features - dordt college to the 2008 financial crisis. reviewed by jack r. van der slik. pro rege...

FeaturesWhy We Need Institutions in Order to Be Faithful, and What Institutions Need So That They Can Be FaithfulStanley Carlson-Thies

Should a School be a Business? (or) What is Education?Roger Henderson

The Customer is Always Right, Right? Freshman Commissioning ServiceErik Hoekstra

Women and Sportscasting: A Different Kind of BallgameBruce Kuiper

Operative Metaphor and Antinomy: A Framework for Understanding the Two-Kingdoms/Neo-Kuyperian DebateDonald Roth

Looking for Good Work: Western Christian High Commencement, May 19, 2015Nicholas Wolterstorff

Book ReviewsRoth, Michael S.. Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters.Reviewed by Walker Cosgrove.

Wallach, Philip A. To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Reviewed by Jack R. Van Der Slik.

Pro RegeVolume XLIV, Number 1September 2015

A quarterly faculty publication ofDordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa

Pro Rege is a quarterly publication of the faculty of Dordt College. As its name indicates (a Latin phrase meaning “for the King”), the purpose of this journal is to proclaim Christ’s kingship over the sphere of education and scholarship. By exploring topics relevant to Reformed Christian education, it seeks to inform the Christian community regarding Dordt’s continuing response to its educational task.

Editorial Board Mary Dengler, Editor Josh Matthews, Review Editor Sally Jongsma, Proofs Editor Carla Goslinga, Layout

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The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent an official position of Dordt College.

ISSN 0276-4830Copyright, September, 2015Pro Rege, Dordt College

Pro Rege

Pro Rege—September 2015 1

Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies is Senior Director of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance at the Center for Public Justice, Washington DC.

Why We Need Institutions in Order to Be Faithful, and What Institutions Need So That They Can Be Faithful

by Stanley Carlson-Thies

Let’s begin by considering several brand logos that are familiar to many in the church commu-nity: Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, and World Vision. These logos represent just a few of the many distinctive community-serving organizations that we all depend on—and it isn’t just you and me, or people of faith in general, who count on these and many other faith-based and conviction-driven organizations. Let me mention just three amazing examples of faith-based service:

Unexpected Beauty: Village of Hope is the residential program for homeless people and families operated by the Orange County Rescue Mission just south of Los Angeles. The Village and Mission serve thousands of families and individuals who need spiritual guidance, meals, a safe place to sleep, medical care, addic-tion services. These people are homeless but not worthless, of course, and to honor them as peo-ple made in the image of God, as we all are, the chapel at the Village of Hope features specially commissioned stained glass windows—because beauty should be a part of everyone’s surround-ings.

The “halo effect”: Do the services provided by such parachurch ministries and by congre-gations really make a difference in their com-munities? University of Pennsylvania professor Ram Cnaan, a self-professed agnostic Jew, has documented the social value. One of his ex-amples is First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Professor Cnaan and his research team estimate that it puts positive value into its neighborhood of more than $6 million annually—through its school and by preventing suicides, helping people find jobs, preventing family breakups, helping ex-prisoners become productive mem-bers of the community, and more. Isn’t that an amazing impact?

Editor’s Note: The following paper was transcribed from a presentation, including slides, by Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies for the Dordt College First Monday Series, April 7, 2014.

2 Pro Rege—September 2015

From waiting to homes: The Wait No More initiatives of Focus on the Family encourage and equip churches to adopt children out of fos-ter care. Kids often end up stuck in foster care, shuttled from home to home and sometimes aging out of the system without ever reuniting with their original family or being adopted by a new family. Many of these foster kids are hard to place. But when Focus on the Family began to connect the foster care system in Colorado with Colorado churches, a real miracle hap-pened. In less than two years, this initiative cut the number of kids in foster care in Colorado in half—a startling success that amazed govern-ment officials.

