“Fill the earth and subdue it.” — Genesis 1

Almost everyone must work in our world in order to make a living. This is something God has set up; as the Apostle said, “He who will not work shall not eat.” Thus working and having a job are moral issues; our willingness to work is a part of our character.

But beyond a job there are two other options within a civilized society: career and calling. These are higher moral possibilities for a human being, beyond mere work.

First we should be clear about some basic aspects of career or calling. The goal of a career is not to make a name for oneself or to become well-off financially. Neither is that of a calling. Often times a successful career or calling brings renown and wealth, but this is a lesser thing than the actual career or calling itself, and is relatively incidental. One cannot have an effective career or calling if one's goal is merely to make a name for oneself or to make money; it is a law of the mind and spirit. This is of course more emphatically true of a calling than of a career.

A career is a chosen path of work that requires the development of ones mind over a lengthy period of time. It is an attempt to do something good that requires effort over many years, and the realization of one's intellectual and perhaps physical capacities. Examples of careers are: running one's own business, practicing medicine or law, and training as a professional athlete. The career develops who we are in a way that a mere job cannot.

Accordingly success in a career is a matter of accomplishing the good which one had set out to do, in a manner which is itself good and right. Dishonesty or laziness in one's career brings failure in the sense that it prevents us from the realization of the personal qualities that make a career precious. Another kind of failure is when, because of circumstances or the decisions of others, we are prevented from accomplishing the good which we had intended. This kind of failure is of course not one's own fault.

A calling is something different, something beyond career in the way that career is beyond a job. Calling is a path of self sacrifice merely for the service of others and the full realization of ones moral and intellectual capacities. Some of the main callings are religious ministry, political service, artistic expression, and intellectual discovery, as in a university.

It is not wrong merely to have a job. There is dignity in all work; and there are other important aspects of doing good that are somewhat outside either career or calling: such as raising a family or submitting to the instruction of those who are in authority in some way.

One of the key things about both a career and a calling is that they must be consciously chosen as long term goals, usually when one is rather young, say before the late 30's.

I have written this post mostly for the sake of believers, because the church does not currently give helpful advice on this matter. Often career is taken to mean something that one does for oneself apart from God; whereas calling is simply identified with being a pastor.

Instead, career and calling, because they are long term goals, are an effective way to bring one's soul in contact with God, because to properly execute a successful career often requires God's help, especially in our current world. The same is even truer of a calling: in a calling one is pouring oneself out for others; this is a very basic way of discovering the Life of God.

Often one can only have a career or calling if one has been given certain opportunities. In reality, everyone who wants this should be given the opportunity. In this world that is often not so.

It is with reference to career and calling that one can see more clearly the nature of good and evil. In general, evil things can deflect us from a successful career or paralyze us while executing our calling. Love of pleasure of course withdraws the soul from the goodness of the work to be done; avarice prevents us from honestly and wholeheartedly pursuing it (especially by making us distrust God); desire for fame or respectability traps us in hypocrisy. One can read the works of the great moral philosophers and theologians as means to effect a great career or calling. Perhaps the ancient Stoics were the best at this.

When one understands the nature of career and calling, one can see the place that ambition appropriately holds in human life. We are meant to have our lives count-- as much as we will decide to pursue it. The good of society and the world itself depends upon people pursuing ambitious careers and callings. The destruction of a nation comes in part from a lack of people attempting to take such a high path. The same is true of people pursuing “careers” and “callings” merely for themselves or their desires. Instead, we should plan to realize our capacities in a way that is helpful for others, working it all out with God in the process.

“For this corruptible must put on incorruption; and this mortal must put on immortality.”

“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

–The Apostle Paul

We have discussed on several occasions the continuity between this life an the next. The biblical and philosophical traditions emphasize that we take with us our understanding, character, and relationships into our future in the universe, beyond our own physical death. This fact is essential to convince us of the importance of the kind of person we become in our short life on earth, and the meaningfulness of our earthly experience.

But there is also a profound discontinuity between our experience here and hereafter, and I believe it is this discontinuity that makes it difficult to speak with much assurance of the world to come. This difference could be described as the difference between mortality and immortality or corruption and incorruption. I would like to draw out some of the implications of these distinctions.

On the most fundamental level, mortality refers to the fact that all (a few biblical exceptions notwithstanding) human beings die. Corruptibility refers to physical and biological entropy, that is, the inevitable process by which the life cycle of an organism comes to a close by breaking down. This corruptibility is shared by us with plants, animals, and the physical conditions of the universe. Sequoia trees, some of the longest living organisms on earth, eventually reach the end of their life span and die. Stars decay over billions of years, and planets slowly become uninhabitable. Human beings themselves enjoy a short youth, and soon reach a maturity that comes at the price of the breakdown of the body.

