Members of the Board, President Snyder, faculty, and especially students of the class of 2002. It is a great honor for me to be with you on this happy occasion. I want to reflect with you about a few important matters. They all have to do with education and more particularly what we ought to learn and what we should do with what we learn.
To begin with, significant education has to do with more than information. That can be downloaded from the web by the bushel basket. Similarly, it has to do with more than acquiring knowledge. That can be found in abundance in encyclopedias. At its deepest level, education has to do with wisdom and witness.
For an institution like Bluffton College, wisdom is rooted in the professing and living of the Christian faith. This is a very high ideal, one that is not easily achieved. In fact, one university recently found that it was actually dangerous to give the impression that it was committed to the search for wisdom. I am referring to a rather amusing legal case, Columbia University vs. Jacobsen. Jacobsen, a student at Columbia, did not pay his tuition and the university sued. He argued that the university had not provided him with “wisdom.” The university's lawyer argued in the New Jersey courts that wisdom was “an elusive quality and that no one had ever promised to deliver the product.” Jacobsen responded by citing the many inscriptions on the facades of the university's buildings that mentioned “Sophia” and “Sapientia.” Why, he asked, “if wisdom was not in the curriculum, was it advertised on every wall?” Unfortunately, Jacobsen lost the case (G. D. O'Brien, Essential Half Truths, pp. 72-73).
What did Bluffton College promise you four or so years ago when you decided to come here for your education? I would like to describe what I think you were promised. And I am basing this description on a recent view book produced by your college and sent to me by your president. At an earlier time in my life, I supervised a part of our university staff that had the responsibility to recruit students. They also produced view books—pamphlets and brochures that said something about our philosophy of education and offerings, filled with lots of bright and lively pictures. Your view book is also filled with the usual pictures of smiling students and friendly faculty, but also features some rather striking statements about this institution's philosophy of education. I am nonetheless very impressed with what you have been promised.
For example, the largest bold black letters spread over the first two pages state that “the truth makes free,” obviously drawing upon the gospel of John, chapter 8 verse 32. Succeeding pages feature, again in bold black letters, the following words: character, respect, compassion, wisdom, motivation, cooperation, investment and direction. How are these words understood? Let me recall for you a few of the ways the text explains them. Under “character” you, the students, are described not as “characters” (though some of you surely are), but as people who wish to serve their communities; the text says further that some of you have been attracted to this college because of its Mennonite peace values. “Respect” includes not only reverence for each other, but also the honor system, both of which at Bluffton, because of the way the school is, “just happen naturally”— wow! Really? To describe “compassion” the view book states that faculty design and teach courses in a distinctive way, for example, a course in medieval literature that critiques a “war-obsessed feudal culture,” and one criminal justice course that works with a victim-offender reconciliation program. And a final example that struck me is the senior capstone course entitled “Christian Values in a Global Community.”
If you graduating students are somewhat like the students who graduate from my Catholic university, some of you over the past several years have drunk more deeply of the distinctive Christian and Mennonite stream than others. But I assume that all of you realize the distinctive character of the education you have received. Of course, only you can say whether the College has lived up to its promises, and whether you've taken advantage of what was here to be learned. But from the point of view of an outsider, and, historically, an enemy, here's what I have learned from your tradition and here is what it has to offer higher education in the world.
As I look back over the past forty years or so, I can see that my education first began to be influenced by the historic peace churches when in the late sixties I found in conscience that I had to oppose the Vietnam War. At that time, my own Catholic community, not a peace Church, supported the just war theory, as well as the possibility of conscientious objection. I continued to read the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, and Mahatma Gandhi. It was only with the publication of the American bishops' pastoral on war and peacemaking nearly twenty years ago that I began to give serious thought to pacifism as a stance rooted in the Christian Gospel. Around that time (this was during the Reagan years and before the Soviet Union collapsed), I published an article in which I stated that the pacifist tradition “is growing in strength and cannot be dismissed simply as the product of cowardice or of communist influence in liberal democratic societies.” That admission should come as a relief to you! The American bishops themselves wrote that
In the 20th century, prescinding from the non-Christian witness of a Mahatma Gandhi and its worldwide impact, the non-violent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King has had a profound impact upon the life of the Church in the United States.