These and many other faith-based organizations are expressions of biblical faith and the love of Jesus: I call them the hands and feet of the church, providing a range of loving services far beyond the capabilities of you or me individually and far beyond the capacity of most local congregations, which have their own vital roles to play in worship and discipleship.

So here we have hundreds of thousands of faith-inspired organizations, both nonprofits and businesses, whose work is vital in our communi-ties, vital for the wellbeing of countless millions of individuals and families. And yet, because these are organizations shaped by faith, their freedom to be themselves and sometimes their very existence is at growing risk today. What they do differently—of-ten in direct obedience to Jesus—is increasingly labeled by many in our society to be just bigotry, sectarianism, hatred.

Because some of their practices are out-of-step with our increasingly secularized, even anti-Chris-tian society, many powerful groups and political leaders not only condemn their distinctive ways but seek to use the law to force them to conform or to force them out of operation. So that’s the focus of my comments this morning: why, if we are to be faithful, we need organizations, Jesus-inspired organizations; and then what these organizations need, the freedom they need to be distinctive, if they are to flourish in our era. Thank you for be-ing here this morning. My thanks to Dordt College and to the First Monday team for inviting me to

talk with you. Most of all, thank you for your own lives of faith.

As I talk with you about this vital topic of orga-nizations and organizational faithfulness and free-dom, I will be drawing on some of the key ideas of Abraham Kuyper. Although Kuyper’s era was a century and more ago and his main area of action was the Netherlands, in very important ways he is a co-founder of Dordt College, and, if you know his life and thought and work at all, you will know immediately that some of his key ideas are central to my topic today: organizations, organizational faithfulness, and the appropriate freedom of orga-nizations in the context of government rules.

Let me start with this Kuyper quote: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our hu-man existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”1 That ringing decla-ration comes from Kuyper’s great speech on Sphere Sovereignty—that vitally important principle of how government, church, and other organizations should be related to each other, to persons, and to God. We’ll come back to the principle of sphere sov-ereignty. I note here that Kuyper gave this speech to inaugurate one of the many important organiza-tions that he helped to create, the Free University of Amsterdam, a Reformed, or Calvinist, university, a university that through much of its history has of-fered a distinctively Christian alternative to the sec-ular universities operated by the Dutch government. As Kuyper reminds us, there is not one square inch of life outside of Jesus’ care and command: not your personal life, not your church worship, not your la-bors in the Dordt College library, not your work as an employee or a leader in a business.

And yet, while Jesus claims Kingship over ev-ery square inch of life, Kuyper also reminds us that Jesus does not call us to theocracy, to use the gov-ernment to force our fellow citizens to bow their heads and knees to King Jesus. Rather, we seek to win others to Jesus’ cause and his ways through prayer, persuasion, argument, and example. So we confess that Jesus is Lord of all, and we seek to be obedient to him in all we do. And we pray that through our words and our visible witness of actions, those around us will come to see that Jesus’ way brings peace and justice and joy. And one of the most important ways that we witness to


the watching world is through Christian organiza-tions: those that evangelize and those that serve in Jesus’ name.

But, of course, for these organizations to be faithful witnesses—to shine the light and love of Jesus in what they say and do—they need freedom, religious freedom, the freedom to be faithful to

King Jesus even though our culture follows other kings, other guides. And it is just this freedom to be different that is being sharply challenged in our day. So the religious freedom that religious organi-zations need is a main topic for me this morning.

But we have a few issues to discuss before we get to that important topic of institutional religious freedom. Here’s the path of my talk this morning:

1. To be faithful as Christians, we need orga-nizations.

2. Those organizations need to mirror or em-body Christian convictions and values.

3. To be able to mirror Christian convictions, organizations need the freedom to be differ-ent from what our culture values—we need more institutional religious freedom, going against the current trend to restrict religious freedom.

Here’s my first point: To be faithful as Christians, we need to create and maintain organizations—not just churches but also other kinds of organizations: faith-based organizations, companies of convic-tion, a variety of nonprofits and businesses as well

as clubs and other groups. That’s a pretty simple point. To get things done, sometimes you just need yourself, or yourself and a few friends, but to get big things done, especially when time or distance or significant numbers are involved, you need an orga-nization, a structure, a way to combine the efforts of many people and many skills. You need something more substantial than a flash mob or a voluntary committee, more than a temporary collaboration of convenience.

