In the midst of my own Holy Week reflections, I happened last night to run into some beautiful words by Marilynne Robinson from her new book When I Was a Child I Read Books. She is talking about old American hymns that “can move me so deeply that I have difficulty even speaking about them.” I happen to be one who experiences some of those same old hymns in just this way.

One of the hymns she talks about is “the old ballad in the voice of Mary Magdalene,” as she “‘walked in the garden alone.’” The hymn “imagines her ‘tarrying’ there with the newly risen Jesus, in the light of a dawn which was certainly the most remarkable daybreak since God said, ‘Let there be light.’” “The joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known”—“Who can imagine the joy she would have felt?” says Robinson, “and how lovely it is that the song tells us the joy of this encounter was Jesus’s as well as Mary’s. Epochal as the moment is, and inconceivable as Jesus’s passage from death to life must be, they meet as friends and rejoice together as friends. This seems to me as good a gloss as any on the text that tells us God so loved the world, this world, our world.”

Isn’t that beautiful? May we “tarry there” this Holy Week. May we share the joy that Jesus shares with us, this deep rejoicing as friends, together, in the garden. May we know anew, in this very walk in the garden, that God does indeed love “the world, this world, our world.” In the strong concreteness of the gospel texts, and in the poignant loveliness of this old hymn, may we break through the fog of mystery toward a new friendship that is full of love and sheer joy.

In his weekly column last week, David Brooks takes up the question of how, if at all, we can change our behavior. This is often a theme of Brooks, as it is with many writers of our day who feel something is out of whack and needs changing. The question we often ask is whether we can change what we do, even when it is harmful, to ourselves or to our society? Or are we simply determined by circumstances beyond our control to remain as we are? These are personal, individual questions, and they are questions for the future of our world. Much depends on how we answer them.

I am a fan of David Brooks, but I am least comfortable when he ventures off in directions I regard as behaviorist, meaning that we are creatures determined solely by the way we are wired, or determined simply by impulses of self-preservation. I know I am bucking some trends here, but I remain convinced that the aspiration to character formation lies at the heart of the preservation of civilization.

In this current column, Brooks mocks as naive the “19th century … model of how to be a good person … . Your job, as captain of your soul … is to just say no to sloth, lust, greed, drug use and the other sins.” This was the message of the preachers of that time, and we now know, so the story goes, how naïve these preachers were: “These days that model is out of fashion. You usually can’t change your behavior by simply resolving to do something.”

And here is the problem: “The 19th-century character model was based on an expansive understanding of free will. Today, we know that free will is bounded. People can change their lives, but ordering change is not simple because many things, even within ourselves, are beyond our direct control.”

No one in their right mind would disagree with this statement. Of course our free will is “bounded.” We are limited by circumstances of birth, culture, poverty, limited by the way our brains are wired, limited by the social stimuli to which we respond in set ways. Of course we all want to be loved, and of course we will behave in ways to get as much love as we can, even if our behavior is destructive.

But in much of this kind of thinking, the boundaries on our ability to make choices grow absolute, and this is where I get nervous. If I have no chance of becoming a better person, why try? If there is no chance of shaping better character, so that we might shape more decent societies, why try? Why not just go with the flow, since that is what we are determined to do anyway?

To his credit, Brooks is not totally comfortable with the determinist view either. He ends his column by saying, “as the Victorians understood (and the folks at Alcoholics Anonymous understand), if you want to change your life, don’t just look for a clever trigger. Commit to some larger global belief.” And, yes, this would be my point as well, though I would put it in terms probably not unlike those naïve Victorians.

Let me propose a Christian response to the challenge of character formation. As N.T. Wright says, “The aim of the Christian life in the present time — the goal you are meant to be aiming at once you have come to faith, the goal which is within reach even in the present life, anticipating the final life to come — is the life of fully formed, fully flourishing Christian character.”

Christians most certainly agree that achieving this goal is not easy. It takes effort. There are things we can do, disciplines we can adopt, habits of the heart we can shape. We are not totally determined to move down a set path that is wired in certain ways or socially prescribed. At least not totally.

In Colossians 3, for example, Paul talks about “the moral effort involved,” says Wright, in character formation: “Put to death … put away … put on.” Some things are bad, and some things are life-giving. And there are actions you can take to put off the bad and put on the good. You can and must work at it. But the steps “to get to that point involve hard decisions and hard actions, choices that run counter to the expectations, aspirations, desires, and instincts with which every human being comes equipped.”

