Christianity, informed by the universals and by the transcendentals, the unity, the good, the beautiful and the true. And this university is a living representation of that commitment that goes all the way back and far beyond the university. It goes back to patriarchs and apostles, it goes back to prophets and we are standing in that line and gratefully very happily and we celebrate a new president, Dr.

Don Sweeting, the new president of Colorado Christian University. He is superbly equipped for this moment, for this school, for this leadership. His education is superb. His background and experience superbly equip him for this task. He is clearly the right man for the moment I have known him not only from afar and witnessed his leadership but up close as a friend and as a colleague. I know the character and conviction of the man who has come to be the president of this university and it brings me great joy. It’s thus a great honor to stand in this place and to encourage you as we celebrate together. He is superbly equipped for this moment. And of course beyond that, he is superbly married and we also celebrate the fact that Christina, Mrs. Sweetie is now so much a part of this school. You have already come to know her and to love her.

And in the case of both Dr and Mrs. Sweetie, I can assure you that will only deepen and grow more golden over the years. Well here we are. This is the inauguration of a president of a Christian university. We recognize that we’re standing in an urgent moment. We understand that we’re standing in a midst of a civilizational crisis. That’s not to be overblown, but it is to be rightly understood. We’re living in the time when our own civilization is unsure of its own foundations, of its own meaning, of its own cohesive covenant and what it means to be a community. We’re in a great turning point. We recognize that the culture itself is fragmenting and we see this in terms of the deluge of the headlines that come to us and the one thing that becomes very, very clear is that this fragmentation is now not only marking the society at large, it also marks so many of the precincts of higher education.

We thought there was some immunity, but there is none. That’s what makes this school the very model, the Christian university or Christian college, the very hope for Christian higher education, all the more important, the fragmentation that we might hope could have been prevented elsewhere must not be true here. It must not be what characterizes this institution. Instead in the midst of fragmentation, in the midst of confusion here on this campus, in this place, there must be a school that knows why it exists and for whom it exists and what it stands for. And thankfully that is the case. I’m very, very happy. I’m not standing here as you are marking the inauguration of a new president for an institution who knows not who it is nor where it is going. Fundamentally even more important to whom it belongs and whom it serves. There’s a crisis in higher education, not just in terms of the civilization at large and that crisis by the way for some institutions is a crisis of survival.

You don’t have to be very aware of what’s going on in higher education to recognize that many colleges, especially private institutions, are in danger of closing their doors and we can recognize that a part of this is because of flagging financial support, but we can also trace that back to a loss of identity and to a forfeiture of mission. The crisis in higher education also points us to many institutions that are adrift, seemingly no longer aware of why they exist and what they are to teach and what is to characterize that learning community. This points to the urgency and the opportunity this moment for a truly Christian university, Charles Malick of Lebanon several years ago speaking, I believe it was in 1980 on the campus of Wheaton College, pointed to what he called the two tasks of the Christian scholar. Now just understand this, we’re thinking of what must be the mission of a Christian institution, of any institution or school that would serve Christian higher education.

Consider the two tasks that he identified first to save the soul and second to save the mind. In one sense, that’s the task, not only the Christian scholar but writ large of the Christian school, of the Christian college, the Christian university. Our task is rightly as Malik said, to save the soul and to save the mind. We are here first and most fundamentally because of the redemptive truth of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and we are also here because of the transformative truth of all that God has revealed in his word and all that God has assigned to us as his human creatures. This means that the Christian institution, the Christian college, any institution of Christian higher education has to be about the task of recovery That might sound at first as kind of a negative or a defensive act, but rightly understood In scripture, recovery is one of the most glorious gifts God gives to his people.