Here is just one example. Compassion International is the eventual outcome of the con-victed heart of American pastor Everett Swanson, who in the early 1950s several times visited war-torn South Korea. He saw the devastated country-side, the terrible poverty, and most cruel, the many Korean children turned into orphans by the war. A missionary challenged him: “You see what’s needed. Now, what do you intend to do about it?”2 What he did was to ask churches back in the United States to open their hearts to Korean orphans. Out of his vision and their generosity, Pastor Swanson created Compassion International, a parachurch organiza-tion. Today, it provides spiritual and material sup-port to more than a million children in 26 coun-tries. As you can imagine, you cannot be a blessing to more than a million children in 26 countries, and you cannot sustain and grow a ministry like this over 60 years, without a strong and flourishing and expert organization!

We all know this, don’t we? We can do many things on our own; we can do many other things if we gather friends together to join us; but for many great deeds, the adequate response to great needs and great opportunities, we need strong and some-times even large organizations.

We know that, and yet as Americans we do have a bent towards individualism. Moreover, many of you in this audience, the millennial generation, have seen plenty of mistakes made by organizations and have developed a very critical view about them. You may see their value, yet their rules can con-flict with your own goals. An organization may be pretty good at providing some service, but it might not serve you the way you desire.

So there is a tension between individuals and organizations, and in our time, there is very great sympathy for what individuals want and decreasing

To be faithful as Christians, we need to create and maintain organizations—not just churches but also other kinds of organizations: faith-based organizations, companies of conviction, a variety of nonprofits and businesses as well as clubs and other groups.


sympathy for the desire of organizations to express a distinctive way of operating and serving. I’ll note this tension between individuals and organizations now and then as we go along. For now, I just want to remind us of what we know: we count on orga-nizations so that big things can get accomplished.

Now let’s consider Filippo Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, Italy. Do you recognize that building? It is famous in art his-tory and architectural history. It is, Peter Murray says, “the first truly Renaissance work,” the first building after the Middle Ages that truly embodied the architectural principles of classical Rome and Greece—and it is an orphanage, a place to take care of abandoned children. This beautiful orphanage is an expression of the Bible’s commandment that we are to look after the helpless—including the father-less, the orphans. And such care has been a mark of the church for 2000 years. In Florence, Italy, in the 15th century, the impulse to be faithful to God and compassionate to orphans led to the creation of an organization that could bring together all the re-sources needed to give spiritual and material care to the many orphans of that city at that time—and to a beautiful building to house the organization and the orphans.

As I’ve just remarked, in our own time, the same impulse to obey God and to care for orphans led to the creation of Compassion International—and to many other organizations, often large orga-nizations, created to show the love of Jesus to or-phans. So, to be obedient to God’s call of service or teaching, we often need to create organizations —even very large ones. We often can’t just do it individually.

Now my second point: To be faithful to Jesus, we need not only organizations but organizations that mirror or embody the values and the heart of Jesus—and not the convictions or values of some other god or some other guide. This is also a simple point, isn’t it? If, prompted by your love of God and neighbor, you are compelled to start or to join some organization to accomplish some act of service, well then, you have to be sure that the organization per-forms that service in a way that honors God and not in some other way. The truth is: organizations are not just a way to get things done; any particu-

lar organization is a way to get something done in some particular way, and not in another way.

Isn’t that why, in the 1950s, a band of men and women, pastors and teachers and business people, joined together to build Dordt College where be-fore there had been only fields? Not because there were no other colleges around but because there was no distinctively Reformed college around—no college grounded on the Reformed faith and a vi-sion of all of life redeemed. Remember Kuyper’s declaration: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” So as you look at some square inch—some area of service, some new line of business—isn’t this what we should ask? Not only “Is this an instance where some new organization is needed?” but “Is this where an organization compatible with a biblical worldview is needed? And often, “Is this where an explicitly Christian organization is needed?”