Here is the Christian answer to our contemporary determinism: The “putting on” of good character,” says Wright, “is a matter of consciously deciding, again and again, to do certain things in certain ways, to create patterns of memory and imagination deep within the psyche and, as we saw from contemporary neuroscience, deep within the actual physical structure of our mysterious brain.”

The Christian view is always full of surprising mystery. It is not a determinist view of our lives or of our world. It is a view about becoming better, guided by a vision for human flourishing. For Christians, God is involved, of course, through grace and mercy, but the way is also a call to action, to choices, to discipline. I fear if we don’t hold on to this view of personal action, we will lose the will indeed, the will to be better, the will to change the world.

David Brooks Comes to SPU
The SPU 2012 Downtown Business Breakfast speaker
and New York Times columnist comes to campus on April 11, 2012.

Of course the flip side of this yearning for good news is that bad news continues to roll over us like a dampening fog. We desperately want to know when and how good news will shine through again.

But here is the point I want to make: Good news is the language Christians have used since their beginning some two thousand years ago. Good news is what Christians believe they have to offer to the world, not only to individuals, but to the societies in which they live. And so I find myself endlessly fascinated why some fierce cultural force in our day relentlessly insists on airbrushing out of sight the good news Christians might offer, good news that can turn the world in better directions. Christians feel their good news is dismissed, ridiculed, at times treated with hostility. What a puzzling cultural phenomenon. What a shame. What a loss.

Theologically, of course, for Christians, good news begins with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because this is an anchoring position Christians accept by faith, our culture wants to shuffle it off to the sidelines. That’s the stuff of our private lives, relevant to a few, but worthless for the whole. But we must remember that any position about ultimate matters, including the denial of God’s existence, so much in vogue in our day, is accepted by faith.

My question then is this: How can we open up the marketplace of ideas again so that Christians have a chance to present their good news as a viable option for a better world?

Thoughtful Christians know we live in a decidedly pluralist world. There are other ways of looking at a path to a better world. But why should this plurality of options force us into a kind of postmodern relativism, thereby debunking any claim for what is true and good and beautiful?

Christians recognize more than ever they must make their case in winsome and persuasive ways. The problem is that the marketplace of free flowing intellectual exchange gets clogged by a strange and powerful cultural resistance. Christians are not welcome in that marketplace of ideas. This really isn’t a free exchange of ideas about how to bring about good news for our troubled world.

What is this good news that Christians have to offer? We start with a radical notion of power. For early Christians, to quote the renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, “truth and beauty were seen by most as reaching their climax in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” Christians proposed the “reframing of power and policy that lay at the heart of the task of a wise society. . . .” “The message,” Wright says, “is that true greatness comes through sacrificial love, that true leadership consists in self-giving. . . .” What Christians have to offer is an “upside-down vision of human flourishing.” Imagine the impact of this kind of reframing of power for our day.

But there is more. With this new “reframing of power,” our lives simply look different. In his marvelous letter to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul encourages his followers to put on the garments of “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. . . . Finally, to bind everything together and complete the whole, there must be love.” This describes the character formation to which Christians everywhere aspire, ardently self-critical when we fail, but nevertheless believing this is the path to human flourishing. When leaders are shaped in this kind of way, an upside-down kind of leadership, the world begins to look different, more kind, more patient, more life-giving.

One other note: The notion that Christians pursue or propose a kind of theocracy in these matters is ludicrous. Such theocracy has almost never been part of the Christian narrative. And Christians, drawing on the profound Jewish experience, know what it means to live in exile, to be exiled even in one’s own land. But that posture has never silenced Christians from working toward a better world for all of God’s children.

As the eminent sociologist James Davison Hunter says, “To be Christian is to be obliged to engage the world, pursuing God’s restorative purposes over all of life, individual and corporate, public and private.” While there is no intention, for most Christians, to rule the nation or to shut down genuine pluralism, Christians most assuredly want to share their good news, precisely because they believe it will make a difference. Christians believe their good news is a path to human flourishing.

And so I would caution us to be careful when we allow the voices of our current culture to drown out this good-news contribution for our society. To put it more positively, when Christians are at their best, they model and articulate a good news that can literally change things, moving lives and societies from arrogance and desperation and hopelessness to hope and compassion and forgiveness.

Maybe, as the bad news gets even worse, it’s time to allow this marginalized Christian notion of good news back into the marketplace of ideas as we think about how to reshape a society more life-giving.

Well, a week ago, when we were snowed-in in Seattle, we were exchanging our thoughts on some topic of this sort, and Rick wrote something that just stunned me with its beauty: “What an astonishing gift the human mind truly is! I have long thought that the experience of stating a profound truth in a clear sentence is as close as human beings ever come to knowing what it was like for God to create everything out of nothing.”