Recovery is one of the most glorious gifts God gives to his church, a reformation that we now celebrate in terms of 2017, looking back to 1517, the beginning of what we call the reformation. That was a great gift and we need to understand that the mission of recovery is not only essential, it is rightly understood as glorious and that’s why we’re very happy I was taking place here. We’re very happy to affirm an institution that is intentionally, strategically unapologetically about that recovery. We stand at the junction of a most opportune moment and a most urgent moment. We have to ask the question, if this will not happen on this campus and on our campuses, then where will it happen if this recovery is going to happen, it has to begin in schools just like this. You go back a century or so to the formation of what became Colorado Christian University and there was a real need then, but we come to understand that the need is far more pressing now and that will be true so far as we can see far into the future.

But if this be true, then what are the aims of Christian higher education In the year 1916, Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher and mathematician, gave an address entitled The Aims of Education. He was frustrated. Many of the great addresses in human history have come because someone was frustrated, spoke out of that frustration. Alfred North Whitehead said his frustration was in the educational system that especially was shaping the young and as he saw it, the young leadership for Britain during that period in 1916, Alfred North Whitehead said the great problem in terms of British education and he was speaking particularly of the schools and you’ll recall it was true then even is it still largely true now that the playing fields of some of those schools actually produce the leaders of the future? They understood that and Whitehead said, the problem is that we are teaching inert ideas.

He said, we have lost the aim of education. We are taking school boys as he said, and we are making certain that they know how to do algebraic equations. And he said, so we’re teaching them how to do equations, but they do not understand algebra. They can do the mechanics. They don’t understand the meaning. Whitehead warned in the early years of the 20th century that the aims of education are lost if all it produces are those who can perform the mechanical acts of inner knowledge. He castigated the British schools of the time and he extended that all the way to the universities saying that if the mission were merely to be the inculcation and transmission of inert ideas, then all you need is an inert institution. And of course what will be produced is an inert culture. The Christian looking at Whitehead’s address can only affirm the point that he was making, but also we must take it further.

He was absolutely right that inert ideas are not the genius of true education. That education is about learning and wisdom. It is about the formation of character. It is about the head and the heart. Christians understand it is about the soul, nothing inert there. We also understand that there is a certain amount of learning that might appear to be inert. There are tables that must be learned. You recall learning the multiplication tables and you had to do it by memory. The great meaning of it all would have to await some later day, and that’s often true right down to the algebraic equations that were the focus of Whitehead’s concern. Students have to learn dates and people, they have to learn texts, but if that’s where it begins and that’s where it ends, it’s inertia. Instead we understand that Whitehead was absolutely right. True education means not only understanding the equations, not only being able to do rudimentary algebra, but understanding algebra.

Whitehead was a genius, a philosopher mathematician. He saw through the equations the secret as he saw it of the entire universe. He saw through the equations to an entire system of truth. He dared to see through the equations and understand how important those equations were for our very understanding of reality and of life. And as Christians, we have to take it further than did Whitehead because we understand that it’s not merely enough to go beyond inner ideas to the larger picture of knowledge. We must eventually bear witness to the knowledge that comes to us by the revelation of God supremely through Jesus Christ our Lord, and to understand that what Christians have learned to talk about evangelical Christians in particular over the course of the last several generations in terms of a comprehensive biblical vision of life or the Christian worldview, we cannot settle for anything less.

Not only must we be concerned that students are able to do an algebraic equation, and not only would Whitehead would we hope that through that they could see larger truths and how algebra fits within the larger discipline of mathematics and mathematics within not only sister disciplines but within the entire body of knowledge. And through that, how the world Christians must understand that this is the world that God has made and though those algebraic equations actually work, that they actually reflect truth not because of some cosmic accident, but because God made the world for his glory and he made it intelligible and he made human beings the only creatures made in his image. As the creatures who can know that world and analyze that world have the cognitive ability and not only that in our souls have the restlessness to ask the questions about the meaning of these things, that means that the aims of Christian higher education have to be pointed towards truth, not mere knowledge.

