The Sermon on the Mount and University Reform

Interchange 49 1991 pp. 23-24

Originally Published The Naked Wasp 12:5 1989

This series was originally written just before the great mergers took place. Nevertheless, the great experiment of John Dawkins continues to this day. The same critique applies today.

BCW Wednesday, July 23, 2003

At the risk of being thought of as a kind of Chaplain in Herod's Palace, I would put the question: Can a reconsideration of Jesus' teaching give us any perspective on our current crisis in "higher learning"? Followers of Christ have always asserted that Jesus' words are not just vague generalizations. They are, if they are anything, decisive and provocative. The Gospel writers always drew Jesus' hearers as those who heard and were decisively changed - one way or the other.

Beware of gurus who come along dressed up like any old sheep of the flock but in fact are famished dingoes! You'll be able to pick them out by their products. Can grapes be harvested from blackberry bushes or do figs come from acres of thistles? And so healthy trees give good produce, infested trees give rotten produce. A good tree cannot give rotten products any more than an infested tree can bear good products. Every tree withholding good fruit is chopped down and consigned to the flames. Therefore get to know them by what they produce.

What is being taught here is not some "quick fix" formula to help us decide which applicant should get the job as our resident guru. This teaching is not addressed solely to members of interviewing panels. Bureaucrats can be involved in false and famished dingo-tactics just as much as teachers who, after getting the job, carry their students off as ideological prey. Pseudo-prophets may abound in academia but they are also to be found in planning departments, student unions, accountancy forecasting, among top-of-the-pile bureaucrats as well as those working in the editorial office. In other words, anyone who is in a position to give advice, point in a direction, make policy, push a barrow, teach a theory or informally influence their fellows, is a potential false prophet.

The question immediately arises: Is John Dawkins a famished dingo-guru? Are the Senior University and College executive, apparatchiks of Staff and Student Unions, the ones we should carefully scrutinize to see if they are leading us all astray? Perhaps.

The case of John Dawkins is interesting. There have been many counter-prophetic denunciations of his White Paper. Yet those of us who claim that he is a false prophet also have to be subjected to critical judgment as to our doctrines. We are known by our own produce. It's our produce that will enable critics to decide whether we are, in fact, true or false prophets.

The key is not to be found in the above passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15-20), I have translated into contemporary Australian political idiom. Neither can the key be found in that part of Jesus' sermon that immediately precedes it. John Dawkins indeed claims to be doing the hard thing and entering by the narrow way, even if his detractors may eagerly suggest he is taking the wide road that leads to destruction.

The key for us, I believe, is to be found in Jesus' still earlier comment:

No-one is capable of serving two masters; for whichever way you turn you will either hate the one and be unreserved in your love for the other, or, you will be unstintingly loyal to the one and utterly contemptuous of the other.

So it is a matter of where one's loyalties lie. If you are loyal to the bureaucratic careerists who accept Dawkins' plan you will be contemptuous of those rivals who reject Dawkins' plan as so much heresy. You cannot serve our foreign debt and the autonomy of university education. Or so it would appear.

"Great!" you might say. At last the Sermon on the Mount comes alive with relevance to our situation. I had always hoped that God was on our side! And this shows it as clearly as it has ever been!

BUT THAT IS NOT IT! Jesus immediately after this defines the dialectics that result from following rival masters with a statement that brings us to the principle. Wait for it.

You cannot be enrolled in the service of God and your invested securities at the same time. You cannot serve God and mammon.

In Jesus' terms Mammon could be national profit to offset overseas debt, but it could also be ivory tower autonomy to preserve some kind of professionalistic security. In the next article I wish to develop the implications of Jesus' teaching here to help us decide whether John Dawkins is in fact clothing himself in sheep's garb.

God, Mammon and University Reform

Interchange 49 1991 pp. 25-26

Is John Dawkins a dingo in sheep's clothing? That was the question with which I concluded last week's study. It might be pertinent to remind readers at this point of the purpose of this column. It has an unashamed religious purpose, namely to raise questions about the interpretation and application of biblical teaching in our current situation. All the answers cannot be given; and unlike much fundamentalist obscurantism about 'biblical' this or that, my aim is to encourage readers to read and act upon the teaching of Holy Writ for themselves.

So back to the topic: "You cannot serve God and your invested securities" announces Jesus. Now is John Dawkins' policy one that promotes the service of God? John Dawkins may assert that the universities will have to become known for what they produce in economic terms - here he has appeared to take Jesus' teaching, "You will be known by your fruit" to heart. But has he? Jesus' words were an aid to his followers; he was encouraging them to develop their discernment about how they could be conned. He was not trying to give them formulae about how they should manipulate a national account, or deviously avoid criticism from those who disagreed with them.

Is Dawkins' policy one in which tertiary education will serve God? Is it not an attempt to turn tertiary education into an invested national security? Whatever the costs? And did not Jesus say, "You cannot serve God and your invested securities"? If we agree that Dawkins' policy is for the mammonizing of tertiary education, then we present ourselves with a task, a very large task indeed. After all, we will be known by what we produce! The task is to find out just what serving God means in action, not only in the academy but also there.

This means recapturing our scientific task as a vocation before God, or as they used to say before Latin went out: Coram Deo. If we agree that Dawkins' policy is about mammonizing the university student, then we present ourselves with a dissenting task which will involve political research and much else - we will have to formulate a public philosophy that can truly embody Jesus' teaching that rulers are servants of God who perform their service Coram Deo. What could this passage mean for our multi-layered, ethnically-rich federated system of Australian government in the last decade of the second millennium?

