WHY SHOULD A UNIVERSITY EXIST?
prepared for Kosin University convocation, Korea, 7-9 March 2000 A.D.
by Dr. Calvin Seerveld, a Senior Member in Philosophical Aesthetics, emeritus Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto

Outline

A. Historical background on the character of the universities
1. Early glimmerings
2. Setting the Western pattern
3. Variations on the medieval university setup

B. Implications of a history for facing the systematic problem of defining a university institution

C. Biblically christian contours for a university: systematic notes
1. A community of scholars
2. A christian philosophical systematics
3. Underlying biblical theology and redemptive historiograhy
4. A rainbow curriculum for wisdom
5. The historical problem of priorities

D. Notes & Bibliography
 
 

To be your guest speaker at this convocation is a great gift. But I am apprehensive: American-born, European-trained, my home is Canada; I am ignorant of your language, and know so little of Korean history and culture. What could I bring you that will not be a carefully wrapped Western, neocolonializing present? A christian Korean university does not want to duplicate a (secular) North American multiversity, does it?
I intend to respect and enjoy the wonder of our cultural differences, because we share the same humanity as a communion of scholarly saints redeemed by Jesus Christ (Romans 12:4-5). We are one in the Holy Spirit, who does not build empires but humbles peoples of the world with the common, comforting ministry of wisdom (Ephesians 1:17-23). My offering to God on this occasion is to try to lead you in a scripturally-directed reflection on what the third generation of Kosin University--your present student body--will face in God's world, if the Lord waits to come back.

Why should a university exist?
Should all of God's children become university students?

In Canada, before a small community of Dutch-immigrant christian believers of the Reformation faith-tradition (Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Abraham Kuyper) organized in the 1960s what has become the graduate Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, where I have taught philosophical aesthetics (1971-95), there were only Bible Colleges for tertiary education in Canada, denominational seminaries and secular universities.
Is a christian graduate-level university necessary today? What would a normative university institution and curriculum look like in our complex, differentiated, deeply troubled, globalizing society of the few literate rich and millions of uneducated famished poor? Does the Bible speak for giving priority to a department of the arts at this stage of Kosin University's development, now that theology, a Christian education program, and medicine with nursing are well established? How can you best unfold and deepen (cf. Isaiah 54:1-3) the vision of the Presbyterian missionaries whose faith has led to what, by God's grace, is at work here today?

Historical Background on the Character of Universities.

Let me first recount a few historical events of certain significant matters which may give a context for answering such questions about university education in Canada and Korea.

Early glimmerings. Origins of institutions are usually clothed in mystery, probably so we humans cannot proudly think we could construct them as if they be makeshift, laboratory experiments. But we know Moses was trained at the Egyptian court of Pharaoh (c. 1500 BC), and King Solomon later (c. 1000 BC) could out-perform internationally the learned of his day in meschalim (aphoristic proverbial learning) and songs (Exodus 2:1-10, Acts 7:20-22, Hebrews 11:23-28; I Kings 4:29-34). There was an early "seminary" for prophets at Bethel separate from King Ahaziah's court in Israel (c. 900 BC), and it was the enlightened foreign policy of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar (c. 600 BC) to induct the princes of conquered peoples, like Daniel and friends, into the statecraft language and wisdom teaching of his palace school (II Kings 2:1-18; Daniel 1). For centuries Confucius (551 470 BC), Mo Tzu (fl. 430 BC), and the editors of Tao Te Ching (c. 300 BC) gathered disciples around their teaching of Tao in the tradition of an oral sage dispensing life-knowledge enigmatically in poetic pieces.
At the time of ancient Athenian Pericles (died 429 BC) and Socrates (469-399 BC), orators like Gorgias (483-375 BC) and Isocrates (436-388 BC) turned teaching rhetoric into private professional schools with tuition fees, to train Greeks for leading civic affairs in the polis. Philosopher Plato's Academy was oriented more toward aristocrats who wanted leisure to think to the bottom of things and do mathematics, and that Academy lasted beyond Plato's death (347 BC) as a permutating school of philosophy until 529 AD--almost a millenium. Philosophical biologist Aristotle (384-322 BC), tutor of Alexander the Great: Aristotle's lecture notes cover everything from logic, natural science and psychology to ethics, politics, poetics, and searching analysis of "first principles," a veritable cosmic curriculum for the Aristotelian peripatetic school called Lyceum (begun 335 BC).
The educational loci of Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle were codified by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) into nine disciplines: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. Rhetoric carried the day as the most important. The Roman emperor Vespasian funded chairs of Greek and Latin rhetoric (70 AD) to prime his imperial officials for administering the empire. Early christian leaders emphasized grammar and rhetoric too, because they wanted a literate priesthood officiating church doctrines. And gradually there came to be a tradition of seven artes--grammar, rhetoric, logic (trivium), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and musical theory (quadrivium)1--which one was expected to study as propadeutic to doing scholarly work in theology, or as a course of study you needed to do first, for example, to `liberate' and prepare your mind for being a cultured official at Charlemagne's Frankish court (768-814 AD).
Meanwhile, independently about this time, around the Arabic Qur'an and precepts of the prophet Mohammed (507-632 AD) from Medina edited in the Hadith, along with fiqh (rules for daily life behaviour), there developed centers for instruction at the Muslim mosques. Early learning of Qur'an, Hadith and fiqh was largely by rote recitation. Because the Muslim faith does not distinguish "sacred" and "profane" knowledge--all truth is Allah's truth--including skills necessary for Jihad (holy war), imams (clerics) were licensed to teach the faithful such revealed knowledge in the precinct of the mosque. When the Islamic capital was moved from Damascus to Baghdad (736 AD) during the period of the `Abbasid caliphs, Arab scholars began to translate Greek philosophical manuscripts in their possession, especially Aristotle and Euclid, and to write commentaries on these documents, all housed in a bayt al-hikmah (house of wisdom), that is, a library. Gradually as the focus shifted from the "higher spiritual knowledge" to teaching of logic, mathematics, Arabic language, and medical texts, houses near but separate from the mosque became the centers of learning. The Al-azhal center in Cairo and the Modrasah Al-Nizamiyyah in Baghdad, like proto-universities, were meant to host all the splintering camps of Islamic theology with the other kinds of knowledge in one unified system of education.2