Knowledge is indispensable, but we must aim ourselves always at truth and that not merely truth as the secular world might affirm it, but transformative truth and without apology, without any hesitation, that means revealed truth. We understand that this means that truth transforms every discipline of knowledge, every arena of thought and investigation, every investigation of truth, every scholarly endeavor, every major, every minor, every degree program, every diploma. The Christian claim is for a comprehensive system of truth, the comprehensive truth that entails all and what is so dignified in the midst of this as the role of the Christian scholar, I speak to the faculty of not only of this school but of others who may be assembled here. The calling of the teacher must be dignified and must be respected in any context, but in the Christian Church and any school that would serve the Christian Church, it must be most highly honored the teaching office and the church is held out in the New Testament in terms of particular responsibilities and the stewardship of truth.

It is James who reminds us that the one who teaches will bear an even stricter judgment. There’s a reason why there was honor in the first century Jewish world when Jesus was referred to as rabbi. There is a reason why teacher has a particular ring of authority and a particular understanding of stewardship because there’s something glorious in the mission of being able to shape generations coming as a teacher, but that’s true of the individuals, a Christian scholar. It’s also true of an institution committed to and invested in the stewardship of Christian teaching. We come to understand looking in an historical perspective, the role of the school in the Christian Church. You don’t have to look back far the very earliest Christians learned how to adopt the models of the age in order to make certain that Christians transform the entire understanding of learning. And Christians took advantage of all that they could take from even ancient Rome and ancient Greece in order to create schools because they understood that if there were no schools, there would be no scholars and that would be of great entry to the Christian Church and of course also to the larger culture.

This is the legacy that we now celebrate and this is the line in which we stand. We come to understand that that requires a centering vision and that centering vision must be the lordship of Jesus Christ. That centering vision means that every discipline must be understood with its connection to every other. And in this case, John Henry Newman and his work on the idea of the university was absolutely right when he said that in any true university, inevitably theology stands at the foundation. By the way, I think John Henry Newman was even more accurate than perhaps he knew. I think there may be many pointing to secular education who would say, look, there’s the proof that John Henry Newman got it wrong. Cardinal Newman was wrong when he said that. Theology the foundation of every true educational, a scholarly enterprise, certainly anything that would be a university. However, I would simply say it’s a different form of theology.

In reality, theology will stand at the foundation because our basic understanding of God, our basic understanding of reality is so foundational that nothing can be done except upon that foundation. And that’s what points to the necessity of a Christian school being so absolutely clear that it’s not just theology that stands at the foundation. It’s not just theology that stands as the unifying factor. It is the revealed theology of the holy scriptures unapologetically affirmed and received and taught by a Christian college or university are aims. Go beyond that. One of our aims must be to demonstrate true community. We’re not just talking about Christian higher education in some generic sense. We’re talking about Colorado Christian University and we’re talking about the community of Christian universities and colleges. And here we must model community even if it is breaking apart and fragmenting on other campuses here, it must be so that we model what it means to be learners and teachers together.

What it means for every teacher also to be a learner, what it means for teachers and learners and all those who are invested in the responsibility this process, including administrators and others who facilitate, they must also understand the necessity of showing the world what a community of Christian scholars looks like. The world should be envious of what takes place on this campus as they should rightly be even now looking in. They should wonder how it is that there could be a place where scholars of various disciplines and people from many different nations are drawn together, teachers and learners all in a community of scholars. This means we have to be very careful that even as we embrace and understand our necessary stewardship of new educational technologies, we do not allow our colleges and universities to be what one educational leader called the Cyborg University. We are not out to create the cyborg school.

There must be a community of learners here and now I speak to those who are donors and others who facilitate and make possible by generous support of schools such as this. There are less expensive ways to transmit knowledge than this. If you are looking for how you can transmit inert knowledge, you can do so less expensively than in creating a college or a university or all that you already see here, much less the glorious vision that is planned. But if you want a Christian college or a Christian school, if you understand that you’re not aiming merely for inner knowledge, but you’re looking for the inculcation of Christian truth, the transformative truth that is revealed in scripture in the lives of students, if you want, as you must want to be a part of creating a college university and sustaining it and developing it, that will aim itself at heart and soul and mind.