You know how it is in Gentile politics, Jesus said to His disciples, how the rulers of the peoples have one overarching aim that is to lord it over them, having eminent men exercising their authority. That's not the way it's going to be among you; for whoever would be eminent among you will have to be your employed servant; whoever would have the priority must be your slave. (Matthew 20:25-27).

There is much more that needs to be said here, especially since the millennia of Christian traditions have seemingly only ever feebly followed the Son of God who came amongst us as One who served and gave His life. But for the moment let us simply ponder the following questions:

Do the unions, whether for academics or students, call forth and promote any effective alternative to the service of mammon in all the various spheres of university life? We have widespread lamentation about young people on drugs and homeless; but would they be so if the universities were not places where the opium of utility and the homelessness of materialism could be so freely peddled?

Are the courses developed and shaped out of a desire to encourage students to serve God and neighbour rather than themselves? Does teaching point students in all areas to their God-given callings?

Although these questions seem almost quaint, and at best from another era, they cannot be avoided. Jesus was no idealist. The perspective He promoted was very simple: you cannot serve God and mammon; you cannot base your life on God's way and still be in the service of your invested securities; orienting your life via the numbers you can marshal in support, or the consensus you can generate or your bits of credential paper, or your job at the end of the course, or your superannuation pay-out, or your curriculum vitae, or your circulation, is pure and simply mammon.

Neither can national policy serve God truly by looking for justice and fair-dealing while it places faith in a mammonized academy.

Christianity Versus The Opium of Utilitarianism

Interchange 49 1991 pp. 27-28

A consideration of Jesus' teaching will lead us to ask all manner of important and interesting questions about the every-day details of our universities and colleges. But there is still the decisive matter of religious direction. Given the problems that confront our globe, one might think that the universities would be places where young students could come to clarity about the ideas that have led our planet into such a mess. But no! The universities are the peddlers of one and only one perspective - it is liberal, socialistic and materialistic all at the same time. Dawkins' policy is based upon this philosophy; and, whatever else it is, it is a concerted effort by members of this sect to ensure that students do not stop to ask whether the liberal, socialist and materialist assumptions of utilitarianism are in any way responsible for the problems that are unleashing themselves upon us.

The decision as to whether Dawkins, and those led by him, are engaged in an almighty pseudo-prophetic ministry can be decided. This is not to say that his "inner voice", by which he attends to "market forces out there", is the only false religion of which we must beware. By no means. But it is a very powerful influence all the same!

Dawkins' policy reform is to be judged by what it produces! He has admitted as much himself. He is confident of a positive outcome. But he, and his followers, will receive a name from what they harvest. And the rest of us, members of the national community, will be caught up in the process. Dawkins' Combine Harvester is for gathering produce from the universities and colleges; according to their doctrine true financial responsibility is best modelled on big corporate conglomerates. All the produce is not in yet, but we can ask while we are waiting:

Will the nectar of humanities insight be drawn from the cement mixers of technology- intensive training? Will insights from the history of technology and the philosophy of science, be gleaned by historically-aware students once they have sprinted through new short courses made for anxious end-users of the latest software packages? Will accountancy students gain a drop of insight into the non-priced worth of their courses if such courses are only ever formed and run in response to some abstract "demand"?

The questions can go on and on!

My conclusion for this three-part series is this: Dawkins' policy brings to its culmination an intellectual process by which enlightened idealists and left-wing ideologues sought to reform our society. Their experiments have failed for the same reasons that the Menzies and Fraser experiments failed. Rebels in the '60s left suburban materialism to the tune of "doing your own thing". Whitlam's reforms started with the university idealism and the hippy romanticism; it now ends with university consumerism and yuppy emptiness. In the mean-time our society blunders on, blindly believing that maybe a new "fix it" policy will get our drugs washed down the gutter and our homeless dregs welcomed back. But the mess deepens. Because we serve our invested securities we fail to face the fact that stares straight at us: our policies for economic reform are an integral part of the monetarist mess. These policies, at every level private and public, have been put in train by men and women hopelessly deaf to the still decisive words of the still-rejected Messiah:

You cannot serve God and your invested securities! You weren't made to live like that and you're not capable of doing so.

Admittedly if one takes the step to accept this perspective then we give ourselves a task and a half. How now do we view money in the light of the God whom we serve? Following Jesus' words leads to no quick-fix theoretical-opiate; on the contrary intriguing and fascinating questions of all-of-life breadth and depth open up to us. Such questions, like the one about the place of money in society - cannot be truly dealt with if one is enslaved to the tyrannical rule of invested securities; least of all within a university that is dominated by the same dogmas.

And just as Jesus has said to His disciples that the persons who lose their life will find it, so also those students who are freed from slavery to money are the ones who begin to discover the true meaning of financial management. To those teetering on the brink, uncertain about whether to commit themselves or not, Jesus speaks directly, especially to them:

Healthy trees give good produce;

Infested trees produce rotten fruit.

July 2003 © Christian Radical Reflections, is written by Bruce C Wearne (PhD), 29 Lawrence Rd., Point Lonsdale Vic 3225 AUSTRALIA, 61-3-5258-3913. Each edition may be photocopied or retransmitted in its entirety but not otherwise reprinted or transmitted without permission. This personal project aims to encourage positive Christian citizenship, the development of policies and political attitudes that better express our love for God and our neighbour. Your comments are welcome. Email can be sent to bcwearne@ozemail.com.au . http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bcwearne/index.html