But let me immediately remind you of some-thing else Kuyper said: the appropriate organiza-tion is not always a Christian organization. You know, Abraham Kuyper created, or helped to cre-ate, many Christian organizations, not just the Free University. But he argued that sometimes a spe-cifically Christian organization was not the right thing.

The question came up in the later 19th century in the Netherlands when unions were beginning to be formed to protect worker rights. Calvinist workers had to decide: should they form their own union or should they join with other workers—with Catholics and with the secular workers, the socialists and liberals? Kuyper actually discouraged the formation of a Protestant union. The point of a union is to create a counterweight to the power of the employer so that all elements of the factory, every part of the work community, has a chance to be heard so that justice is done to all. But if workers are fragmented into multiple unions, then they can easily be ignored by the factory owners. Better to join together, Kuyper said: that’s how to achieve the legitimate aim of a union.

As it turns out, socialist and Marxist voices came to shape the general union, along with lib-erals who had no sympathy for religion. And very quickly Christian workers discovered that the


general unions were unfriendly places for workers who were believers and who sought a harmonious work community and not a victory at the expense of owners. Then a Christian union was a necessary thing to create. But the goal was an organization faithful to Kingdom values, not necessarily a sepa-rate Christian union.

To summarize: to get things done, we of-ten need organizations; to get things done in a Kingdom way, we may need to start or join a dis-tinctively Christian organization. And in our day when so many of our fellow citizens want to follow some leader other than King Jesus, Christian orga-nizations are even more important than in the past.

Now my third big point and a very big question of our day is this: Will the law allow that organiza-tion to be Christian, to follow Kingdom values, or will the law require the organization to change its practices to mirror the values of the secular major-ity in our nation?

Let me begin this discussion by talking about the common good. You’ll recall that not many years ago, evangelical leaders often talked about preserving or restoring a Christian America or a Moral Majority. That talk was always troubling: for all the wonderful qualities of our nation, it has always had plenty of big flaws, which we shouldn’t ignore. Besides, talk of Christian America has led some to think that non-Christians therefore are not entirely welcome, not entirely legitimate citizens.

I sympathize with everyone who, over the past few years, has brought to the foreground not the idea of restoring a Christian America but instead a deep concern for how Christians can contribute to the common good. Our country surely is reli-giously and morally very diverse. Christians are just part of it. But here we are, living together with peo-ple of other faiths, other convictions. We must get along together in mutual respect, and even though we have many different convictions, we can and should all contribute to the common good and not seek just to serve our own kind, our fellow believ-ers. That’s actually a great Jesus theme, isn’t it—to love God and also to love your neighbor, whoever your neighbor is?

And yet, in focusing on the common good, we should never forget that, as Christian believers, we often have something distinctive and vital to

offer to others—a Bible-informed understanding of what is good, what is most helpful to people in need, what kinds of relationships can really thrive, how best to raise children, how to accurately in-terpret history, what all of the dimensions are that go into personhood and that should be taken into account in therapy, and so on.

Other faith communities also have distinctive visions. That is why there is a Dordt College and not just a University of Iowa or a Briar Cliff University. And that is why there are all those other kinds of faith-based service organizations—Compassion International, Catholic Charities, World Vision, Bethany Christian Services, and almost countless others. They want to operate consistent with their founding religious convictions and to make their contribution to society in a way that reflects the wisdom of those founding religious convictions. Each seeks to make a distinctive—an uncommon—contribution to the common good.

But, as you know, that desire is being challenged more and more in our day. Lawmakers and activ-ists, instead of saying, “They do things differently and sometimes even better,” are increasingly say-

ing, “Those ways are wrong and hateful and should be stopped.” Rather than preserving the freedom for those faith-based organizations to be different, lawmakers are saying, “We need rules that require them to be the same as secular organizations, to do things the way the majority in our society values and not the way they say their religious principles require.”