Setting the Western pattern. And that is precisely what seemed slowly to crystalize in various Western cities at this time: students from great distances congregated to follow lectures by magistri (masters) who wandered from city to city and spoke ex cathedra (with authority) on topics like philosophical mathematics and logic. The medical practitioners gathered in Salerno, however, dealt with skull fractures, pain, amputational surgery, which drugs an apothecary should mix for a fever: they and their students were not helped much by mathematics or by careful commentaries parsing what the Church Fathers had said about difficult Scriptural passages. The ancient Greek texts of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen, and Arabic medical notes translated into Latin by the learned Constantine the African, who settled in Salerno c. 1077 AD, were much more pertinent for diagnosing how a human person's sickness depended upon an imbalance of humours in the body you could see in phlegm, cough, bleeding or discoloured urine.
Also about this time, in the urban travel/trade center of Bologna, there was a renewed interest in Roman law, which was taught by "glossing" the ancient texts. Canon law was added to this corpus c. 1140 AD, because the Church needed its lawyers too. The many foreign students of law who came to live in Bologna unionized to protect themselves against profiteering townspeople on lodging and food prices, and also to control the teaching doctores--if the lectures were not good, the students boycotted and didn't pay the requested fees. Eventually the magistri formed a union or guild too (collegium), to set admission standards and to grant, by examination, licenses to teach jurisprudence (licentia docendi). The students really ran the whole operation in Bologna for a couple hundred years, until c. 1275 AD the commune salaried the teachers, and students gradually lost controlling power over appointments.
The Cathedral school of Notre Dame had the stability to let the University of Paris evolve in its neighbourhood--the earliest universities had no buildings. Famed for the brilliant philosophy of Pierre Abelard (1079-1142 AD), whose Sic et Non (1121-22 AD) used dialectical logic to order the single intention of the only apparently differing learned church authorities, Paris attracted students internationally, also in theology, for the more mystical Victorine theology taught there. It was assumed that students spend six years studying in the seven philosophical arts before you went on to theology, law, or medicine. Whenever there was at least one magister in residence for each of the arts and also for civil and for canon law, then that collective studium (course of studies) was given the status of studium generale by some arms-length authority--pope, king or emperor. Those who held a studium particulare degree could teach within the local jurisdiction of their particular school, while whoever held a degree in studium generale could teach at any university.3
A big question always was, however: is this university conglomerate self-governing? The Paris university is outside civil municipal rules, but is it an arm of the Church? The university of Paris was formally forbidden by the papacy to teach Aristotle's "Metaphysics" and Arabic commentaries in 1210 and 1215, yet by 1254 AD Aristotle was a recognized part of the Parisian studium. It took a papal bull of Gregory IV (Parens scientiarum, 1231) to establish the authority of the university magistri as not being subject to the orders of the bishop of Paris and the Chancellor of Notre Dame cathedral. Skirmishes on who has final say continued, but the University of Paris gradually settled down as a hoary center of a christian patrimony more in the power orbit of the kings of France rather than under the papacy.
Oxford (founded later than 1167 but before 1190 AD) and Cambridge (c. 1225 AD) universities branched off from Paris, as it were, and developed a college residential structure peculiar to England. The Universities of Prague (1347-48), Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1385), Leipzig (1409) and others were founded by local governments, and thus were free to be more secular in spirit and bound to become more nation-oriented--although Latin was still the language common for scholarship everywhere.
One could sum up the legacy in the medieval formation of the university which has remained as a pattern this way: (1) Universitas is societas magistrorum discipulorumque (a corporate society of master teachers and younger scholars) with a fairly stable curriculum of disciplinary study (the seven philosophical arts) where students are tested for a degree that licenses them to teach and/or to enter advanced study programs for the vocations of medicine, law, or theology.
(2) The university wrestled for its own sphere of educational authority, but had to jockey constantly with the Roman church, with whatever political government was reigning, and with local neighbourhood society on what various responsibilities are due to be honoured by whom and possibly shared. (3) Despite the centuries-long privileging of rhetoric as crucial to the style of an educated person, and despite the Humanist revivals of attention to classical languages and literatures (c. 1050-1200 AD), the tremendous impact of the Arabic-transmitted Aristotelian corpus of logic and natural science analysis upon university circles, while it did not exactly curb speculative Platonizing theology, did cause logic to squeeze out rhetoric for primacy, and firsthand examination of natural phenomena began to replace the production of scholia on ancient texts.

Variations on the medieval university setup. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 1838) was instrumental in founding the Prussian university of Berlin (1809). The emphasis Humboldt gave to rigorous, unending wissenschaftliche Forschung (philosophically scientific research) brought a distinctive new focus to German university life. A university demands a genuine community of advanced thinkers wholly driven by the passion to cultivate themselves (Bildung) to reach the truth which will be ever critically improving the individual's ratio-moral humanity. A university is not the place to prepare for a professional job: the vocation of university professors and graduate students alike (in seminars, not lectures) is to keep doing in-depth research, to be philosophically active searching for connecting links in perhaps obscure, recalcitrant realities, exploring the as-yet-unknown heights and depths of specialized knowledge.
This Romantic Idealist twist to university studies favoured an elite group of individuals--students were expected already to be researchers--who were right to be wholly absorbed in their academic investigations, without practical worries, far from the madding crowd. Humboldt wanted the king to make the university financially independent so it could focus on its real task: research.4 And it is precisely this self contained, almost Faustian obsession with research, one might say, that left many German university scholars shamefully ignorant or negligent of their public responsibilities in society during the Nazi era of Hitler's dictatorial rule.5
John Hopkins university tried to transplant the German research model to America in 1876, and began its institution with only graduate students-- But before I conclude this brief backgrounding on the historical formation of universities with remarks about the American hybrid slant that affects the whole world today, I should just mention the influential work of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and became rector of an explicitly Roman Catholic university in Dublin (1852), which was begun because the Catholic students' predicament at Oxford and Cambridge had been that they must sign an affirmation to the Protestant Anglican 39 articles of faith.
Newman believed that a university, a Catholic university, needed to be critically self-conscious of its basic assumptions (principia), and not inculcate faith beliefs but do research for and then teach knowledge to students. You have "knowledge," said Newman, when factual information is intellectually ordered in an organic network of meaning. He could almost have quoted Matthew Arnold: you "see things steadily and whole" when you know something. The mission of the university is to give students knowledge worth knowing for its own sake, not because it is useful or practical, said Newman, but because the knowledge gives you encyclopedic scope, moral resonance, a gentlemanly civility in society.
You can hear the Victorian British, class-conscious breeding bias built into Newman's Catholic program. Unlike von Humboldt's elitist Humanism which counted on severe philosophically honed, inquisitorial analytic talent, Newman's unifying study at the university is literature, English literature, Shakespeare. So Cardinal Newman's idea of a university is more gentle than the German one, and Newman's ideal university, even though he opened a medical school at his Dublin University complex, is characterized by a chastened trust in rationality and the decorous outworking of study in the Humanities.