Is this a joyful statement, or what? It is the joy of a scholar, the joy of someone who cares about language. It is the joy of someone who believes “profound truth” exists and that the exploration and discovery and articulation of such truth requires a “clear sentence.” This is the joy of a teacher, too, one who wants to communicate with others the truth he has discovered.

And, most of all, this is the joy of a teacher who believes that God’s kingdom breaks in at that moment when truth is encountered and expressed well. Such joy, this participation in God’s work of creation, making something beautiful out of nothing.

I love this. I love my friend Rick Steele. He represents for me the best of our work in a Christian university. This kind of work requires great discipline, training, and hard work, but the rewards — for the scholar, for our students, and for the world — are immense. What joy, indeed!

Someone told me the other day about a study of the way information is used from Google. The task was for a group of people to Google the word Egypt (it could be almost any important word). The observer then took note of what people chose to follow out of the long list available under Egypt. Some chose contemporary events flowing out of the Arab Spring. Some chose to look into the rich history of ancient Egypt, its enormous intellectual accomplishments. Some wanted to know more about Egypt, yes, something about its history, but what is it like today? Some even took their cues from travel promotions.

So what do we understand about Egypt? Well, a lot of different things. It depends.

What do we think or care about any subject, from the national debt, to sports, to religion? What holds us together as a culture? What holds our attention more than a day or two? What does culture mean when information flows so wonderfully freely and the truth of anything is up to our individual choices?

I have been thinking lately about a comment the historian David McCullough made about history. McCullough was on my campus for our Downtown Business Breakfast, and he said that a culture that does not know its own history is like a vase full of cut flowers, beautiful for a moment, but destined to wilt and wither. A culture with no roots will die. McCullough said he is alarmed about the quality and coherence of the teaching of history in America today. We do not understand our history. And we must ask about the consequences.

I must add this: There was a time when the Christian story provided deep coherence for Western culture. It was the story itself, of course, but as well it was the coherence that allowed our culture to flourish and prosper. I worry about where we are headed cut from those deep and nourishing roots.

Pinker makes this claim: “Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” Of course, the implications of such a claim are huge.

The book is, I suppose, anathema to postmodern pessimists, a darling to new-atheist determinists, and a surprising encouragement to those who still cling to Enlightenment rationalism. While I haven’t read the full 800 pages, I confess, I have read enough excerpts and editorials and reviews to get the gist. If you want to take a look at the latest article by Pinker on the topic, see, for example, nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/war-really-is-going-out-of-style.

All of this “bears on our conception of human nature,” Pinker says. “Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.” I certainly buy all of this. But what I do not buy in Pinker’s argument is that the age-old Christian commitment to character formation had nothing whatsoever to do with developing empathy, cooperation, or self-control, for individuals or for our society.

Pinker wants to claim victory for the modernist Enlightenment project that reason will triumph in the end, despite the determinism that limits our options. Statistically, the point at which civilized states were brought into being, Pinker argues, the amount of violence declined. Pinker seems blinded to the world-shaping influence of Christian teaching: The call to kindness, gentleness, humility, forgiveness, love, that we find throughout Paul’s influential writing. If we take the teaching of the Christian faith seriously, and if we assume Christian teaching for centuries helped to shape our world, well, is it not possible to assume that violence will decline?

I am not prepared or capable to challenge Pinker’s statistical models, though David Bentley Hart, in the most recent issue of First Things (January 2012), says that “Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.” I am, on the other hand, willing to accept Hart’s conclusion, because I find Pinker’s whole thesis something beyond common sense. The world is less violent, more peaceful, than it has ever been — does that make sense to you?

What bothers me most here is that there is an operative dogma at work, a mythology, a “faith” that is presented as statistically verifiable “reason.” This notion of “progress,” that we are moving evermore closer to utopia, is the guiding mythology behind the Enlightenment, and when it infects the work of scholars, it is nothing if not biased scholarship. It is also an offense to our common sense, even as it calls on us to submit more deeply to its presuppositions.

Hart concludes his First Things article with a generous spirit. There is something, he says, “exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist.” “Over the last few decades,” says Hart, “so much of secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment, spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all ‘metanarrative’ ambitions.”

But “Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more hopeful commitment to the ‘Enlightenment,’ ” says Hart,”— and I would not wake him from his dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt.” This is the human spirit’s “lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.”