These are not merely physical facts, but in fact have spiritual significance.

Much of conscious human experience is determined by mortality and corruption. Each day comes to a close, followed by night. We grow tired, and must sleep. We grow hungry, and must eat. The earth and its inhabitants experience four seasons every year; with plant and animal death following life, and life following death. Several of the great Psalms focus on this mortality in nature.

Thus the environment in which we live is defined by mortality and corruption; but so are our bodies and even perhaps our souls. Our senses are most powerful as a child and youth; slowly they begin to lose their clarity. Romantic love especially goes through phases: first the infatuation of childhood, then the blossoming of young love, and finally the mature love of older men and women. Families are defined by the various stages of corruption and mortality in human life– grandparents, parents, and children receiving their places in life in a measured, temporary way. Civilizations are born, prosper, and come to an end. The body itself loses its natural powers in the evening of life, finally succumbing to death in one way or another.

There is something deeply meaningful here, and yet also perhaps something morose. It can be comforting and depressing at the same time. The life cycles of the created universe are beautiful; but in the face of human aspirations much experience of those cycles is humanly tragic. A young person may die in a car crash, for example.

What we want to consider is what the promises of immortality and incorruption have to offer us. Imagine a world in which no one ever dies. War, famine, murder, and suicide have no place there. The human body is constantly refreshed and continually in a healthy state. Relationships continue indefinitely, and over time we know more and more other people. A life’s work does not come to an end, but rather develops into something greater time and time again. Government no longer maintains itself by threat of death. These are some of the basic properties of the world to come; and when one thinks about it one can see how vastly different human experience will be.

Perhaps one can see this best by considering art in such a world: high art as well as popular art. Art as we know it on earth is very much wrapped up in the earthly human experience. Romantic love and marriage, family, death, history, war, and the rectification of evil are some of its most important subject matter. But in the age to come we will die no more, marry no more, and human history as we know it will come to an end. What then will be the subject of art? I think that there must be some kind of beauty beyond current human experience, which will be the subject of art for the age to come.

Our interests and the condition of life will one day be totality determined by eternal factors; and as Romans 8 suggests, humanity in its immortality will bring God’s incorruption to bear upon the rest of the cosmos.

Thus it is our destiny to enter into eternity, and to stay there permanently. One could think of this as a person trapped in a small room opening the door to a vast landscape such as the Grand Canyon. In this field of divine and human activity the limitations which we assume in our current state will be removed. As was said in the Middle Ages, “the creation in time is a revelation of the eternal acting of God.” May we all find ourselves well prepared for such a future.

January 8th, 2008 | Nathan | 0 comments | Continued

Although it is helpful to have a comprehensive vision of education, equally important is an understanding of where we actually stand as a society with regard to education. The prominence of our institutions of higher learning may deceive us into thinking that people are being adequately educated every day. Rather, the opposite is true. Seeing what is going on today can be a great assistance to pursuing our own learning.

Our situation is one of distraction, ignorance, and hostility to truth.

The student at a university today is overwhelmed with activities and social engagements that put their academic life into turmoil. One especially sees this in my field, mathematics. It requires self-discipline to learn math, as is true of the rest of the sciences. Most students have neither the time nor the strength to do it well, and so although people they pass through the classes, they gain very little authentic, helpful knowledge. The many student organizations vying for the students’ time, and the culture surrounding partying and romantic involvements render time for homework non-existent, and can even make class attendance difficult.

Now, there are students who are able to spend enough time on their work (athletes and international students in particular often are better at this). These gain something by their time at the university, especially if they are in the scientific or technical fields.

The second fact of our situation is ignorance. In the humanities, one cannot avoid questions about God and the human soul. Nevertheless, a faculty member who has much knowledge of either is one in 10,000 or more. For various reasons, the information about the human self and ultimate reality is no longer under the professors’ command, nor is it something that they even think that they should know.

This leads us to the third property of the university today: hostility to truth. Not only are the faculty mostly ignorant of basic aspects of life, they are indignant that anyone would claim to know about such things. They thus, in general, try to discourage their students from seeking knowledge about the ultimate conditions of human life. Instead, they encourage very specific knowledge of theories, and the writings of the 20^th century “authorities’. Often this takes the form of being interested in very specialized topics rather than about the nature of God or the soul. There is a tacit scorn for those who are genuinely interested in the knowledge of such things.

