Our Present Age and Its Models of Education

An Unauthenticated Response to Caleb Green

Jacob Patrick Collins

Our Present Age and Its Models of Education

22 March 2024

More and more people renounce the quiet and modest tasks of life, that are so important and pleasing to God, in order to achieve something greater; in order to think over the relationships of life in a higher relationship till in the end the whole generation has become a representation, who represent…it is difficult to say who; and who think about these relationships…for whose sake it is not easy to discover. A disobedient youth is no longer in fear of his schoolmaster—the relation is rather one of indifference in which schoolmaster and pupil discuss how a good school should be run.

—Søren Kierkegaard^[1]

What makes a man great?

There are some people who are content to live life in the present age with little concern for their future. Such people are admirable and worthy of the greatest respect, for they came into contact with death and thought so little of it that they do not concern themselves with it at all. For those of us with a bit more existential anxiety, however, things do not appear so easy. Perhaps you occasionally feel the same anxiety I do: “How can I make my life count?” or, “Will I be remembered after my death?”

For those of us concerned with the future, either of our own or of our children, we have to think about this question: “What makes a man great?” Every question we ask has another question hiding behind it, even if we are unaware, that is infinitely more personal. Rather than saying “What makes a man great?,” the real question I ask is “Am I a great man?” I asked ChatGPT this question, and it gave me a list of attributes that mark greatness: leadership, vision, courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance, impact, wisdom, humility. “Who is a great man?” Gandhi, Mandela, MLK, Einstein, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Churchill, Lincoln, Steve Jobs—none of whom are too objectionable, though some of these are not like the others.

Something about this list feels incomplete, however, especially for Christians. The world can provide its criteria for greatness, and they are qualities we often admire in others. We’re drawn to people who are natural leaders, who have a vision for life, who promote that vision and live for something beyond themselves. Great men are remembered because of what they did or who they were. But are these criteria suitable for the Christian? In other words, is a great man, judged from the position of God, the same as someone who was great in the eyes of the world?

Given the way I phrase it, you can probably guess that I say “No,” the person who was great in this world will not be remembered by God for his valor, his leadership, his compassion, his charisma. However, it is difficult to articulate why we believe this, for too often our criteria for judging greatness is the same as the world’s. As a Christian, I am just as likely to say Mandela was a great man because he led the nation of South Africa out of Apartheid and advocated for equality between men of all races as I am to say Saint Paul because he taught us the true meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They cannot both be great in the same way; even if the world believes both men are great, albeit for different reasons, they cannot both be judged great before God—the only one who can truly judge, because he is the only one who is truly just.^[2]

The answer for the Christian—what makes a man great—is not in his valor, nor in his leadership, but in his LOVE. The eighteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argues this well: “No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but each was great in his own way, and each in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.” Greatness must be closely bound up with the idea of love. There are three different objects of love: the self, other people, and God; those who love themselves become great by themselves, and those who love others become great by their devotion to others, but those who love God become greater than everybody, for they have struggled with God and conquered the world by their weakness (for only the weak can love God). Kierkegaard goes on to say that Abraham was great, not because he loved himself, but because he took faith with him when he left his home; he was “great by that power whose strength is powerlessness, great by that wisdom whose secret is folly, great by that hope whose form is madness, great by that love which is hatred of oneself.”^[3] The hero, the great man, is someone who rises above the ways of the world, one who lives “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” but who lives in and for this life. In other words, he lives in this life for the kingdom of God. This is not great in the eyes of the world; it may look like weakness. But in the end, the one who becomes great is one who loves God, which comes only through faith in God.

Ignatius of Antioch, the early church leader and martyr, said this in his letter to the Romans (3:3): “Christianity is not the work of persuasiveness, but of greatness, when it is hated by the world.” To put it more simply: Christianity is hated by the world, which proves it is not persuasive, but it is great. Men who are great in the eyes of the world despise Jesus because he represents what they believe, to paraphrase Nietzsche, is ultimately effeminate and weak. Real men have no time for Jesus because he represents a religion of “women and slaves.”

However, these are not the qualities of greatness which the New Testament presents. Yes, it appears to promote weakness. But it is weakness in the eyes of the world. In the kingdom of God, what counts as great is love, and only the weak can love God—Saint Paul shows this most powerfully in 2 Corinthians: “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (12:9–10). But this is not original to Paul; Jesus, too, believed that the weak are those who actually become great: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20). The weak, those who are empty, find themselves in a position to be loved by God and so come to love him. For “we love because he first loved us.”