American higher education has usually displayed a mixture of institutional structures. (1) Early American church-run colleges like Harvard (1636) followed the literary liberal arts lead of the residential Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin setup, and started colleges particularly to train ministers for their denominational pulpits, much as Kosin Seminary, as I understand it, and then Kosin College were begun. (2) The U.S. Congress' Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, gave states land for state universities which were expected at minimal tuition costs to democratically serve inhabitants of the state with the traditional undergraduate liberal arts education and provide them training in applied research, particularly in experimental agriculture and industrial manufacturing needs of the country. This was closer to the kind of "useful" university Benjamin Franklin had wanted. (3) Certain American universities like John Hopkins (1876), which I mentioned, Stanford (founded 1885), and Chicago (1890) were impressed by the German graduate doctoral research university, and pioneered such advanced studies in the USA.
All three kinds of American college-university institutions trumpeted equality of student opportunity, quality of professorial instruction, and actually became the privileged way in society for someone to become a "professional," a person certified to provide a service with specialized knowledge. Important is the fact that the graduated clergy for the church, lawyers for the government, physicians, dentists and nurses for the populace, as well as other professional specialists in agriculture and commerce, all had a roughly common underlay of liberal arts exposure--Western civilization overview courses, English and American literature, with elementary knowledge of mathematics, natural and societal sciences, plus a hearty dose of extracurricular activities like choir and athletics. This was the American way of "institutionalized individualism" (e pluribus unum)6 in a university system organized along the lines of "competitive merit" and "team spirit."
After what is called World War II (1939-1945) and the divisive war in your own country (1950-53), things changed in the American university. American war veterans who survived the horrors were given money by the U.S. government (GI Bill, 1944, 1952, 1966) to go to the university for the education they had missed. In fact, in postwar America there was a surge of mass enrollment of students, because college and university were no longer seen as places you entered to find out by studying who you were as a person (Socrates' sé gnowthi), but you went there to train for a job. Two-year community colleges and polytechnical institutes sprang up like dandelions, and even the big-name, pace-setting universities, which had been drafted during the war by the U.S. government to bend their scientific research more toward defense and space technology projects (grant money!); these universities, too, diversified, multiplied specializations, and looked for ways to provide vocation-friendly courses.
The Russian space success in launching "Sputnik" (1957) opened the spigot of U.S. government money to pour funds into American universities to beef up study in advanced mathematics, natural sciences, technology; and everybody was in a hurry! Teenage students as well as married war veterans did not want to be prepared for life "in general," but were glad to be recruited for programs in an engineering department or in business administration which led directly to an income after graduation. Many American universities became "multiversities," as Clark Kerr dubbed them, with myriad academic specializations that seemed to lack any overarching connection to the others--
there was no center. Multiversities took on the character of high-grade educational cafeterias where majors and minors in different fields of information existed for a while, subject to the market forces of special interests, a kind of degree factory, often with excellent training, but scattered.
Student unrest, however, grew, not only because of warring in Viet Nam (U.S. escalated involvement 1964-69), but because something was missing. Not even an established university can live by bureaucratic administration and bread alone. Robert Hutchins inaugurated the "Great Books of the Western World" program at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, to try to recapture alive the historic tradition of Western civilization and make it palatable to a generation of students-as-consumers.7 Harvard, which long ago had introduced the matter of "electives," now broached the requirement of a "core" curriculum, to try still to give a common civilizing knowledge to students passing through its hallowed gates.
It has always been hard to sell Americans on the value of history, and the riots of 1968 in Paris, the organized unrest at Berkeley
campus in California (1964), the shooting of protesting students at Kent State (1970) and other rallies of revolt on American college and university campuses, did not stop American multiversities from becoming the Big Business they are today. Often the educational crux of a professor of humane studies with an attentive apprentice student gets lost in the massive machinery of a teacher's needing to publish articles of expertise in refereed journals only the initiate can read, and the university's fixation with handling the grades of a student's "performance" efficiently rather than taking the time to judge the worth of the education given and received. And university administrators, rather than being held accountable for their visionary leadership of a community of scholars, often came to be evaluated by their success in raising funds. Large American universities today, I believe, are run more like business corporations, in consultation with government granting agencies, and have yet become cultural power-brokers around the world on what higher education should be.
 

Implications of a history for facing the systematic problem of defining a university institution

You have been patient to hear me narrate an historical sketch of certain steps which lie behind the universities we have on our hands today. My reason for taking the time to do that was to help us students and teachers who would follow the Christ in our advanced studies see that "a christian university" does not just drop out of heaven on a certain sunny afternoon. The university as an institution is alive and has a history, and a living university organization changes. Universities are communal human responses to God's call for educating a younger generation in the wonders of God's world. We humans are responsible for the institutional university response we make together. That is why at certain times for faculty, institution-building may be more important than advancing research in one's chosen disipline. If a university does not hang together, then the students hang separately in their multiversity specialist cubicles.
In our Reformation christian faith-tradition you do not go to the Bible to find a chapter and verse prescription that tells you whether to teach chemistry or add a department of painterly art to your school. The Reformed Presbyterian faith tradition takes seriously the belief that the creation also reveals our Creator's will,8 and if our sinful eyes are corrected and directed by scriptural truth, we may fallibly discern in creation what way the Lord would have us walk. So, discerning carefully what has happened historically in university formation, de-formation, re-formation, should give us a clue as to what creatural realities humans have had to wrestle with--from whatever faith position or perspective they acted--since the creaturely limits God has set for discovering and passing on knowledge in God's world give the parameters and cradle all human endeavours, whether they be pagan, christian, or secularized humans busy building its "university." Can we find out what kind of contours a normative university institution should have in our day?

When the oldest university in the world, Al-Azhar in Cairo, under Nasser's regime in Egypt, added an engineering program in the 1960s, the dilemma of current Muslim university education became painfully clear. Arab scholars note that Al-Azhar has two parallel, unharmonized systems of education next to one another: the secular liberal Western one, and the traditional Muslim theological one, under the same roof. But, they said, the Muslim nation is built on a common creed, and we need to have an integrated Islamic thought-world amid the morally destructive, materialistic culture all around us. Says Muslim scholar Syed Ali Ashraf:
Unless we are able to formulate all basic concepts of knowledge from the point of Islamic metaphysics, we shall not be able to establish
an Islamic university.9

The original Canadian universities were meant to pass on the traditional values of their elders to the aspiring leaders of the nation, but gradually Canadian universities followed, perhaps more slowly, the secularizing course of the American universities. Industrialists in Canada wanted more skilled occupational help. So Queen's University opened a mining school (1893), and the august University of Toronto began a forestry school on campus (1907), alongside the startup of independent trade schools (Industrial Education Act, 1911).
Much later, in the prosperity period after World War II and with the baby boom, the Canadian government began to give financial aid to the debt ridden universities, since the populace supported this "investment" in helping Canada become a modern industrial nation, and most graduates found employment in their specialties. Around 1970, however, Canada experienced rising unemployment, spiraling inflation, ad hoc policy decisions by universities on what programs to develop, and cut-backs in government funding: the costs of a Canadian university education came to be experienced as a burden rather than as an investment. "We want more scholar for the dollar," said the Ontario Minister of Colleges and Universities. Should Kosin University do that?
That is the time when the small graduate Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto began holding regular classes in philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of political science, philosophical theology, philosophical psychology, philosophical aesthetics, philosophy of christian education....

