Biblical Principles for Everyday Life
How the Academy Decided to be the Chaff which the Wind Scatters Away
The question of the day is, should I keep consuming cute animal videos on X, or should I face the dark chasm of societal devolution opening up underneath all our feet? So far, the cute animal videos have consistently won out for me over the last several days. The news from far away is too awful to contemplate, and the events close to home, though perhaps smaller in scale, are nevertheless tragic and, in some cases, iniquitous.
The first bad thing is that the local university, in which my child is an enrolled student, canceled classes yesterday because the body of a student was discovered in the shadow of the library tower. Today classes are kind of up in the air. The president articulated his dilemma in a long, heartfelt letter to the student body early this morning. He doesn’t want to close down, but doesn’t want to open either—there is absolutely no easy way out. He is the one to whom the university looks for direction, and he doesn’t know what to do.
The second bad thing is that my own alma mater, Cornell, just down the road, is dealing with some vile and racist threats directed at Jewish students. The screenshots of the messages are over on that X app if you haven’t already seen them. That president also sent out a letter to the Cornell “Community” to say that both the campus police and the FBI are investigating. There isn’t any room, she said, for hatred or bigotry, even though, for those who have been watching events there for the past few years, both students and faculty have been free and willing to express feelings and opinions that in latter days (like a hundred years ago) would have set a person outside the bounds of polite society, let alone intellectual discourse.
Which is to say, that gentle time of letting low-grade antisemitism, racism, and other kinds of hateful bigotry burn along the “margins” of a society or an institution under the name of liberalism and tolerance is coming to a swift and sudden close. The zephyr of “liberal tolerance,” to everyone’s horror and surprise, turned out to be a whirlwind, a conflagration of ugly sentiment that doesn’t quietly confine itself to speech but eventually spills over into action.
I went to Cornell in the 90s and I loved it. It was so fun. I took Decadence, Irony, The Russian Novel, Wines, Post-Colonialist-Structural-Deconstructionist-Judith Butler-Literary Theory-Nonsense, and Survey of the Bible. I rushed along through the drifts of snow from class to class filled to the brim with Derrida, Les Fleurs Du Mal, and Helen Cixous. I also faithfully attended the Episcopal Chaplaincy every Sunday morning and went to Intervarsity every Friday night. Amid “self-evidently” consequence-free books and ideas, I discovered I believed even more in the deep, immutable, coherence of God’s Word. In some ironic twist, all the stuff I studied—which at the time was deeply unserious, if something can be both deep and unserious at the same time—turned out to be prescient. In the few years it took me to get through seminary, have six children, and lift my head to look around at our American intellectual and theological wasteland, all those deconstructionist seeds had taken root in the soil of Western malaise, put up shoots, unfurled some buds, and sent sucking tentacles all over the place.
Ideas—to lean into another cliché—have consequences. What a man soweth, that doth he reap. What an institution decides to teach, that will be what the students learn, for the most part, unless God rescues them out of the pit they are digging for themselves. I was recently trying to find the name of the professor who taught the Survey of the Bible—one vastly more interesting and informative than most of the classes I took in seminary—and discovered that Cornell no longer offers the course. Who needs that? If you aren’t teaching Shakespeare or Milton, which you can’t do because those dead white men are so intolerant and racist, you don’t need to teach that even more terrible book, the one where God speaks so plainly about the spiritual and intellectual state of those whom he has made.
So anyway, yesterday the Morning Prayer Lections finished the Psalter, which means that bright and early this morning, as rosy-fingered dawn was creeping over the edge of the world one more time, it began again with the very first one:
PSALM 1
Beatus vir qui non abiit
1 Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,*
nor stood in the way of sinners, and has not sat in the seat of the scornful;
2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord,*
and on his law will he meditate day and night.
3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside,*
that will bring forth his fruit in due season.
4 His leaf also shall not wither;*
and look, whatever he does, it shall prosper.
5 As for the ungodly, it is not so with them;*
but they are like the chaff, which the wind scatters away from the face of the earth.
6 Therefore the ungodly shall not be able to stand in the judgment,*
neither the sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
7 For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,*
but the way of the ungodly shall perish.
Part of the whirlwind, the chaff dancing and swirling in the terrifying gusts of wind, is that those who determined not to know what to do—who were more anxious for their political skins than the intellectual welfare of their students—walked in the way of Marx, and stood in the way of Foucault, and eventually sat down in the seat of a growing number of actual people who think it will be fun to rehabilitate Hitler. They thought that calling everyone a racist would mean that no one was really a racist, that deconstructing the Western Canon would be fun and wouldn’t turn the student body into an anxious, rage-filled, spiritually empty mob. They did the opposite of what they were called to do.
The sick thing is, many people in the church are taking up this hot, burning, ruinous torch and thinking that will be the solution to their problems. Instead of listening to the bright, clear call of the Scriptures to apply the mind and heart to wisdom, to delight in the Law of God, to meditate upon it day and night, they are already blighting the saplings growing along the river’s edge. It will go exactly the same way.
So anyway, have a nice day!
Here is wisdom.