Several other official statements in my own Church have been important was well. I offer three examples. Three years before the pastoral letter I just now quoted, the American bishops condemned capital punishment. Second, more recently, Pope John Paul II has all but forbidden any use of capital punishment. And finally, while the US bishops have not condemned the war we are now waging in Afghanistan, they stress more and more the necessity of finding long term solutions that have to do with our foreign policy and issues of social and economic development.
All of these developments have affected me and brought me to a position where I find the central values of the historic peace Churches more and more persuasive. Whatever a person's stance on the morality of wars, the sheer number of people who have over the last century had their lives taken in war, a number estimated at nearly 175 million (to which if we add the number of abortions in the US alone since 1973 we have over 200 million persons killed)—the sheer number of lives needlessly lost forces at least those of us who are at all thinking that there must be a better way to resolve human differences than war. And yet war continues.
The greatest tragedy we face is not even the horrendous destructive violence of war. It is that so many people live in ways that make war almost inevitable. In terms perhaps a little too dark, a literary critic put it this way:
War is not the supreme tragedy of man and nations. The supreme tragedy of men and nations is that the moment war ceases they give themselves over to the pursuit of pleasure and power: either to idleness, amusement, diversion, dissipation, or sport; or to money, business, intrigues, politics, domination in some one of its diverse aspects—either, that is, to “peace” in that soft sense which indirectly makes more war inevitable, or to the hard selfishness that is nothing but war in its slumbering form (from H. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare).
Indeed, these selfish pursuits create the conditions in which wars continue. And the conditions require the long term approaches of peacemaking and justice. Like all quick-fixes, especially violent ones, war is not the solution. As one of your own professors, J. Denny Weaver, put it after the 9/11 attack, “It is unfair to assume that pacifists, who did not create the situation in the first place…can now be parachuted into the middle of [the crisis] with a ready-made solution” (Trollinger, “Non-Violent Voices”, CC, 12/12/01, p. 21).
Given the tragic and repetitive cycle of violence, a commitment to non-violence and peacemaking is needed more than ever. Such a commitment is rooted deeply, as most of you know better than I, in the historical origins of the Mennonite Church. Deeply engrained in its experiences of suffering and martyrdom in the sixteenth century, the Mennonites continued to commit themselves to a “believer's baptism,” to adults who freely chose to be baptized, knowing full well that it could lead to their death, as it actually did for literally hundreds of them. They opposed Roman Catholicism, which looked like sacramental superstition, and rejected the Protestants whose promises of salvation appeared to offer easy grace (“salvation by faith alone”), and chose instead a public witness to the following of Christ. The powerful witness of Mennonite martyrs was captured in the many hymns that members of that Church have sung for centuries (see Brad Gregory's Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe [Harvard University Press, 1999] p. 211).
But things have changed. A Mennonite College is about to confer on a Roman Catholic priest an honorary doctorate—something I suspect that Menno Simons could never have imagined. It is true, the Catholic Church has not become one of the historic peace Churches, but it has, as I have already indicated, come to see ever more clearly the futility of war, and the importance of non-violent approaches to resolve conflict. It is also true that the Mennonites have not embraced the just war theory, but have come to see more clearly the importance of joining with other Christians and people of other religions in the search for lasting peace. For both the Catholics and the Mennonites, Christianity is no longer an established religion. Christendom is over. Christian witness and courage have never been more important.
Besides experiencing together the end of Christendom, both Catholics and Mennonites have invested their energies in creating distinctive forms of education. Your view book proclaims that the truth will make us free. That truth is ultimately the person of Jesus Christ. That truth is not an abstract truth that any neutral observer can understand and cherish. For as a late 60's poster once put it, “To understand is to stand under which is to look up which is a good way to understand.” The truth of Jesus is liberating only for those who embrace his way of living, ways that are manifested in people of character, people with the virtues of respect, compassion, cooperation and wisdom. This Truth can and should change the world.
It is obvious that the faculty and administration of this College do seek to offer an education that transforms its graduates so that you might change the world. Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist once told his students: “Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that” (NCReporter, April 26, 2002, p. 29). As you are about to graduate, it should be obvious that Bluffton College has been trying to teach you in a way that will help you to build a world of respect and compassion and cooperation. The purpose of a Bluffton College education is to impart a wisdom that must be embodied in witness. It should be a great honor for you to graduate from such an institution. It is surely a great privilege for me to receive an honorary degree from it
{Father James Heft, SM, is A University of Dayton Professor of Faith and Culture and The Chancellor. He received an Honorary Degree from Bluffton College}
