During the first week of the second semester Scooter found a note in his mailbox summoning him to a meeting with Dr. Lenhart, the president of Whitherspoon College. He asked around but no one could guess what provoked the “invitation.” It was not unusual for a student to be called into the dean of men’s office, which spelled a student conduct problem, or to be called before the academic dean if grades were a problem; but to be directed to report to the president’s office was a harbinger of some grave urgency. Dr. Lenhart was rarely seen on campus save for an occasional appearance in chapel. Much of his time was spent on the road at alumni banquets and visiting foundations to solicit funds for Witherspoon’s building program.
Scooter remembered the address Lenhart made to the incoming students during Freshman Orientation Week when he intoned a warning that 50 percent of incoming students would leave by expulsion, a few by transferring, most by flunking out. He said in almost mystical terms of reverence: “Look closely at the person sitting on your left… now look at the person sitting on your right. The chances are that one of those persons will not be here on graduation day” –the ominous warning sent a shiver up Scooter’s back.
Scooter went to the president’s office at the appointed time, filled with apprehension. He had a strange visceral feeling of guilt but wasn’t at all sure why. He tried to guess the reason for the summons. Maybe they found out about the night I covered for Johnny. No, that can’t be it; that would be handled by the dean of the students. Are they angry with me for not joining a fraternity? Surely the president wouldn’t be concerned about that?
He approached the president’s secretary in the waiting room outside the executive office and announced his presence with a lump in his throat. “I’m Richard Evans. I have a note that says I’m supposed to have a meeting with Dr. Lenhart.”
Scooter looked at the woman’s eyes for a clue to the purpose of the meeting. She gave none. Retaining an officious posture she pleasantly replied, “Yes, Mr. Evans, please, take a seat. The president will see you shortly.”
Scooter’s anxiety level increased as he sat down. He nervously rooted through some magazines on the coffee table in front of him. His hands were clammy and he had a hollow point in the pit of his stomach much like he felt in the waiting room of the dentist’s office. He studied the room, noting that the secretary didn’t look up at him from her work. He saw an ebony captain’s chair with the Witherspoon College seal on the back. He thought of sitting in it at a court martial presided over by Captain Queeg. The paintings on the wall were of sailing vessels, adding to the maritime delusion that was playing havoc with his imagination. He was snapped mercifully from his reverie by the sound of the secretary’s voice: “Dr. Lenhart will see you now, Mr. Evans.”
She rose from behind her desk and escorted Scooter to the heavy oak door that guarded the inner sanctum of the president’s office. She ushered Scooter into the spacious chamber. Dr. Lenhart remained seated behind a massive desk with his imposing bulk framed against the black leather chair that supported him. He made no effort to rise or extend a hand of greeting. He said imperiously, “Sit down, Mr. Evans,” indicating a chair placed at the front of the desk, the traditional spot for the subordinate who came to this place of power for an interview.
Scooter felt as if he was in a Chancellery of a king. The room had a medieval feel to it. It was graced with two large oriel windows encased with stained glass panes. The ceiling was vaulted and the bookcase was gothic in style with slender vertical piers and buttresses. Opulent Oriental rugs with golden fringes graced the parquet floor. Scooter realized he was in the presence of the second man who had ever intimidated him.
Dr. Lenhart approached the reason for the summons indirectly. With eyes on the edge of blazing he abruptly picked up a volume from the edge of his desk and handed it over to Scooter. “Look at this book, Richard, and mark it well.” The book was a special leather-bound edition of The Masters of Deceit written by J. Edgar Hoover, the reigning plenipotentiary of the Federal Bureau of Invesitagion. “Open it up,” Lenhart commanded.
Scooter fingered the pages of the book until eyes fell on the dedication page. There in heavy scrawl was an inscription, “To my dear friend George Lenhart, With warm personal regards, Hover.”
Scooter’s fear turned to intrigue as he wondered how this book could have any possible bearing on why he was sitting in the president’s office. Surely he doesn’t think I’m involved in some sinister communist cell group on campus, he mused.
“Do you know what that book is about young man?”
“I’ve never read it, sir, but I guess it’s about communism isn’t it?”