Now this is certainly not true of all professors in the humanities. But it is true of enough of them that one meets actual resistance in one’s quest to know, rather than finding a faculty being devoted to cultivating such a desire.

Now this is all a matter of our history. What happened in the twentieth century brought education to its knees and changed it from the wonderful thing that it had been to the abysmal thing it now is. There were several events of importance. The first took place in the early twentieth century when science became, for the intellectuals, the only arbiter of truth. There was a struggle for this to happen but it was mostly completed by 1950. Although there were still many learned people in the humanities, they were no longer in control of the destiny of the university. Philosophy, Literature, History and so forth no longer could claim to be avenues of knowledge about the human self and about God.

The second big event was the student revolutions of the 60’s. This was when the students, after the direction of the leaders of pop culture, threw of the old education and demanded something “better.” In the interest of racial and gender equality, and unrestricted student freedom, the students rejected traditional learning. These are, of course, significant things to be sure, but they are not the subject of a worthwhile education.

The faculty, because of their dedication to science, was unable to form a cohesive response to the students and so much of the traditional curriculum was discarded, and, within a generation, the students who were now “smarter” were the ones who had control of the academic disciplines. One cannot underestimate the amount of knowledge that was lost during this period—knowledge that had been faithfully passed down for centuries.

Today we find ourselves in a place where if someone wants to understand ultimate reality, in general the last place he or she should look is the university. There are shining exceptions to be sure—mostly in the form of a few individual faculty members here and there, who received their education before the mid 60’s. After rejecting its charter to educate, the university now functions as a place to help students get a good job, and to make them tolerant of others. This is important of course, but it does not have very much to do with being an educated person.

One more thing to discuss is the universities and colleges created in response to this crisis. Here I mean some of the upstart colleges created with the help of groups such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the various Christian and Catholic colleges, such as Seattle University, Biola, Westmont and Wheaton. Personally, I think that these are the best places to go to college right now. However, none of them (at least that I am aware) has set out to make its goal imparting knowledge of actual ultimate reality. The students read the Classics perhaps; and there is some exposure to beauty, and the truth of the sciences. The student culture is also vastly superior at these institutions, and the general character of the faculty may be better as well. The deficiency of knowledge, however, about the things most important in human life, is still present, just like at the secular institutions. The faculty has not been properly educated—so how can they educate others?

Therefore, it is not merely a matter of adequate education being too high an ideal to be realistically attained. There have been many times and places in which it has been done well. However, our time in America is not one of them. Because the human need for knowledge is so great, all of us, and especially those who aspire to be leaders, must do what we can to further our own learning, and this will usually mean doing things apart from university curriculum.

In our lives we are constantly faced with choices. These choices may be rather trivial: where to eat lunch, for example. Or they may be serious: how to raise a child. They may regard things in the short term: which gym should I join? Or long term: how should I plan for retirement?

In many ways, our lives are a series of choices. This is part of what it means to be a human being equipped with a free will. As we all know, many of these choices will shape the kind of person that we become; and for most of our choices, our lives and the lives of those around us will be significantly affected by what we choose to say or do.

We have already discussed how it is that we need to make good choices in the most important areas of our lives. But we must further look at the nature of choice to see how it relates to education.

For human beings, freedom of will is both a great opportunity and a terrible burden. We are responsible for vast things, even our whole lives. And those in leadership have an even heavier burden. They must direct the choices of others—and be responsible for the outcome.

Part of the problem of choice that we find in our daily lives is that there are many people and things that actively attempt to influence or even determine our choices. These may be people in authority, like a boss or a president, or they may be people devoted to getting us to give them something, as is the case with advertising and political/ religious propaganda. In addition to this there are our beliefs, our close relationships, our feelings and desires and even parts of our deepest soul that try to bring power to bear upon our decisions.

Though many of these choices are made rather spontaneously, we are fundamentally responsible for what we do or don’t do. And we will be held responsible: we will become a certain kind of person through our choices and have to live with the consequences of being that kind of person—in joy or in misery.

The only adequate answer to the human quandary is knowledge. I don’t especially enjoy pointing this out, because most of us do not have the knowledge that we need. We need to know how things are, what will happen in the future, and what the consequences of particular choices will be. If we do not know, we will only be able to act based upon authority, opinion, feeling, or worse. And of course each of these might be helpful: we may know good authorities, have solid opinions, and possess healthy feelings. But in fact, in order for this to work effectively, our authority must really know what he or she is talking about; our opinions must be based upon fact; and our feelings must be in harmony with reality.