What is happening? We can simplify a com-plex development into three trends: First, we no longer have even a thin Christian consensus but

To be faithful to Jesus, we need not only organizations but organizations that mirror or embody the values and the heart of Jesus—and not the convictions or values of some other god or some other guide.


instead great religious and moral diversity. If there is some public consensus, it is a secular consensus that on some important matters values things the Bible says are not good. Second, our governments increasingly are insisting that private organizations must be regulated, and they must be regulated so that they follow those secular values. As a result, non-Christian values increasingly are being turned into laws and regulations that government requires private organizations to follow. And third, rather than honoring the religious freedom of faith-based organizations to depart from those secular laws and regulations, governments increasingly claim that religious freedom is a narrow freedom that protects churches but not parachurch organizations, that protects worship but not service of our neighbors—a freedom that protects your thinking but not your doing if your doing involves the public and not just your family or your church. This is the con-flict of the health insurance contraceptive mandate: Which organizations have religious freedom?

To refer to Abraham Kuyper again, we can say that we are losing our commitment to sphere sovereignty. Sphere sovereignty is a reminder that government does not create society and its many organizations. Rather, families, art institutes, col-leges, hospitals, adoption agencies, businesses, and media companies all have their own God-created areas of service, and they often express a religiously-based way of carrying out those different kinds of service. While the government must protect indi-vidual rights and must act so that these different organizations, these different spheres, can co-exist harmoniously, it is not the legitimate duty of gov-ernment to lord it over those distinct organizations, trying to change what they do and how they do it. The government should respect their sovereignty, not override it.

Well, as you may know, or might guess, the major disputes about how much freedom organi-zations shaped by faith should be allowed to have revolve around three important topics: religion; reproductive issues—abortion and contraception; and gay or LGBT rights—same-sex marriage and sexual-orientation discrimination.

To some activists, government officials, and judges, it is just wrong and should be illegal for a Christian student club to insist that its leaders be

faithful to the Bible in both belief and personal con-duct. That’s supposedly just religious discrimination and anti-gay bigotry, and so the clubs are often told, “stick to your policy and you lose your place among the approved student groups on campus.”

To some activists, government officials, and judges, it is just wrong, and it should be illegal, for a religious organization, especially if it receives any form of government assistance, to hire only people who confess the same beliefs as the organization and agree to follow the organization’s code of per-sonal conduct. To these critics, there’s no good rea-son for such a policy; it is merely a way to keep out people the organization must despise.

To some activists, government officials, and judges, it is just wrong, and it should be illegal, for a faith-based hospital not to perform elective abor-tions. It doesn’t matter that a hospital or clinic or doctor around the corner does perform abortions: they say it violates the rights of a woman seeking an abortion if the Catholic hospital in front of her will not perform abortions. They say that such a bigoted hospital should lose Medicaid and Medicare funds and perhaps should not be allowed to operate at all.

To some activists, government officials, and judges, it is just wrong, and it should be illegal, for an adoption agency to have the idea that every child deserves, if possible, a believing father and mother married to each other for life, instead of placing the child with a cohabiting couple or a single person or a gay couple or a same-sex married couple. It does not matter that other adoption agencies are eager to help the single person, the cohabiting couple, the same-sex married couple. They believe that every agency should be forced to operate as if all these types of households are equally valuable, or else they should close their doors.

And so, after 2,000 years during which one of the key marks of the church’s faithfulness was its care for orphans, in our own day in the United States and in other countries, many faith-based adoption agencies have been told by government either to abandon their beliefs and practices about families and biblical sexual relationships or else abandon their adoption services. And in our coun-try and other countries, a growing number of faith-based adoption agencies have had to close their doors. Catholic adoption agencies in Washington,


DC, San Francisco, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and an evangelical foster-care agency in Illinois, have had to stop providing services they believed they should offer.