“It certainly is. It exposes a movement that is going on right now in this country, a movement that is a cancer eating away at the very heart of the society. A cancer of the heart. Did you ever hear of that kind of cancer boy?” The president's voice had assumed a pit of frenzy and there was a wild, nearly hysterical gleam in his eye.
“No, sir. I’ve never heard of cancer of the heart but I think I see what you mean.”
Lenhart interrupted Scooter sharply. “You have no idea what I mean. You’re too young. I’m talking about waste. A damn pitiable waste of this country’s great resources. This country was built by work. Hard, clean, backbreaking work by men and women who paid a heavy price for their liberty. The people who built this country weren’t lazy. They didn’t sit on their hands waiting for someone to hand them everything on a silver platter. If they had they wouldn’t have survived, they’d have starved to death. They didn’t have any pork barrels to put their hands in.”
Scooter grew more mystified by the second, wondering how this speech about free enterprise, pioneers, and pork barrels had anything to do with him.
“The Soviets have a master plan for undermining our nation, Richard. It goes beyond the obvious efforts to infiltrate labor unions and strategic government posts. One of their prime targets has been the leftist-controlled entertainment industry and the mass media. I’m talking about Hollywood and New York and CBS and Scripps-Howard. They’re everywhere plying their subtle arts of subliminal seduction. They’ve even penetrated the church. They seduce the minds of young people, making fun of the classical virtues of industry and pride and duty, the virtues that made this country.”
Lenhart noticed the bewildered look in Scooter’s eyes and finally drew the strands of his rambling soliloquy to their predetermined point. “It all adds up to waste, Richard. That’s the one thing I can’t abide, and you represent the supreme example of waste in this freshman class.”
With this dramatic climax, Dr. Lenhard paused to let the punch line sink in. He disturbed the pause by shuffling some papers and producing a file folder whose contents were hidden from Scooter’s view.
“Richard, this file contains the test scores of every freshman, coupled with their record of academic achievement for the first semester. You are here today because of a singular achievement, or shall I say, lack of it. Your test scores show that you have the highest I.Q. of all the entering freshmen, a class, by the way which includes no less than seventeen high school valedictorians. In fact Mr. Evan, you an I.Q. which is one of the highest in the history of this institution. Yet you failed to attain even a C average your first semester. That, young man, is a waste, and I would like an explanation.”
The reason for the meeting was now perfectly clear to Scooter. He had squirmed in meeetings like this before with his high school principal and with his teachers. They all went over the same ground and beat the same drum—“Scooter, why aren’t you working up to your potential?” He loathed the word “potential” and seemed doomed to spending the rest of his life with a scarlet P taped to his chest.
“I’m not sure what the problem is, sir,” Scooter began. “I did well in grade school and junior high but my main interest was always sports. I’ve never been much of a bookworm. I worked after school in high school and never took a book home.” Scooter thought that fact might show that at least he wasn’t a pork-barrel addict. “I guess I depended on my natural ability to get me through, I sure didn’t study. I was scared all summer about coming to college because I felt like I sort of skipped high school and I didn’t know if I’d be able to make it here. I don’t have any idea how to study.”
Dr. Lenhard broke in, “If you don’t know how to study, how did you make an A in Bible?”
“Well, sir, I never read the Bible before I came here and at the beginning of the semester I had a religious experience, a conversion to Christianity. Since then I’ve had a passion to learn about the Bible. I guess you could say I had a special motivation in that course. And…that course is different from the others. We don’t have essay exams, they’re all objective tests, fill in the blanks, that sort of thing. I play little quiz games with myself about all the facts in the Bible: who was Moses’ mother and that kind of stuff. I determined that the professor would never be able to ask me a detail about the Bible which I didn’t know. I used to be the same way about baseball statistics and trivia.”
“I see. Why aren’t you motivated by your other courses?”
“A couple of reasons, I think. First off, ever since I had my conversion I’ve run into all kinds of skepticism in the classroom about Christianity. I figured if that’s what education gets you, who needs it. He thought of Eddie and said, “I want wisdom, not knowledge. There is a saying by Thomas Hobbes on a stained glass window in the library that says, ’Knowledge is power,’ I don’t like that. I don’t want any part of that. It sounds arrogant to me.”
Dr. Lenhart grabbed another book from the side of his desk. “I read the Bible too, Richard. Do you know what is says in there about knowledge?”
