Anthony J. Diekema, Trinity Christian College
August 30, 2002
One of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, provided me with the title for
my remarks this morning. Indeed, ever since joining Trinity Christian
College just two months ago, -- after about 30 years away -- I have been
puzzling anew over what Frost might have had in mind when he wrote these
lines deep within a poem titled “Build Soil” which first intrigued
me many years ago when idly perusing some of his works. Here are his lines
of advice:
Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family—
But not much in between, unless a college.
“Unless a college”—what is so important about a college?
In the context of Frost’s critical analyses of American society
and his own personal experiences at colleges and universities, the burden
of his advice appears to be to build one’s own intellectual and
emotional and spiritual soil. It is to develop the freedom of mind and
spirit that establishes one’s distinct identity as a person, before
encountering the risk of collaborating unthinkingly with almost any ideology
or special interest group that comes along. Frost’s advice is a
plea for the essential discernment that is developed best within a college.
For a college is dedicated to the cultivation of the mind by rigorous
thinking.
But let’s look more closely for a moment at the gangs to which
Frost alludes—and which he suggests we should not join. Certainly
we live today in a world of joiners. Literally thousands of organizations
and single-interest groups want our membership, our loyalty and our money.
They’ll tell us how to think about issues. Usually it is made simple
for us—a simple yes or no will do, no matter how complicated the
question or issue. Most have it all together—attractively packaged—just
waiting for our uncritical and wholehearted entry into the joys of knowing
the “right” answers. And we really don’t need to think
about it; they’ve done it for us. It’s easy. Think of a few
such controverted issues: from pro-guns and no-guns, to pro-choice and
no-choice, to pro-voucher and no-voucher, and on and on. Now each of these
groups may have its merits, of course, but in most instances the message
they sell is dangerously oversimplified—even when addressing some
of our most perplexing issues of life and death, of good and evil.
Don’t join too many such gangs, says Frost, join few if any.
But join a college.
Why a college? Frost would say to “build soil”—to build
the soil of your own intellectual, emotional and spiritual being, to learn
who you are and where you stand and to know why. Frost promotes a college
for the purpose of preparing people for thoughtful participation and leadership
in the long-term improvements of our world and for the common good.
Trinity is one of those places where you may undertake that essential
task of building the soil of your mind and heart and spirit. Trinity is
a Christian college, a Reformed college, a very special college among
colleges. At Trinity, then, we are building and enriching Christian soil.
We develop explicitly Christian minds, and nurture Christian hearts and
encourage Christian hands and feet for service in the kingdom of God.
As a part of Trinity Christian College, you join with many others, past
and present who are dedicated to the development of Christian personhood.
You join a confessional heritage in which Christ is Lord of all and first
of all in every dimension of our lives. This we do by focusing on the
development and life of the mind. For Christian thinking—the development
of a pervasively Christian worldview—is indispensable to Christian
living. That is our continuing conviction, and it remains a central commitment
at Trinity.
The Trinity tradition is also distinguished by a fundamental question,
“How should the college relate to the world around it?....to the
vast reaches of Chicagoland and beyond?” That question is focused
not only on Trinity, but also on you and me. How should I relate to the
world around me? Struggling with that question is foundational to the
task of developing Christian thinking as well as Christian living today.
For anyone who knows the heritage of Trinity, this question is familiar
ground on which to walk. Some among us have viewed the world as Christ’s,
and we are urged to reclaim the territory that is rightfully His. Others
have emphasized the “antithesis” which sees the world as alien
and forbidding, a constant source of “worldly temptation”
and distress. Such differences and debate continue to this day, but always
within the common conviction that we must be Christ’s servants in
the kingdom of God.
One of my favorite professors put it this way: “It is hard work
to be in the world, really in it…fully aware of the religious and
prophetic tensions and pressures of it, the ultimate allegiances of the
various cultures in it, the religio-moral choices of men in the past that
make the cultural challenge of the present what it is; I say, it is hard
work to be in the world that way and then not to be of it. That is really
what we are always busy with in the classroom.”
He spoke also about the struggle of a people and a place seeking to be
fully Christian and authentically Reformed, a place like Trinity. “We
take the Calvinist challenge seriously, namely, that the Christian must
bring the whole range of life—science and art and society and government—under
the sway of Christian principle and purpose as an expression of the kingly
rule of Christ.” And he would then sum it all up by saying “Nothing
matters but the Kingdom, but because of the Kingdom, everything matters.”
So where may one come to such an understanding of life’s ultimate
challenge, UNLESS A COLLEGE like Trinity?
And where may one be equipped to take on such an ambitious task, and
freely and critically engage the sciences, the arts, and the humanities
in the full light of God’s Word, UNLESS A COLLEGE like Trinity?
And where may one place reason within the bounds of religion, and with
scholarly integrity integrate faith and learning, UNLESS A COLLEGE like
Trinity?
Where may we find a community of Christian thinkers in which we communally
and prayerfully go about developing our individual minds and characters,
UNLESS A COLLEGE like Trinity?
And where may we together develop the courage of our convictions about
living the Christian life, UNLESS A COLLEGE like Trinity?
Building the soil of your mind and spirit is not easy. And amid the turmoil
and problems of the world around us, we’ll ask you to study and
to think. It seems so incongruous, so inconsistent. You are full of energy.
You want to do great things. But we ask you to study, to think about things.
And you want nothing less than to sit long hours developing a discipline
of the mind. Yes, we call you to an unnatural expression of yourselves:
to overcome the natural inclinations of your age. We do so in the conviction
that God has brought you to this place for a purpose. We believe that
He has, in the words of The Preacher of Ecclesiastes, “set eternity
in the hearts of men” (3:11b) and that He has planted within you
and each of us an inclination to search for meaning, to seek an abiding
certainty and security, and to seek God and His will for our lives. So
He calls you, and each of us, to a life in the “upside-down kingdom”
of Jesus Christ, where the “movers and shakers” come dressed
like servants, not kings.
Trinity has established a noble tradition in the pursuit of these academic
ideals. These ideals are now also in your hands. You have come to join
and build a community, a fellowship of Christian scholars. And if the
experience of this Christian community is meaningful to you—if it
does what it is designed to do—you will never really leave it again,
no matter where you go. For The Preacher of Ecclesiastes also tells us
that we “cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
(3:11b) We’ll never fully fathom God’s grand plan, but we
shall always be on the verge of discovery—always searching and finding
new and exciting facets of God’s will for our lives.
In coming to Trinity you have joined, for the sake of Christ’s
kingdom, the scholarly enterprise: asking the right questions, searching
for the answers, applying moral judgments, telling people about them and
living with Christian conviction. You always will be building the soil
of your mind and spirit.
Welcome, and Godspeed!
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