Now, this pressure on religious organizations to change their practices is not, at least not always, intended to be anti-Christian; it is meant, instead, to be pro-justice, or pro-equality, or pro-human rights. But here’s the problem. Our society just does not have a consensus on justice, equality, and human rights. We differ, sometimes deeply, about the value of religion, about what a flourishing mar-

riage looks like, about the best interests of children, about abortion and euthanasia, about how best to help the poor and addicts, about the role of religion in medical care, and about many other things. And so, to respect one another, to respect conscience, to honor our Constitution’s guarantee of the free exer-cise of religion, there ought to be robust protections for persons and organizations that do not share our society’s current secular consensus. There should be religious freedom, not only for individuals but for organizations that are shaped by faith.

Our laws, rather than pressing for more and more uniformity, must preserve space for diversity. This is my third point this morning. We need in-stitutional religious freedom; we need more institu-tional religious freedom—right in our day.

There must continue to be legal room for Dordt College, Compassion International, Catholic Charities, Hobby Lobby, Jewish Social Services, and nearly countless other organizations shaped by faith to make their uncommon contributions to the common good. And this freedom is increas-

ingly important as our society’s consensus becomes less and less friendly to Christianity and more and more secular.

In our religiously diverse society, in our mor-ally plural society, Christians need the freedom to be countercultural—freedom for individuals to be countercultural in our personal practices and freedom for organizations to be countercultural in their operations and services. And people and orga-nizations of other faiths need the same freedoms. In our religiously and morally diverse society, we need more religious freedom, not less—and that freedom has to extend to faith-based organizations that serve the public and not be limited to individu-als, worship, and church.

As the logo for my institution—Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance—says, religious organi-zations should be “free to flourish” even when they are “shaped by faith.” Our laws should respect our religious and moral diversity and not try to sup-press views that are currently unpopular. Let me stress: Institutional freedom doesn’t suppress indi-vidual rights, as many critics now say. Just think, we have diverse organizations because we have diverse views—and because of those diverse convictions, some employees want to work in a religious envi-ronment even if others don’t, and some customers want to be served in a faith-shaped way, even if oth-ers don’t. And other employees and customers pre-fer a secular organization. Respect for each other re-quires respect for diverse organizations—even when we disagree with some of the views that guide some of the organizations.

Now, let me affirm—not every view is right and God-pleasing. Of course not. So we do wish and pray that our fellow citizens, our neighbors, will come to acknowledge Jesus as King. But religious freedom is not a barrier to our witness but is instead the means to have a clear witness in our morally and religiously diverse society.

Remember the prayer we are supposed to pray for governmental leaders. Here it is, in I Timothy 2, written to Christians living when the Roman Empire was pagan, anti-Christian:

I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, in-tercession and thanksgiving be made for all people —for kings and all those in authority, that we may

Will the law allow that organization to be Christian, to follow Kingdom values, or will the law require the organization to change its practices to mirror the values of the secular majority in our nation?


live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.—I Timothy 2:1-4

I’m not a New Testament scholar, but isn’t that a startling prayer for political leaders? It is not a prayer that they will become Christians and then rule by the Bible, forcing everyone to follow King Jesus. No, it is a prayer for religious freedom: praying that we can live holy and godly lives in peace. And if we can do that, what might be the outcome? We’ll please God and he may bless our society with a har-vest of new believers, people who, out of convic-tion, desire to follow King Jesus in all that they do.

But we face a problem, don’t we? We need reli-gious freedom so that we may live holy and godly lives—personally and through our organizations—even when many in our society have other gods and other goals. But why should our society preserve religious freedom when so many powerful people are sure that religion is not good and that religious organizations may do more harm than good? Well, there is a witness of deeds that can be persuasive even when arguments fall on deaf ears and hard hearts:

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires…live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.—I Peter 2:11-12

This is a passage that I think should give us hope. Here we are, you and I, more and more foreigners and exiles in our own country, followers of a differ-ent King than most of our fellow citizens want to follow. Increasingly, our fellow citizens regard many of our views and values to be wrong, harmful, hate-ful, cramped, bigoted. And yet these verses suggest it is possible for our fellow citizens—even if they think our convictions are wrong and crazy—to see that the works of service we do are genuinely good deeds, and even to glorify God in some way and at some time because of those good works, works they didn’t expect to be good because they think religion is wrong and hateful. Isn’t that striking and hopeful? Acts of service—the things we do personally and the

things that faith-based service organizations do—can be a testimony to the goodness of God, even when people don’t want to hear the Gospel.