This is a hard saying, but it is necessary because it completely upends what it means to be great. I am great in this world only in proportion to how much I love God. My love for God comes from faith and from the new heart he gave to me; it is not an action, nor is it “service” or “good works.” Though we affirm that we do good, and maybe even great, things after our regenerating justification, this is not actually true. It is “Christ-in-me” which does good and the Holy Spirit which bears fruit. Faith works itself out in love (Gal 5:6), and faith comes by the Word of God (Rom 10:17). The Word of God comes first and then makes men great in proportion to their love.

We must here make mention of education, for this is the whole end of education: “Train up your child in the way he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart from it” (Prov 22:6). Training is instruction in the moral way of Proverbs 1–9. In short, it has to do with wise living, or righteousness. In this sense, training is also a call to consecration, offering up something to the Lord so that he can make it righteous, for God alone can call a thing what it is and God alone can make something righteous.^[4] When we’re training up our children, we do not depend on our abilities to faithfully child-rear so that our children follow how they ought to go, but on God. It is God alone who makes us righteous, based on nothing we have done. The task of educators is not to “repair the ruins of our first ancestors,”^[5] for such a task is an impossibility. Jesus alone repairs the ruins of our first ancestors. Instead, we preach the folly of the cross so that some of these children might claim their faith as their own. The end of education is to make disciples “who know and serve the Lord Jesus Christ.” It is nothing more, but far more dangerously it is nothing less. We make men and women great according to the way of the Lord. In fact, educators do nothing to make great men and women. We cast seeds widely, praying that God will be faithful to give growth to these seeds of the gospel. We do not chase after virtue, but after Lady Wisdom, who alone holds the keys to eternal life. And she invites us, and all who come after us, to her banquet (Prov 9:1–6). We do not believe that we can force children to be anything but what they are. Instead, we preach the power of the gospel and of the cross to them, believing that our task is to do simply this. In this way, our task is to make our students great, which is accomplished only when they have “faith working itself out in love” in the One who alone is Great. This is the end of education: to make great men and women of character—not great according to the peculiar judgments of the zeitgeist but according to the particular judgment of God: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

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^[1] Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 45.

^[2] Karl Barth provides a helpful framework for understanding the person and work of Christ, particularly as it relates to judgment. Because Christ chose and was chosen to die for the sins of the world, he is able to fulfill the demands of the law and in so doing provide a way for mankind to be saved. For Barth, man’s chief malady is placing himself in the place of the judge; each person always sets himself up in judgment against other people. Our attempts at self-justification fail because we cannot judge ourselves fairly; we have usurped the place of the judge but can never judge correctly (CD IV/1, pp. 219ff). Our fundamental problem, then, is improper judgment. Christ takes the place of every person by both judging correctly and taking the judgment of every person. However, he never attempts to justify himself. When Pilate asked him to explain himself, Jesus offered no rationale for his ministry; he never said a word to defend himself (Lk 23:9). This is both a liberation and a hope, for the judge who judges in our place has shown that justification comes only as a gift of faith. In dying, Christ takes the judgments of the world and declares them nullified. Instead of providing for himself and so justifying himself (as Satan tried to persuade him), Jesus demonstrates once and for all that the atonement is a free gift of grace unto salvation, given to those who have faith and who do not (because they cannot) justify themselves.

^[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13–14; cf p 43. See too p 28: “I gaze only at my love and keep its virginal flame pure and clear, and p. 54: “How then did Abraham exist? He believed.” Cf Augustine, The City of God 10.3, trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2012), 1.308.

^[4] God uniquely possesses the authority to either name or rename a particular instantiated thing. In Genesis, God names what he has already made, and this is his prerogative because he made it (Jn 1:3) from nothing; thus, the book presents a catalog of things to which God has given a name (light, night, earth, sea, &c.). We cannot say confidently that the names given to Adam are the same names we use today, but we can say with every confidence that God assigned Adam a task which was properly God’s alone. For it is only the one who creates, who owns, that has the sovereignty to name it. Even though he did not create it and so has no innate right to name anything, God has given Adam the ability and responsibility for calling everything by its name (Gen 2:19). This point is made more fully in Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9. On consecration, see John A. Kitchen, Proverbs (Fearn: Mentor Imprint, 2006), 495. BDB, s.v., “חָנַךְ” Prov 22:6 does not occur in the LXX.

^[5] John Milton, Of Education 2.366–367.