Well, I guess I don’t recommend reading the whole 800 pages either, though judging from the response in the public intellectual arena, this is an important book. Pinker’s book is yet another of the new-atheist’s attacks on Christian notions of human fallenness and the Christian path to human flourishing. For that reason, it is critical that we know what it’s all about.

Just yesterday I received one of those many email holiday e-cards, this one from the American Council on Education, one of the important higher education lobbying organizations in Washington, D.C. On the card there is a lovely picture of the Capitol in D.C., framed by picturesque snow-covered trees. But surrounding the picture are these words: “We wish you peace, joy, hope, and fulfillment during this holiday season and throughout the new year.” At first I wondered if the message intended to suggest that peace, joy, and hope will come from the capitol of our nation. I hope not.

But all of this is indeed puzzling. The language is straight out of the Christmas stories we find in the gospel accounts of the coming of the Christ child. And yet any trace of Christian content is totally expunged from the e-card. Isn’t it strange that we want to claim the heart of the Christian content — peace, joy, hope, fulfillment — but we insist on airbrushing out the source of that content?

All the while I have been reading, as I do each year, the gospel accounts of the coming of the baby Jesus. And once again, I run into that amazing moment when Mary, discovering she is with child, hearing the voice of God about her profoundly special purpose, “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” Later in the Gospel of Luke we hear that “the child’s father and mother were full of wonder at what was being said,” and “his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.”

This is the coming of the Prince of Peace. It is the long-awaited Messiah who brings hope of deliverance to his people and to the world. In him is life, says John, the light of the world that shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it. In him is the source of hope and joy and peace and ultimate fulfillment.

Thoughtful Christians know that we live in a pluralist society. We enter into the marketplace of ideas about what is true and good and beautiful, and we know we must make our case along the way. But it is a free marketplace, and we need to claim our spot. And in this Christmas season we want to remind those around us that we ponder in our hearts the true source of joy, peace, hope, and fulfillment.

And so, subversive as it may sound these days, Merry Christmas to each of you in this beautiful season of wonder and joy.

But we are not reading the same books or going to the same movies or watching the same news. Is that a good thing for our society? No one is reading the same blog, to be sure, or following the same tweets. Every newspaper or network or cable channel has its own slant, and we are quite deft at picking the sources that appeal to us, individually. The people who are watching MSNBC are not watching Fox News, and they are certainly not talking to each other about what they learn. Judging from what we read and watch we are obsessed with a political view of everything, and yet we are decidedly divided in our chosen political postures, and there is this careful avoidance of talking, at least calmly, with anyone with whom we disagree.

Have things splintered out of control? Isn’t it a bit disconcerting that we have very little in common we can talk about? This isn’t a matter of just being nice, or of conflict avoidance, but rather a matter of crafting carefully protected silos of meaning and even language where we feel comfortable. When a common culture splinters into a thousand pieces, do we have any longer a notion of the common good? Don’t people yearn for some sense of coherence as a society, some sort of neighborliness of meaning?

All of this is reinforced by our culture of tolerance. We have a great deal of difficulty calling anything wrong, because everyone has a different opinion of what is right and wrong. Tolerance is one of the dogmas of our day. But I find it so interesting that tolerance actually turns into intolerance, and perhaps the reason we withdraw into our own subcultures, our silos of agreement, is that we simply can’t stand someone who thinks differently, someone who reads something we consider ridiculous. That’s intolerance, isn’t it?

Recently I was up at Starbucks, very early in the morning, sipping my latte and reading The Wall Street Journal. A friend came by and spotted the Journal and asked incredulously: “You mean you read that?” I felt his dismissal just because I wasn’t at the moment reading The New York Times.

As early as 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, well before her time, said this: “We have ceased to live in a common world where the words we have in common possess an unquestionable meaningfulness.” And the results are not pretty, says Arendt, because “short of being condemned to live verbally in an altogether meaningless world, we grant each other the right to retreat into our own worlds of meaning, and demand only that each of us remain consistent within his own private terminology.” That’s downright horrifying to me. But are we not approaching this kind of “retreat into our own worlds of meaning”? Is this really the kind of society we want?

I’m not sure what to propose as a solution, but some common core is missing from our society. I have lots of thoughts about why this has happened, some of them philosophical, some cultural, most of it reaching back as far as the mid-19th century. But we are where we are, and I am not sure where we are headed with this new phenomenon, but to my mind, it is not appealing, or healthy, or worthy.