“No, sir, I’m not sure what you mean.”
“In Proverbs it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Apparently you have that. But that’s only the beginning. The Bible says that wisdom is better than knowledge but you’ve made a serious mistake.”
“What’s that?” Scooter asked, impressed that Lenhart’s tone had changed. He was now speaking to him in a fatherly, pastoral way.
“The Bible says, ‘Get knowledge, but more so get wisdom.' What that means, Richard, is that it is possible to have knowledge without ever attaining wisdom. You can be an educated fool; the world is full of them. But, you cannot have wisdom without knowledge. Knowledge is an indispensable step to getting the wisdom you’re searching for.”
“I think I understand that, sir. That’s why I’m studying the Bible so hard, to gain a knowledge of it.”
“But that’s not the only book God has written, Richard. It is surely the most important and I don’t for a minute want to discourage your studying it. I’m a Christian too, and I know how important the Bible is. But even that book speaks of another book, the book of nature. Do you think God speaks the truth in the Bible?”
“I sure do,” Scooter answered.
“So do I. But He also speaks the truth in the other books as well. What I’m saying Richard is not of my invention. It was spoken by both Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas—‘All truth is God’s truth.’ All truth meets at the top. What is true in biology comes from God, what is true in sociology is of God. I’m not saying that everything you learn in biology or sociology is true. God forbid! But what is true there comes from the Source of all truth. You need to read all the books of nature if you want a full picture of God. Maybe I don’t mean it or believe it the way Hobbes did, but knowledge is power if it is true knowledge, because there is no greater power than truth.”
“I guess it is, if you look at it that way. We read about Plato’s cave in Humanities and he talked about human opinions being like shadows on the wall, but I ‘m not interested in Shadows.”
“That’s right. But even Plato said that shadows are better than darkness, and ignorance is darkness. You say you want the light but you but you are choosing the darkness to get out of the shadows. I think you need to start moving toward the sunlight. Your Bible study is good but you’ve consigned everything else to the darkness which will cast a horrible shadow over whatever light you find. Now that you know the source of the light you shouldn’t be afraid of the light wherever you find it shining. Get my point?”
“Yes, sir. I see what you mean. I’ll try to do better this term."
“You’re fortunate, Richard. You have the intellectual tools. What’s been blocking you is the wrong attitude. Don’t be afraid of your professors. If you are wise you will know that you can learn something valuable from every person you meet. You can learn something from the devil himself, if only what craftiness is. Now get out of here and get to work. I’ll be checking your progress at the end of the term.”
When scooter left he wasn’t sure whether to fell chastened or complimented. The revelation of his I.Q. boosted his confidence, and that the president cared enough to call him in made him feel important.
He knew that Dr. Lenhhhart was right; he was wasting his mind, letting it become lethargic like some deadened muscle that had surrendered to atrophy. But he was afraid. Afraid to try to learn and of failing in the process. I.Q. tests were so sterile. They measured a damnable potential but offered no grades for actual performance. To perform meant to compete, to risk losing, and its inevitable escort, humiliation. It meant disciplined work, something he loved in sports but feared in the classroom.
Lenhart’s rebuke sparked a spiritual struggle within Scooter. His heart was palpitating with a zealot’s love for Jesus, but it was a sensuous love, a love of feelings and emotion. His was a fragmented devotion, a partial fulfillment of the Great Commandment. His soul was aflame but he was not loving God with his mind. Could religious affection be intellectual, or would the mind douse the flames of his ardor with cold stifling concepts? He had to know if the heart could survive an inquiring mind.
His first test came the next morning when he went to his introductory course in Philosophy. The professor began his lecture by saying, “Today we will consider Saint Augustine’s view of the origin of the cosmos.” All Scooter knew about Saint Augustine was that it was an old city on the east coast of Florida and boasted a mission made famous by Tin Pan Alley.
The Professor was Dr. Hepplewhyte, Scooter’s faculty advisor. He was erudite, no doubt, but his lectures were usually dry as dust. Today, however, the content was so absorbing that it seemed to explode through the dust and bombard Scooter’s ears. Hepplewhyte gave the lecture as he did all his others, in quiet tones, but the softness of his voice seemed only to accent the theme of this recitation.