If you understand the necessity of what it means for teachers and learners in the almost magical context of a classroom, then you’re going to understand why that requires investment in a school just like this. If you, as I did today along with other guests, if you were to walk on this campus and see students together, lemme tell you one of the ways I gauge the health of an institution is whether or not students are happily on the campus when they’re not in class. And it is clear that the residential students on this campus are not captives here. And to see the community that is even evident in them in conversations no matter where they’re taking place. And you understand that learning that starts in the classroom never ends there. And one of the most important gifts that comes in a residential college education, especially in a Christian college education, would be the camaraderie in the community that comes as learning takes place not only in the classroom but beyond the classroom and lives are shaped.

We understand that our aim must go beyond what any other school understands. A passerby who might happen into this occasion will look in and see the academics in our regalia, understand the formality of the occasion. We’ll look at the program and understand, yes, I’ve seen elsewhere or known of elsewhere, the inauguration of a president, a chief executive officer of an academic institution. But that passerby though, recognizing the shell of what is taking place here would likely miss the heart of the matter. Because what is taking place here is not just a presidential transition, it’s the passing of a torch. And we ought never to take lightly the passing of a torch, especially torch that has been carried by prophets and by patriarchs, by apostles. A torch that was passed on by martyrs, a torch that includes reformers and schoolmen, that includes puritans and preachers, that includes scholars, some of whom have labored without any students merely in the darkness of a monastery copying manuscripts they were never sure would be seen by anyone in the future, but they did not want knowledge and truth to disappear.

Those who established the universities and those who began that movement of Christian colleges that we can trace back just for about two or 300 years, we come to understand how glorious this is. It is the passing of a torch. It’s the passing of a torch in the administration and in the presidential leadership of this school to Dr. Don Sweeting. And that’s a very happy thing. It’s the transition in the passing of a torch also to a new generation. Those will be serving as trustees and faculty and those will be the administrators of this school as the passing of a torch from one generation of students to another.

Our aims have to be understood as all of those invested in other institutions of higher education. And yet more. You heard earlier the text read from Hebrews chapter 12, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and let us offer to God. Acceptable worship with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire. The torch that has passed, the challenge that is given to us, the stewardship invested in us is nothing less than to teach those who will be the servants of an unshakeable kingdom. So everything that’s prologue, all the fragmentation, the crisis, and the civilization, all the questions in our culture, the barrage of headlines coming, they’re going to continue to come, but let this school and all the other schools call to a common calling. Let us understand that we are about an unshakeable kingdom. And if we do what we are called to do, if we teach and preserve and transfer not only inert knowledge, but the transformative truth of all that is given to us in the scripture, in Christian truth, in the inheritance of Christian knowledge, then we will truly serve to equip servants of an unshakeable kingdom to serve here, to serve across this country, to serve in this discipline and in this arena of life and in every other to the ends of the earth and for that matter in places where we cannot ever imagine.

It’s one of the glories of being a teacher. It’s one of the glories that has been given to me to serve 24 years in one place. I have seen the Lord use graduates and send them where I never would’ve understood, flinging them to the ends of the earth for his glory. It’s worth doing this. It’s worth doing this for the long haul. But remembering that we are after all serving in unshakeable kingdom, we’re also reminded of something else. We will not finish this task. President Sweeting, we congratulate you on this transition or on the passing of this torch, and I am confident that through you, the Lord will do much in this school and far beyond, but you will die with more undone than done and so will I. It’s a humbling realization. But for the reigning God who is a consuming fire, that would be a depressing thought.

But we’re called to run a race. We’re called to do what we are commissioned to do, the stewardship to be fulfilled that we have received, and then if the Lord tarries, that will come another and then another and then another. And it will still be undone because if we rightly do what we are called to do, what must be done can only be finished by the author and finisher of our faith and our confidence is that it, the aims of Christian higher education are everything invested in every other school and so much more preparing servants of an unshakable kingdom. Once we know that, who could possibly want to do anything else, God bless you.