When I read that even during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) in your country, the Ewha Haktang College for women students (1886/1898) was supported by Queen Min, teaching christian principles along with natural science and manual skills quite strange to the confucian ideals, I became grateful to God for such an effort next to other christian colleges (Sungsil Union, 1906; Seoul Choson, 1915). And when I know how American christian missionaries stood by you as a people in mission schools during the Japanese occupations and wars for liberation, then I must confess the witness of Kosin University (with roots back to 1946) has much to teach us North Americans, since the persecution in which you have persevered cannot but have given your university studies and your decisions on priorities a sanctified calibre we academic believers in Canada and the USA do not know.

Biblically Christian Contours for a University: Systematic Notes

Let me distill for you several matters I have learned from tracing somewhat the world history of universities. And in the back of my consciousness lies the directive of the LORD in Psalm 78 for fathers and mothers to recount magnalia Dei, the great deeds of the LORD to their children, so that the coming generations will remember to tell it to their children, so that the great-grandchildren will
set their foolish, unshakeable hope in God,
not ever forget the deeds of the LORD,
but instead, take good care of God's ordinances,
so that they would not become like their ancestors,
a stubborn, know-it-all generation
whose heart never got settled,
whose spirit never held steady, solidly faithful to God.
(Psalm 78:7-8)

A community of scholars. A university is an institutional community of an older and younger generation of scholars/students whose
calling together is to discover and cultivate God's world with informed, imaginative reflection, and then as responsible, responding human subjects coram Deo together articulate their acquired wisdom in awed thanks to God, sharing its blessings with one's neighbours, and by taking care of all God's marvelous creatures, including animals, plants and stones.
A community of scholars is the crux to any university. The medieval community of scholars ate and drank, prayed and studied
together, supported in their bookish life by family, friends, patron or church benefice. A community of scholarship is not a church, and is not a family, but is a collegial union of capable, thoughtful readers and investigators whose faith identity does not assume unanimity or even consensus on every policy matter, but does attest to a fundamental communion of dedication to a common task.
I should like to propose that when a community of scholars as a body holds the Psalm 24 vision to be true--
The earth with its profuse diversity,
and the world with all its inhabitants
belong to the LORD (Psalm 24:1)
--and when as a body they breathe a holy spirit of inquisitive shalom tempered by "each [scholar's] humbly esteeming the others to be superior to oneself" (Philippians 2:1-11, v.3) as they all together "consider how to provoke! one another to passionately selfless love and good works" (Hebrews 10:19-25, v.24): then you have the heart of a christian university throbbing with life. Then heterogeneity of persons and interests, the wide diversity of fields and often hardly intelligible research problems, as well as possible unbridgeable cultural differences, are all still unified by everyone's commitment to communicate one's studies and insights to the other members. It's almost as if there is a tacit, transparent understanding percolating underneath among the various older and younger scholars that, because God's universe coheres, what we singular people do in probing its mysteries should also cohere in a uni-versity.
Secularized universities unfortunately tend to become multiversities, held together by traditional protocols or administrative glue. Inter-scholarly communication can be frustrated because there is really no transparency in the language used, no singleness of spirit or
common lord, the way the early Christians experienced having common resources after Christ's resurrection, ascension, and the Pentecost arrival of the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:32-37). So competitive power-plays, pulling rank, and creeping fragmentation sap the morale of such
academic institutions. Prestige and the role of managerial hierarchical authority can maintain a semblance of identity, but the positive, unfettered flourishing of communal researched study and teaching becomes pinched. The frame to what goes on inside the university seems to be more of an imposition than a wholesome bond of blessing you want to count on. Such emaciation of vital community can happen at scholarly institutions which carry Christ's name too, where, with the best of intentions, the operation is more like the time of the Older Testament judges, when each professor does what seems right in one's own eyes (Judges 17:6, 21:25).
A college or university that would be truly christian in its exercise of the scholarly vocation cannot be satisfied, I think, with having competent, thoughtful practitioners in the spectrum of the various disciplines who are devout, Bible-believing, learned magistri. An ordinary way-of-life that follows Jesus Christ by giving evidence of the fruits of the Holy Spirit (cf. Galatians 5:16-6:2) is of course basic and essential to every christian profession. It is also critical that a christian scholar, in whatever special field of investigation he or she works, comes to be conscious of and is able to articulate the vision of a world-and-life-view which commits one to discover and accept the lordship of Jesus Christ over every speck of creaturely existence. Such a comprehensive overview acts as the watershed which services each one's particular terrain of study. But there is one more crucial step, I believe, beyond living a joyful biblical style of life, and having a christian world-and life-view, which is necessary for a christian university to function in a way that fosters genuinely communal, redemptive scholarship: a christian philosophical systematics needs to be operative in the theoretical, conceptual world of the special scientists busy analyzing and teaching all the different disciplines.
Let me try to be very clear about this last matter because it has significant implications for university curriculum too.
A christian philosophical systematics. You do not need to have a philosophy or a developed world-and-life-view to be a bona fide child of God. You do not even need to be literate to be a person whose life is "securely hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:1-4). But we are discussing what constitutes advanced university scholarly education that would be truly Christ-centered, Scripturally directed, Holy Spirited; and for this kind and stage of academic education you do need to be literate, you do need to be trained to think precisely, making connections, imagining hypothetical possibilities, drawing conclusions.
And I am proposing that if scholars who work with rigorous conceptual care in their chosen field of pedagogy--preventative medicine, literary theory, musicology, biology, mathematics, theology, or in whatever facet of God's world you examine phenomena--these specialized scholars also need to be serviced by a rigorous philosopical systematics in order to be prepared, at theoretical depth, to practice inter-
relational, inter-disciplinary study that is integral to a university education. It is important for scholars to make the assumptions and implications of their conceptual work accessible to those with other world-and-life views by having their cross-disciplinary sharing of scientific knowledge also carefully chiseled to scrupulous theoretical intelligibility.
By a christian philosophical systematics I mean the practice of theory oriented toward probing the structured aspects of things, persons, acts and events, ferreting out the interrelated meaning of the matters under scrutiny. A christian idea of philosophy, you could say, is that philosophy is more a set of fundamental questions than it is a number of answers; philospophy is a constellation of categories within which one proceeds to think and make conceptual judgments. A christian philosophical systematics itself will be a network of leading ideas that order how you analyze specific affairs and construe their encyclopedic connections, and this network of leading ideas or orientational categories will be marked by biblical wisdom.
For example, the biblical truth of the sovereign God's positing a raft of ordinances for creatural reality which are good, discrete and interwoven ordinances which hold for all creatures after their kind (Genesis 1:1-2:3, Isaiah 40, Psalms 1, 19, 104, 119, I Corinthians 15:39-41) in spite of sin--humans don't ever become animals, they sinfully become inhuman!--has pivotal implications for structuring how
academic disciplines limit the reach of their investigative findings and correlate their specialized knowledge with the contributions of other fields. Medical instruction operating out of a christian philosophical stance confessing such an integral God-structured world will recognize, I think, psychosomatic maladies, and will never treat whole persons who are physically ill as if they be an organic compound attached to or hosting a separate valuable soul. A christian philosophical anthropology assumes women and men are whole corporeal souls in the human race; and that basic presupposition will shape not only how medical doctors and nurses study medicine, but how one conceives and practises psychotherapy, school teaching, artistry, jurisprudence, the liturgy for congregational worship, and much more.
Another example: the scandalous biblical truth that Jesus Christ is God's veritable Archimedian point and Redeemer of world history,10 whose Rule all humans are to be subject to (Micah 6:8, Isaiah 49-55, Habbakkuk 2:14, II Corinthians 5:17-21, 10:3-5): that biblical truth spires the philosophical idea that all human endeavour--including agriculture, communication theory, music-making, scientific analysis of parasites, deciding economic policies, formulating the doctrines of a church tradition--will be following the Lord when humans do compassionate justice to the reality they study or administer. A christian philosophical view of society assumes that no one discipline may lord it over another, but that each kind of special study forges ahead in its field with the understanding that each washes the other's feet with the hands and towels and knowledge each specialized scholar has learned to employ. Economic theory couched in a christian philosophical
systematics, as I understand it, will affirm in God's world that "profit margin" is a necessary condition for business, but if economic theory is aware of God's love for the poor, for fauna and the bio-diversity of plants, an economic theory couched in a christian philosophical
systematics with an eye to justice will replace the "profit motive" with the category of "generous supply of resources for needs" as the guiding function for commerce which pleases the Lord.