“St. Augustine taught the concept of creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Remember, class, that category of ‘nothingness’ in its absolute sense is unthinkable. When Augustine taught that the world was created out of nothing he did not mean that once there was nothing and poof, suddenly there was something. For something to come literally from nothing is absurd. It would have to create itself; it would have to be before it was. It would have to be and not be at the same time and the same way, which is something even Hamlet knew was not possible. No, When Augustine spoke of ex nihilo creation he was not saying, as some modern thinkers foolishly suppose, that the universe popped into being by chance. Chance can do nothing; for it is nothing. It has no power because it has no being. Augustine was saying that there was no matter of which God shaped the world, that matter itself had a beginning, that it was dependent on God for its existence. But God was there eternally, having the power of being within Himself.”
Scooter’s head was swimming but he enjoying the exhilaration of this dip in the metaphysical pond. For the first time in any class except Bible, Scooter raised his hand.
“Yes, Richard,” Dr. Hepplewhyte called.
“Who or what created God, professor?”
“God is not created, Richard. He is eternal.”
“But doesn’t that mean the same thing as saying that God created Himself?”
“No, Richard. God could no more bring Himself into being from nothing than you could, or the chair you’re sitting in could. Think of it. If God were created, if He had a beginning in time, and everything else had a beginning in time then that would mean that once there was nothing. Absolute pure nothingness. Now, Richard, if that were so what would there be now?’
“Well,” Richard thought pensively, “I guess there would be nothing.”
“Precisely, Richard. If once there was nothing at all and then there was something, that would be magic, not science—in fact such a thing would make science altogether impossible. Science depends on reason, or rational laws, for its very possibility. To assert a totally contradictory and irrational beginning to reality would make rationality suspect at every subsequent point. No scientific law would be any more credible than its opposite. That’s why it is a law of science as well as philosophy that, write this down class, ex nihilo nihil fit, ‘out of nothing, nothing comes.’ The simplest way to state it is this, if something is, then something somewhere must have the power of being. If nothing had the power of being then nothing would be because nothing could be—it is as simple as that, yet a point missed by some the most brilliant of thinkers.”
Again Scooter’s hand shot into the air. “But Dr. Hepplewhyte, it can’t be all that easy. Surely there must be something that has the power of being, but why does it have to be God? Why can’t it be the universe or some obscure part of the universe?”
“Well, Richard. Let’s see. First, do you think that it is you?”
The class giggled at the suggestion that perhaps Scooter was the one who possessed the power of being upon which the whole universe depended.
“No, sir, I know it isn’t me.”
“If it is the universe as a whole or some hidden part, then that part or that whole would in fact be God. But if a part of the universe lacks the power of being then it must be distinguished from the “whole” which has it, and now the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or if some part of the universe has the power of being it must be distinguished from those parts which do not—this one special part would be ’transcendent’ to the universe.”
Hepplewhyte was moving quickly and Scooter wasn’t the only one to fear he was being the victim of a word game. Hepplewhyte was into it now and there was no stopping him until he made his final point.
“We usually think of ‘transcendent’ as meaning ‘higher’ in the sense of ‘up there,’ like it means God resides some place above the clouds. But transcendence is not a spatial term or a referent to geography. It is an ontological term—it refers to being. If something has the power of being in itself, that gives it the supreme kind of transcendence we are talking about when we are talking about God. Now I don’t know where the power of being is but I know that it is and that without it we could not be here talking about it. You see, class, it’s not just the Bible that says there is a God. All of nature screams the same message. If we had only one molecule that existed, that would be enough to demand the existence of something with the power of being, else we would be cut adrift from all knowledge, all science, all reason, from life itself.”
“Whew,” Scooter let out a sigh. This was just what Dr. Lenhart had been talking about the day before. He listened intently to the rest of the lecture but he was already hooked. As soon as the bell rang Scooter rushed from his chair and impulsively raced to the registrar’s office to change his major. He declared breathlessly to the startled woman behind the counter that he wanted to be a philosophy major.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Portion of R. C. Sproul's book I am using to teach kids why they need to study. Pt. I
This is taken from a Novel R. C. Sproul had published in 1984. It is titled Johnny Come Home. I am posting it here for the benefit of the kids who are starting College or have to deal with Professors and Teachers who oppose Truth.