When William Monsma, the MacLaurin Institute’s founder, invited me aboard the Good Ship MacLaurin in 1993, I understood that “ideas have consequences” (see Richard Weaver’s classic 1948 book by the same name). It was clear that one could loosely correlate a given society’s predominant worldview with certain cultural, political, and economic outcomes. Islamic-dominant societies, with God as the sole and unrivaled Supreme Authority, usually tend toward dictatorial control and less political liberty, for example.

However, as these 15 years of academic ministry come to an end, I’ve learned that methods also have consequences. By this I mean that our media actually do convey a message, as Marshall McLuhan reminded us back in the 60s when I was a teenager. The fact that methods bear implicit messages and that they are consequential is a far cry from what I had long believed, which was that our methods are morally-neutral vehicles for conveying morally-loaded ideas.

This fact has several important implications. The first is that a professor’s way of life matters nearly as much as what she teaches in the classroom. I discovered, for example, in my dissertation research, that religiously-minded international students learned from their professors — and no doubt from the general campus climate — that religion is off-limits in the lab and in the classroom. Most were never told this is the case; they simply learned from watching their advisors and teachers that religion is verboten.

So, you can see that I’m a bit at odds with Stanley Fish in his book Save the World on Your Own Time (2008). He tells professors that their job is to convey knowledge, not change lives or the world. I want to agree with him on one level, and yet the evidence is abundantly clear that a professor’s way of life, and even what subjects he will broach in conversation, carries a moral message (a claim that Dallas Willard has made during his several visits here, in 2004 and 2008). Through mere observation, the student may learn from her professors that there are absolutely no answers to life’s deepest problems; there is only academic knowledge, which is removed from social and personal solutions. This may propel the student down the lonely, desolating road toward nihilism. Along the way, the student may then pick up Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic texts, read them, and develop an intellectual commitment to nihilism.

I am suggesting that many students learn from peers or professors a way of life, and then often find the texts to provide intellectual reinforcement for that way of life. If this is true, it also means that the task of Christian conversion is not necessarily first of all an intellectual task (persuading a person that Christianity is true), though that is a very important task in the long run. Our first task is to embody a way of life that others will want to share. Our method of living is our message.

Another implication of the fact that our methods are not morally neutral is that the methods themselves may diminish the intended message. I have often wondered how certain rock performers (U2’s Bono is a wonderful exception) can generate a sense of urgency at an “Aid” concert (whether for the poor, desperate farmers or HIV/AIDS) while playing music that has concert-goers frolicking in mosh-pits. I am equally unclear how much of what loosely passes for evangelical worship today (at least in many American churches) can generate awe for the Triune Godhead.

Of course, if some methods can diminish intended messages, others may enhance and reinforce those messages. The typical university classroom, for example, reinforces the message that learning is a sober affair, although the fact that it occurs within four walls may diminish the message that this education is meant to be applied in the real world.

That pre-eminent educator, Jesus, beautifully converged method and message. Only someone with no place to lay his head could begin his preaching ministry by claiming to help the poor. Only one who was willing to clean the feet of his followers could have taught them to aspire to servant leadership, not the nasty dictatorial leadership of Gentile rulers. I suspect that his followers caught the message that his teaching was to be practiced, not just pondered as good academic theology, precisely because he taught them in the marketplace, on hillsides, amidst human need, around the dinner tables of sinners, and often while weary and exhausted. His death on a Cross, apart from the clear teaching that it was a substitutionary sacrifice for sin, also conveyed the notion that courageous self sacrifice is often necessary in order to promote greater healing and renewal.

As Christian thinkers, we and our friends work to renew our great universities (like ours here in Minnesota). One of our many tasks is to insist with fearless gentleness that not just academic ideas, but academic methods — including the actual way of life of professors — also have morally significant consequences. We must remind faculty and administrators that if we want students to become morally-engaged citizens, then we will we have to seriously explore the moral vacuum that our campuses have become, both because of what is often taught, but also how we live and teach.

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