For many of us, left without knowledge of the most basic aspects of life, we will find ourselves drifting through the days and years of our lives until we begin to reap the consequences of our choices. Without knowledge to stabilize us in our flight of human life, we will be destined to a turbulent existence—perhaps forever. When it all comes down on our heads we will feel like a victim—though in reality we are experiencing self-imposed results.

And so each of us—no matter what place in society—need to have knowledge. And that means knowledge about everything that happens in human life; as well as knowledge about ultimate reality.

This is what education is for. We need to know. And not just about trivial things. We need to know the meaning of human life, our own capacities, human capacities in general, God, human nature, history and our place in it. We need to know what is good, what is evil, what is beautiful, what is ugly, and what it means for something to be true or false.

Thus education is not a trivial matter— indeed it is one of the most important parts of human life. If education is generally understood in the sense of receiving knowledge—there is nothing more important in our lives.

To know something is to have a solid, sound, representation of it in our mind which corresponds to the reality. We all know many things, especially in the modern world. For example, we know that the world is round, who our parents or close family members are, who is president, and many things having to do with our jobs. One cannot be a competent human being today without it.

But there are many things we do not know and even do not know we do not know. The average person without an adequate education can be characterized as having all the ideas of his or her surrounding culture and unable to form a thought without them– and perhaps unable to distinguish his or her ideas from reality. This is the state most people live in today, even those (especially those?) who have studied in a college or university.

For all these reasons we each have much invested in how education and learning are done in our society.

This is not to say that everyone needs to have an extended period of higher education. If one can stand it, one should take it; but if not one must rely on those who do know the way the world works.

The natural questions that follow are: What is an adequate education? And is what we receive today adequate?

“The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.”

“Man is by nature a political animal” –Aristotle, Politics

When we look at the art of the Early Church, one of the most striking things is its depiction of Heaven. Though there are not so many pictures of the physical layout, there are many that emphasize the spiritual terrain. This landscape is the community of the Blessed. The gold background that is so typical of the art up to the middle ages is a way of expressing the Presence of God tangibly filling the air around those who live beyond death, in the next world. Often in a prominent place in this splendid background is an image of Christ which imparts a sense of his current glory, and his leadership over the future world. There are, however, usually many pictures of angels, saints, prophets, and dead or resurrected Christians.

This is meant to be a picture of our future in the universe.

The present kingdom of heaven is life under the authority of God and His workers in the universe. To those with living confidence in God, training is being given in the Way of His Son, to prepare us for our work in the ages to come. This happens right in the midst of our daily lives on earth. As has been said earlier, we thus each have a glorious future of work and creativity in the universe.

But we also have a wonderful destiny together. This reality was called by Augustine “The City of God;” Aquinas referred to it as the perfection of the universe. There is something very deep here and it is related to the fundamental nature of God, angels, and human beings.

The social aspect of the person is the key here. It seems that persons are the kind of beings that find their fulfillment in giving and receiving love and joy for someone beyond than themselves. This is part of the image of God in man and angels. God is a community of mutual love among three glorious persons; to be in the image of His Son means to participate in the same kind of community; indeed, in the community of the Trinity itself. Our happiness lies in knowing and being known by the City of Persons that is in fact ultimate to everything.

This is the main reason that God did not place every man and woman on a separate planet in order to train for his or her destiny in the universe. Rather, he placed us all together, so that we could learn to love each other, and to love Him through loving others. It also seems to be the reason that we do not see the angels around us. We need to find our bearings in Love for each other before we can face the persons of perfect love. The glorious community of persons who are each distinct and yet hold so much in common is the secret reality in which we live.

In a small corner of this beautiful city lies the earth, a place of strife and pervaded with evil, at least on the visible side of things. This is because the nations currently living on the earth are in ignorance of or even rebellion against the City of Peace. For reasons that are difficult to enumerate, at many times and places in human history– including contemporary America– the existence and nature of this personal community has been unknown or concealed.

But the reality is still there; and the ultimate perfection of the universe is a vast community of personal beings who love each other. This love is no trivial matter; it is the love that is described in the New Testament. While we will still have opportunities to grow in love in the next life, this is the direction we should be heading even now so that we can take the benefits of who we are and what we have learned to our life in eternity.

For those who attain to the heavenly kingdom or Eternal City of God, their lives will be integrated forever into a beautiful matrix of persons that is fully self-sufficient because of the God who is its chief inhabitant. “Then shall I know fully; even as I am fully known.”