Underlying biblical theology and redemptive historiography. It is the appointed task of a christian philosophical systematics to serve as this architectonic lynchpin for mediating a unity in the diversity of studies at a university. Biblical theological study, as I understand it, provides the rootage to a christian philosophy. Christian philosophical categories are conceived and born in sustained exploration of the Hebrew and Greek testaments of God's kerygmatic Word. There is practically a symbiotic relation between biblical theological searching of the scriptural revelation and a christian philosophical construction of redemptive categories which mesh with creational revelation. It takes a Reformational searching of the Scriptures which reveals how the Lord God's chesed and 'emet (covenanting mercy and reliable faithfulness), pinpointed in the grace of torah (the Lord's guidance), which when obeyed leads to shalom (abundant well-being) [Proverbs 3:1-4], all as the historical outworking of basileia tou theou (the Reign of God) [Matthew 6:24-34, 9:35-38, Acts 1:3]: that is the kind of biblical theology it takes to fructify a biblically christian philosophical systematics. There are other, sterile, theologistic ways to search the Scriptures too (cf. John 5:39 40, II Corinthians 3:12-16)! And it takes an on-going humble christian philosophy to keep renewing the biblical vitality of its underpinnings so that its basic categories and contours stay fresh, to keep on breathing a seeking, redemptive conceptual ministry rather than become a closed system with inelastic formulae that order standard answers for difficult problems. The epigones of many ossified philosophies have been a blight on university communities.
It may be important to note here the difference between wrestling with the canonic Scriptural text (=Biblical hermeneutics, biblical theology), which can be carried on in a university setting, and dogmatic theology, the systematic codification of biblical teachings aligned with a particular confessional tradition, such as the Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist slant on the Christian faith. Winsome doctrinal theology is as sound an endeavour as any other careful systematization of materials, such as one finds in legal codes, ethical standards, marketing or diplomatic protocols and the like. Dogmatic theology deserves special prominence in a seminary, so that priests and pastors will have a thorough knowledge of the creeds and catechisms of their historical branch of the Church.
But dogmatic theology is not equipped, it seems to me, to play the role of philosophy, that is, to help critically examine and compare, for example, how Freudian concepts of ego, id, and superego are at odds with the Jungian postulate of a Collective Unconscious, and what their respective positions mean for understanding artists: that is a philosophical, not a theological investigation. When dogmatic theology has tried to adjudicate theoretical, scientific matters outside its field of competence, there have been troubles, as when Galileo was censored and forced to recant what he said he saw in his telescopes and had figured out mathematically (It could not be so--any fool can see that the sun rises and the sun sets around our mother earth; besides, the Bible says so in Joshua 10:12-14....). In theoretical matters it is wiser to let a christian philosophical systematics translate the biblical orientation into a mediation of scientific disputes than to jump from a dogmatic theology into settling such matters.
Historical study which remembers what has unjustly been forgotten, and therefore redeems the meaning of significant past events which are getting lost, is a close partner of a christian philosophical systematics in promoting philosophical unity amid disciplinary diversity at an institution of advanced learning. Every field of study has a history, and a discerning historian sees how the norms posited for mathematics and music, psychology and economics, theology, literature and philosophy, change over the years in staggered fashion; yet there is often an overlapping similarity, unity, in the cultural dynamics of the different changing phenomena.
An Enlightenment spirit of ludic Rationalism can be found, for example, to be permeating rococo artistry, des philosophes of l'Encyclopèdie and the gallant politics of Louis XV and Louis XVI for a couple of generations preceding the French Revolution in Europe--the variegated cultures of different nations was of a piece. An American pragmatistic spirit of hang loose competitiveness has been driving postcolonial technological enterprise worldwide: judges, generals, and advertisers--at least in the Americas and Europe where I come from--all seem deeply committed to "whatever works." That pragmatistic spirit unifies so much of the incomparably different
cultural phenomena extant. Yet so few (political) leaders seem to have any historical consciousness that the "normal" today is abnormal in God's world, and frightfully destructive. Good history-writing will lay bare the divisive principalities and powers almost monolitically at work in diverse places of prestige and power throughout the world.
Historiography--history-keeping, history-telling, writing down the story of significant changes--makes philosophical meaning concrete, as it were, corporeal; and if it is redemptive historiography, it will have the eye to discover that there is nothing new under the sun as far as human cultural waywardness goes--there are patterns to human idolatry, good abilities, and wickedness. So a christian history-keeping discipline at the university will find a thread of continuity in the succession of noteworthy human events, as well as recognize the endings to periods of well-being and evil-doing over the years. To keep the history of a people or a culture, of a specific institution (like a university) or any thing, is to trace the surprising connections between quite disparate happenings, an itinerary, and to discern which changes contribute to the Rule of Jesus Christ on earth and which human responses are off track and lay God's good world waste. A just historiography details the relativity of human deeds under God's enduring faithfulness, and thereby encourages present-day professors and students who follow Christ to assume their allotted place and task with modesty: we never need to complete God's work! we only need to be faithful in bringing our cultural inheritance a step more normatively into the presence of the Lord (cf. Isaiah 60, Revelation 21:22-27).
The fact that a biblically anchored historiography unifies the incredibly fitful, disjunctive events scattered across the ages into a supple narrative of God's dealings with creatures, disturbs many so-called "postmodern" thinkers today who have decided to "wage a war on totality" and "master narratives" which offer false consolation to those who believe in them,11 for example, in the evolutionary progress of the human race to an ever better life, liberty, and the pursuit of rational happiness. Because a biblically christian conception of historical wholeness allows for the surd reality of sin and does not whitewash atrocities of evil (Ecclesiastes 7:14, Job 19), yet still affirms the certainty of God's Rule acoming, I call such a biblical overview a servant narrative. The biblically oriented servant narrative does not "mastermind" history into a utopian scheme, but situates a person today so that one knows surely what time it is: Today is the day the LORD has made! We are alive "in the last days" after Christ's ascension to God's right hand of power (Psalm 118:24-25, II Timothy 3:1-7, Hebrews 1:1-2, II Peter 3:1-15); we are alive in the time when we expect the glorious consummation of our human tending to God's world (Matthew 24-25, Luke 19:11-27). Bible disbelievers who have only "petits récits" (local narratives), for fear of falsifying reality in a grand scheme, usually suffer from inflating their own predicaments because they cannot relate their little journey to a public story that has intergenerational staying power. It is because followers of Christ know the biblically historical "Big Picture" in outline form, as it were, that we have the perspective to be critical of the status quo without turning revolutionary or anarchic.