I have a conviction that a society will not flourish unless there are some things we hold dear, in common. This is where education comes in, but surely it goes back even earlier and deeper into the home and how families are bringing up their kids. You can’t force deeper commitments or convictions on anyone or any society. Of course. But isn’t there some obligation here to dig deep into our roots and back into our history to discover there something of lasting value that is the glue to hold us together? Shouldn’t we be discussing these things? Should we not be thinking and talking together about what we might consider to be the good, the true, and the beautiful?

What follows is an excerpt from my opening convocation speech this fall at Seattle Pacific University called The Upside-Down University. I am talking here about the deeper contributions the Christian university can make for our time of disintegrating culture. I think this applies to thinking Christians anywhere, not just to the university.

Here then are the excerpts:

Lesslie Newbigin says that “what we have to do [in our time] is what the Church Fathers and Augustine had to do in the age when classical culture had lost its nerve and was disintegrating.We have to offer a new starting point for thought.” What an extraordinary notion for us, that the deep purpose for the Christian university is “to offer a new starting point for thought” for a disintegrating culture.

Newbigin goes on to say that the “new starting point for thought” is found in the Scriptures, and that the “determining focus” of the Scriptures is found in Jesus Christ. We have to look deeply into the presuppositions of our culture, and we have to say, no, no, we have another starting point, and out of that we build new assumptions about human flourishing. We build new assumptions about leading our world forward.

Tom Wright says something similar: “Truth is something that happens when genuinely humble people pause long enough before their subject of study to hear and see what is truly going on, rather than inflicting their own theories on it. Truth then comes to expression when they . . . manage to say the new thing, whatever it is, in new and appropriate ways. Universities exist to foster the conditions within which that birthing of truth can take place.”

“To find a new starting point for thought,” says Newbigin. To “manage to say the new thing,” says Wright. What an extraordinary claim we can make for the work of a Christian university in our time. What an upside-down way of going about our business as a university.

There is a lot of shouting going on in our streets and in our halls of power, but no one seems to be pointing the way forward. “Where have all our leaders gone?” I asked recently.

In the midst of all of this, I am asking, what kind of leadership will make the difference? Is leadership even possible anymore? What paradigm of leadership could best inform the work of leaders to tackle the enormous problems we face? How should my university be preparing our students for leadership for the future of our world? What kind of a leader should I seek to become, a kind of leader that is perhaps very different from the leader I was 17 years ago when I began my work as a university president?

A prominent businessman, Mortimer Zuckerman, said in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, that we are “desperate for strong leadership.” We hear that sentiment all the time. “Democracy does not work without the right leadership,” he says, ”and you can’t play politics. . . . The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you’re doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country.” Of course that’s a line that either side can use about the other side. What is this “right leadership” for our moment?

We seem stuck in a kind of leadership that isn’t working, but is there a way out?

Perhaps we need an upside-down kind of leadership. That’s a phrase I’ve been borrowing from N.T. Wright’s wonderful sermon in June for the 600^th anniversary of the University of St. Andrews. I talked about this in an earlier blog post, and I have been quoting from this sermon all through this turbulent fall. Wright says that we need to proclaim an “upside-down notion of human flourishing,” a vision like the one proclaimed by his university when it was founded 600 years ago.

“At the time when [St. Andrews] was founded,” Wright says, “truth and beauty were seen by most as reaching their climax in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” This “reframing of power” was seen to lie “at the heart of the task of a wise society, needing in each generation a fresh supply of wise leaders.” That was the purpose of the university, to equip a “fresh supply of wise leaders” who really get this “reframing of power.”

“The message of the early Christians,” Wright goes on to say, “is that true greatness comes through sacrificial love, that true leadership consists in self-giving. . . .” This is what the cross of Jesus does to us.

But can self-giving, sacrificial love possibly work in the world in which we live? Isn’t this a sign of weakness? Isn’t it just flat-out wimpy? Won’t the other side just roll over me if I adopt that kind of posture? In a world shaped by notions of sometimes ruthless, arbitrary power; in a world that aspires to serve the self alone; in an individualistic world, where God is dead, as Nietzsche says, where it is power against power, where it is my will against yours, where whoever shouts the loudest or shoots the biggest guns—can this upside-down view actually come to be the deep principle of leadership that can make a difference in our world? Do we have here perhaps the reshaping of the paradigm of leadership for our day?

I haven’t always operated this way as a leader, believe me. But I have come to see, in perhaps profound kinds of ways, that our leadership somehow must get hold of this deep and abiding principle of the upside-down kind of leadership that is grounded on the cross of Jesus. Perhaps this fundamentally Christian way of viewing the world is the way out of the morass of our historical moment?