I have the privilege of preaching for the Sunday morning worship service at my college reunion. It’s a small liberal arts college in central New York whose Presbyterian origins long since gave way to a decidedly post-Christian identity. Worship is billed as a “service of remembrance.” At the end, we read the names of those in all the reunion classes who have died since the last reunion five years ago.
On such occasions, thoughts turn to Ecclesiastes. Not just “a time for this and a time for that” and the vanity of all things, but also the verses that say God “has put a sense of past and future into [our] minds . . . I know that whatever God does endures forever” (3:11, 14).
People attend reunions for various reasons, among them the sense that something of enduring value happened during our student years. If this is not true (despite the obvious fact that that a lot of young adult experience does not rise to the level of “enduring value”), then what is college for?
On my shelves are a number of books from those years, now-yellowed paperbacks with the college version of my signature scrawled inside. I don’t just keep them there for display. They are in my working library, classics that I have dug back into year after year for project after project.
Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” both hefty volumes, formed just part of the reading for a seminar with the old-school course title, “Christian View of God and Man,” that was the occasion of my conversion to adult Christian faith. There is Michael Polanyi’s “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy,” the basic premise of which stuck in my head for good. It was still the intellectual heyday of the Niebuhrs. “Moral Man and Immoral Society” and “The Irony of American History” bear that youthful signature. Converging in a rudimentary Christian realism, it came to me by the end of junior year that I was some kind of Calvinist.
Other books that I have carried with me -- physically carried with me -- wherever I’ve lived shine with lasting importance. In a course called “American Intellectual History” our professor made a deep impression when he posited that there were two books on his reading list that you could not consider yourself an educated American unless you’ve read them. When I have taught American history I’ve always challenged students to guess what they might be. Of course, the answer could be “Moby Dick” or any number of classics, but here is what he identified. People often guess one of them -- Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” (1835). But I’ve never had a single person name the other – W.E.B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903).
Putting Tocqueville’s analysis of religion in the New Republic alongside DuBois’s discussion of religion in African American life got me hooked as a lifelong student of the American human and spiritual experience. The alignment of Tocqueville’s insight that in America religion and liberty are not enemies like in Europe but coexist and actually reinforce each other, together with DuBois’ trenchant critique of American culture and his thesis, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” got me going.
That and the Puritans. My term paper for the course took me into Perry Miller, “Orthodoxy in Massachusetts,” “Errand into the Wilderness,” and “The New England Mind.” Such books started me on a decades-long path of research and writing about colonial New England religious experience as one ur-text of American culture.
My purpose here is not to drag anyone down my personal memory lane. Nor is it an invitation to lament (“Where are our Niebuhrs?”). Rather, in our culture driven by innovation and the demand for constant institutional renewal, I am advocating the importance for leaders to stop and reflect on the sources of our ideas, ways of thinking, values and aspirations.
Intellectual self-awareness is a virtue to be cultivated by faithful leaders. Creativity over time does not burst forth ex nihilo. It emerges from leaders imbued with, in Polanyi’s wonderfully complex phrase, intellectual passion.
Charles Hambrick-Stowe is pastor of the First Congregational Church, Ridgefield, Conn. He was formerly an academic dean at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.
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