A rainbow curriculum for wisdom. When a community of christian scholars has the grace to consider mapping the range and kinds of human knowledge there be within a christian philosophical perspective, and has the boon to acknowledge a relatively common record of God's blessing you together with an imaginative, articulate thought-tradition spired by the historic Reformation in Europe of the sixteenth century, all undergirded by a consensual heart-commitment steeped in a biblical covenantal theology, then the university which institutionally frames your teaching and learning validates a rainbow curriculum as cosmic as God's world. Any creaturely reality with its marvels and history deserves to be studied, because the LORD God does not make junk.
From the beginning humans were ordained to care for the earth and develop agriculture (Genesis 1:26-31, Isaiah 28:23-29); so the physical sciences, plant and animal husbandry studies are noble occupations. Early on in history there have been cities with problems of trade in manufactured goods, transport, and power relations within families and between neighbours (Genesis 4:16-26); so socio-economic and political sciences and psychological studies are important fields for sustained investigation, to try to order human deeds in good ways (cf. Matthew 22:15-22, Romans 13:1-7, Revelation 13). The fact that Adam greeted Eve with a poem (Genesis 1:23) that God had Moses incorporate wood carvings, goldsmith artistry and vestments into the tabernacle worship even in the wilderness wanderings (Exodus 31:1-11), that later on God supported King David's emphasis upon training professional instrumental musicians and singers to lead God's people in praise and laments (I Chronicles 15:16-24, 16:4-6), that there were free standing sculptures fashioned by Solomon's hired artisans for the LORD's temple (I Kings 6:23-26), and that the psalms were booked so they could be read and studied: all these matters show that the imaginative arts and literature are dear to the LORD and deserve to be skillfully practised by God's people (Psalm 33:1-3).
So, one might say, the whole rainbow of creaturely affairs, any colourful zone of God's universe, is grist for the mill of university education. Naturally no one can study everything, especially in our day of specializations. If I Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, however, provide the dynamic within your community of scholars, so that medicine does not think itself more important than church theology, and the seminary study does not hold its gift to be superior to the domain of christian school teaching, and the service of music-making is not considered less critical than nursing, then each specialty may glory in the contribution of the other members because you are all one diaconate body of rigorous scholarship. But there is still the problem of choosing which new fields of study should be selected for attention to fill out the rainbow roster. A single university like Kosin University seldom has the resources to do everything under the sun. How can a university with biblical stuffings be responsible to the Lord in our day, and make its choices as worldliwise as a snake in the grass yet as innocent as a dove, in the pack of wolves where Christ sends us as educated people (Matthew 10:16)?

The pattern in the history of the university I told suggests that one did well to study a core of philosophical and history-rich "liberal arts" as propadeutic, to prepare you for the professional study of theology (to provide educated clergy for the Church) or law (to yield trained advocates for the Governing Powers) or medicine (to produce skilled practitioners for Public Health). It seems as if the professional services of nurse-physicians, prophetic priests, and political leaders came to the fore at the traditional university because these professions focussed on certain pivotal points of human nature that surely need attention--body, "soul," and societal order.
It is significant, I think, that the Reformer John Calvin, who comes out of this medieval-Humanist university milieu as a reflective theologian, held up the training in law for ruling civic affairs as magistrate, to be the highest calling humans could assume, since unlike a pastor who shepherds a flock of believing, sometimes straying sheep, the lawful judge has larger scope and must administer God's justice to outright unbelievers as well as believers, says John Calvin.12 So next to the hospital and seminary of a Calvinian christian university would probably be a law school, since in the end times the persecutions and violations of the pregnant woman (God's faithful ones) by the powerful Beasts and dragon (the Antichrist pseudo-World Rulers outfitted with the Lie) shall have to be fought in the courts and in the public square (Psalm 2, Revelation 12-13), and we will need christian lawyers and rulers to mitigate the evil.
There is also good sense, I think, in the long history of the university, as to why students have been required to study certain subjects like the trivium and quadrivium first, so they would be literate, able to read and interpret texts, and to think things through critically. What good is a Bible to a professional theologian or legal statutes to a professional lawyer if you do not know how to read with precision? And who wants a professional nurse or doctor who administers medicine and surgically removes diseased tissue who has not first learned to calculate proportions and angles exactly? Before one can enter the rigours of a specialized profession, one needs to master the basics of number and word and have the facility to identify differences and catch subtleties of meaning. Without an exercised founding in grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematical examination of phenomena, a prospective scholar is ill-equipped to advance one's professional specialty and to locate his or her specialty in the worldwide panoply of human tasks. Then there could be the temptation to do your technical thing and go it alone with your specialized competence.
Right here, on the matter of one's initial university studies, is a good spot for the biblically christian contours of a university to make a difference: when the flexible but basal canon of "liberal arts" preparatory studies will be couched in a christian philosophical perspective, flanked by a redemptive historiographic awareness of one's faith tradition stretching back to the LORD's dealing with God's elected people memorialized in Psalm 78, then students at a christian university begin by learning the fundamentals of scholarship in a way which forms their mentality to be at home in God's world. Apprenticed to an older generation who have thoughtfully matured in the Reformation faith tradition, the new generation is shown the general lay of the land, so a student does not become narrow minded, staring at just one small patch of ground in God's world. If one specializes too early, you can miss the breadth and depth of God's creational openings for wonderment and enrichment. Christian scholarship is not in a hurry, since study itself can be full-time service for the Lord, and to help a newcomer envision the richness of God's creational blessing and to own a habit of reflection that is wise to God's amazing, long-suffering compassionate justice in the world takes time.

This is why a university, I believe, should exist: to give able men and women the structured time to experience an intergenerational crucible for reflective shalom, so as to generate the wisdom of God abroad.
By "wisdom" I do not mean the ambitious, speculative knowledge promoted by Renaissance Pico della Mirandola who believed chameleon man could become an angelic intelligence.13 Nor is "wisdom" finding out the alchemical secrets of the universe passionately desired by Goethe's Faust. Such godless, self-seeking Humanistic "wisdom" is demonic foolishness, according to the Scriptures (Psalm 14/53, James 3:13-18). What the biblical Proverbs call "knowledge" (da`at) is a firsthand, intimate experience of what God wants done, and what the Bible calls human "wisdom" (hokmah) is the Spirit-filled, disciplined ability to judge what God wants done, what it is right to do, what is just (dikaios).
Only God the Holy Spirit gives a human person wisdom (Proverbs 2, Job 28, I Corinthians 2). But we believing students and teachers may wrestle with God for the Lord's direction in discovering God's will hidden in the mines of precious stones, the energy of the sun, the labyrinth of a person's DNA, the quirks of pedagogy, and what God wants done to undo ignorance, to alleviate poverty, to rectify so much that has gone wrong in our complex, disturbed, secularized "civilization." Wisdom by formula is not possible, because the times are always changing, but Scripture encourages us to wait upon the Lord as we struggle communally, in all our getting of knowledge, to get wisdom (Proverbs 4:1-9).
Wisdom may seem to be a rather intangible rationale and reward for a university to exist, but Scripture celebrates wisdom as a redemptive conduit for God's effecting the Lord's will on earth (Proverbs 3:13-20). Karl Marx was wrong to disparage philosophers for only "interpreting" the world and to demand that thinkers "change" the sorry mess of society. If a university is turned into a site where socio-economic and political issues are actually either imposed or resolved, that alteration violates the university's rightful space to be an institution of inquiry and consciousness-setting (cf. nouthesía, Ephesians 6:4). But when Wisdom hovers over the give-and-take of teachers and students learning from one another at the university, as they parse through their disciplines and argue difficult matters: when wisdom attends their deliberations, the horizons of one's consciousness change. Under the tutelage of Wisdom one is no longer caught in the mesh of a competititve society driven by the urge to capitalize on information that brings you success; instead, one's horizons for reflection have changed so that mentors and learners grow a vision of the Lord's imperative over their medical study, their formulation of doctrine, the debate about pedagogy and musical critique, horizons whose wise injunction is:
let tried-and-true justice gush through the land like a rush of water,
and let just-doing deeds overflow like an almighty river (Amos 5:21 24).
Without wisdom at large in its operation, a university becomes a Babylonian citadel of vanity. With Wisdom blowing where it wills (cf. John 3:1-8) through the ongoing discussions of a university, there is a spirit of thankfulness in the study and promise of healing for the nations of the world in the classrooms (cf. Malachi 1:11).

The historical problem of priorities. Would a wise university today develop a specialty in the imaginative arts? What are sound principles for deciding priorities?
Jesus would look out over the world as he once did on the territory of Samaria, so despised by the Jews, and say, "Every field of human endeavour is ripe for being reaped"(John 4:31-35)!
Two-thirds world poverty is a scandal to shame every affluent country living by "the profit motive": we need a christian economics program to reflect on how loving money corrupts business (I Timothy 6:6-10), and to think through what kind of banking system could operate by the guideline of "thrifty generosity" (II Corinthians 9:6-15). The wanton violence against the weak in the monster megalopolises of the world, and the butchering of defenceless believers, gypsies and outcasts in totalitarian lands cries out for the wise university to fund a program of jurisprudence to study the strains on international law, bullying tactics by the stronger, and how injustice leaves a curse upon the land when breaking treaties and deceitful cruelty is unacknowledged (Proverbs 3:27-35, 14:32-34). The terrible power of media technology to bear damaging false witness by sensational bites of reporting begs for a university concerned about truth to develop a program in the area of communications, rhetoric, and popular culture, in order to form a school of critical, investigative journalism that will avoid cheap muckraking but probe for connected commentary on current events that imaginatively supports what is wholesome, and expose to the light what is a hateful angel of light (Colossians 4:5-6, II Corinthians 11:12-15, I John 1:5-7). And artistry?
It is important, I think, to realize that in deciding priorities there is not only one right choice, and the rest of the possibilities are wrong. Good judgment will not pit one avenue of service in partisan fashion against an other. It is good for medical study at a university to focus on the malady of cancer, a blight found particularly in an urban populace, but it is good, it may be better for a medical faculty to put its research energy into parasitology and diagnostics, in order to focus preventative medicine and healing upon problems experienced more by the helpless rural populations of our world--if you cannot do both. Which fields of study a university explores depends, it seems to me, upon deciding circumstantially where the most fruitful openings be to bring shalom at a spot where the miseries of God's people and our neighbours are worst, and where there is a source of gifted leaders able to carry through on bringing wisdom to that specific area of scholarship, so as to change by conscientization the demeanor of people and bring them hope.
There must be a holy spirited motivation behind deciding a priority, which generously sees the whole panorama of other needs too, and there must be the willingness by a few to commit to a generations-long haul in carrying out that specific program, because seeds need to be sown and trees need to be grown before fruit can be harvested. If a secular government promotes bio-technology or engineering with a crash program of awards and scholarships so that a university can assist a country to meet the rabid international competition of industrial production, one needs to ask whether the kingdom of God has those same priorities, before one joins the crowd. Where and how can a christian university show a winsome alternative to the godless, dominant rush to serve Mammon?

No university should begin, and Kosin University does not need, an arts program if it be conceived and practised as a luxury, an ornamental fringe on the garment of life,17 something one dabbles in if you have monied leisure. But artistry--music and song, theatre, poetry, graphic art, the dance, architecture, typographic design--understood in a christian philosophical way has excellencies worth considering for serious study:
(1) While the sciences generalize from phenomena investigated and pursue the invariant law which will hold the same everywhere, artistry latches onto what is singular, unexpected, perhaps unique, in providing knowledge that may be characteristic of something we formerly overlooked. (2) Artistry has the logic of defamiliarizing a person from ordinary experience. A poem forces you to read more slowly, so you are faced with nuances of meaning you normally miss in words. Black-and-white photographic art throws up shadows that disclose a side of a person's character you never saw before in multicolour real life. Shakespeare's King Lear makes you cry at the folly of a broken father's deluded love for a daughter. (3) Art is God's gift that can protect us from reducing life to technical knowhow, and primes children as well as adults, the uneducated as well as the educated, to perform doxological acts that include the catharsis of lament as well as a dance of praise.
The practice of artistry as a profession has not been an ancient fixture at the university. American undergraduate colleges have given "the fine arts" a place of sorts, but usually musicians, painterly artists, ceramicists, sculptors and would-be novelists have gone off to the rigours of Art Academies and Schools for Writing for their apprenticeships. But maybe a christian university in Korea could find a way to integrate the professional practice and performance of artistry with the critical art historiographic and theoretical art study which would pioneer a comprehensive art program that would research the place and task of artistry for people in society, and devise ways to have artists integrated next to nurses and teachers, police and preachers, as necessary figures in a normal society.
A flourishing literature in the hangul language that would bespeak a redemptive vision for our daily tragedies would be one important way for Korean culture to keep its voice amid the imperialistic pressures to be standardized in the American-English empire. Your ancient Korean tradition of crafted hanji mulberry bark paper and the exquisite, artisan paper objects which grace a home or office like butterflies of joy can be a way to encourage God's people in their troubles and to proffer a smile to engage unbelievers--why not harness such an art ministry to the outreach of a wise university? The peculiar glory of art's nature suits it to tell the truth tongue-in-cheek, like a jester, at special times of crisis and celebration in human life, when prosaic statements are inadequate. I wonder, could the Korean tradition of han lamentation be extricated from shamanistic and Buddhistic rituals which effect a detached acceptance of one's fate, and be reclaimed,
converted! into a biblically sensitive, voiced psalm lament that has the LORD God listen to your pitiful weeping and caress you gently, wiping away the tears from your cheek, as Psalms 6, 13, 39, 42-43, 51, 126 and 131 do?
That is, artistry--its reception and production--has had either a churchified or uncertain history in the Western christian environs. My thought is that Kosin University as a christian academic institution of higher learning embedded in the rich heritage of the Reformation might have the unusual opportunity to find an alternative way of making art wise, giving artisanry a diaconal dignity so hard to manage in the differentiated chic art culture of New York, London or Paris. If Korean artists have not historically suffered through the l'art pour l'art derailment of professional art's godly purpose to help the imaginatively handicapped neighbour perceive the wonders of God's world, maybe your university could translate indigenous folk artisanry into art-as-such (concerts, novels, objets d'art) that would be as chaste and neighbour-friendly as a Choson white porcelain vase. There is great, great need throughout the world today for dispirited people to have clean water, ample grain, clothing, shelter, and also the cheer afforded by a redemptive song, a sturdy image, a choice, wise poetic verse that banishes fear and instills hope (Hebrews 6:13-20, I John 4:16-18). Is there a small band of wise persons ready to lead a university program in this mission of the LORD to bring artistic shalom to the poor of the world (Matthew 5:1-16, Ephesians 5:15-20)?

I close this convocation address on "the university" with a special challenge for you who shape Kosin University's identity at present and, God willing, in the future.
The reason a university should exist is to glean God's wisdom from creation and its history, and to pass on the Lord's wisdom from one generation to another amid the cloud of faithful witnesses who surround us here and now (Hebrews 12:1-3). A university is called by the LORD God of the universe to do redemptive scholarship as a community, to lead God's people and our neighbours in good patterns of thinking, speaking, imagining, living. That means, I take it, not all God's children should become university students, but only those who are willing and able to dedicate themselves to the trials of disciplined study. There are many other ways to join the chorus magnifying the Lord's name among the nations and to offer up sacrifices that stay alive, which please God and are not conformed to the passing fashions of this world (Malachi 1:11, Romans 12:1-3, I John 1:15-17). A university education is not a preferred route of sanctification. But a university is necessary, I dare say, in our era of differentiated specialized studies, to provide an opening for concerted reflection that begets communal wisdom our world desperately needs. To become a privileged member of such a university is an awesome responsibility.
May I encourage you in Korea not to simply take on the American Western model of university scholarship as the norm. Trust your roots in the living biblical Reformation christian tradition and the refining of faith your persecuted Korean ancestors went through, the missionaries who began this institution, to try to find alternative ways of practising biblically christian scholarship that will be historically and internationally aware but may be folk-specific, and so brighten with colour the rainbow diversity God loves in a communion of the scholarly saints.
The tiny Toronto philosophical Institute for Christian Studies is practically an anomaly in North America, an encyclopedic center of a university without the specialists; yet we have been blessed as an institution. Kosin University has a larger presence in the land, and I pray that our Lord keep you humble and imaginative as you explore God's world to disseminate the Lord's wisdom and shalom, so God may surprise you with scholarly fruit one hundredfold (Mark 4:1-20).
All that the Lord expects of us professors, administrative presidents and vice-presidents, students and infrastructural staff, is that we be found, when Jesus Christ returns in glory, to be faithful and wise--worldliwise! (phronimoi)--waiters and waitresses in God's academic household, says Scripture, serving up nutritious scholarly food at the right time (Psalm 1, Matthew 24:36-51)! May the Lord God revealed in Jesus Christ equip you with grace and stamina for this joyful calling (Ephesians 4:7,12-16, Jude 24 25).

I owe my colleague Bob Sweetman deep thanks for checking my wanderings in his field of medieval studies. It is a blessing to have virtuous friends.
I thank my wife Inès Naudin ten Cate for special bibliographic help in preparation of this lecture.
 
 

Endnotes

1 Martianus Capella, Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isodore of Seville are all integral to forming this intellectual tradition too. Cf. A.B. Cobban, The Medieval Universities,
pp. 12-14.
2 Cf. Bilgrami and Ashraf, The Concept of an Islamic University, pp. 22 24.3 This ius ubique docendi (law of empowerment to teach wherever), however, was often torpedoed by local professors jealous to protect their own students' employment
in a given university.
4 Cf. Anton van Hanskamp, "Wilhelm von Humboldt," p. 36.
5 Cf. Eric Vogelin, "The German University," pp. 25-26.
6 Cf. John W. Chapman, The Western University on Trial, p. 5.
7 Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987) and E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (Cultural Literacy: what every American needs to know, 1987) follow this old Humanist
strategy too.
8 Cf. G.C. Berkouwer, Algemene Openbaring [1951], translated General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdamans, 1955).
9 Bilgrami and Ashraf, The Concept of an Islamic University, p. viii. They continue: ". . . if we still follow the same syllabi that we are following now in imitation of the
liberal West, we shall not succeed in making this education truly Islamic" (p. 64).
A secularized Muslim educator takes a different tack: "There is no such thing as an Islamic viewpoint in the study of physics, chemistry, or any of the other sciences.
...there is nothing wrong with the teaching of scientific subjects as such." So F.K. Khan Durrani, A Plan of Muslim Educational Reform, pp. 13,15.
10 Cf. Herman Dooyeweerd, De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1935), 1:471-73, translated by William Young and David Freeman, A New Critique of
Theoretical Thought (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1935), 1:506-508.
11 Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Answering the question: What is Postmodernism" [1982], translated by Regis Durand, as appendix to The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 1988), pp. 81-82.
12 Institutio christianae religionis, IV, 20:4,6.
13 Cf. Oratio de hominis dignitate [1496], translated A. Robert Caponigri, Oration on the dignity of man (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956).
14 Theses ¨uber Feuerbach, no. 11.
15 Cf. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxvi.

16 It seems to me Jacques Ellul falls into this mistake when he dialectically pits word against image in Parole humili´ ee [1981], translated by Joyce Main Hanks,
The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985).
17 Cf. Abraham Kuyper, "Calvinism and Art," in The Stone Lectures on Calvinism [1898] (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1961), p.151.
 
 

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