Such good deeds, when they are connected to biblical convictions, may yet speak to a disbelieving culture, a culture that needs to become convinced again that religion is not necessarily bad but can produce real good, and therefore that religious free-dom is a good thing, that it is the way to make pos-sible in society these admirable good deeds.

Let me end with one last image and with a re-minder about the early years of Christianity. Have you been to the Roman Forum, that large area of ruins in Rome dating back 2000 and more years? I stood in the Roman Forum eight years ago and was pondering questions of cultural decline and cultural renewal. The main features in this picture are the triumphal arch in the foreground and the church up higher in the background.

The triumphal arch celebrates great victories in war by Emperor Septimius Severus and his sons in the years 195 and 197 AD. At one time, you will have to imagine, it was a glorious arch, standing among other gleaming monuments and build-ings—sacred buildings such as many temples to the Roman and Greek gods, and also secular buildings such as triumphal arches, the Senate building, and the Rostrum, the platform where speeches were made to the gathered crowds. This was the heart of Rome, the heart of the civilized world. This was the glory of the civilized world, the concentration of power and monumental art and temples to all the gods of the pagan Romans. At one time this arch was sparkling, not eroded, and it was surrounded by gleaming white marble and gold and brightly colored statues. The arch and the other monuments and buildings celebrated the might of Rome, the glories of the Empire, the wonders of Roman cul-ture, art, engineering, military force. Recall the powerful images in the movie Gladiator.

Now, imagine yourself as one of the small band of Christians, a small minority in the ancient Roman Empire in the year 200 or so. Here you are, looking at this arch and the other monuments and temples and saying, “Nevertheless, despite all the glory of these structures and all the power that these structures represent, Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, not Emperor Septimius Severus despite his glorious


victories. There is only one true God, and it is not the Roman emperor.”

I am sure it was very easy to be a cultural pes-simist and a personal defeatist, standing in the Roman Forum, gazing at this arch and seeing the gleaming temples and the glorious monuments. And yet, the glory of pagan Rome was extin-guished. The empire fell. The monuments fell into ruin. More than that, pagan Roman civilization and pagan Roman might was transcended and re-placed. And it was transcended and replaced by a civilization deeply shaped by Christianity.

That transition and replacement of pagan Rome by Christianity is symbolized and exemplified by the church you see standing taller than the arch—standing on higher ground because it was built cen-turies after the triumphal arch. This is the church of St. Luke the Evangelist and St. Martina, a 3rd- cen-tury martyr. The original church on this spot was built in the early medieval era, and the church was then rebuilt in the 17th century in the Baroque style that we see now. Over the years, sometimes right on top of pagan Rome, a new civilization was built.

Pagan Rome and pagan Roman civilization were transcended by the Christian church and Western civilization. The God and the perspectives and commitments of that small band of Christians had overcome the glory and the practices and the beliefs that were exemplified and magnified by the monuments and temples and secular buildings of the Roman Forum. Pagan Roman civilization had been displaced by and transformed into Western civilization with its Christian inspiration.

Let me be clear. I don’t mean to suggest that Western civilization has ever been a faithful expres-sion of Christian convictions. There was always too much injustice and unbelief and violence and me-diocrity to say it was truly and wholly Christian. Yet there was, and is, much that is good in our civi-lization, so much that is better than pagan civili-zation. Universities, modern science, legal systems, and our sense of justice, compassion for the needy, democracy and human rights, respect for women, care for children—these and many other undoubt-ed goods are the fruit of the Christian civilization that replaced pagan Roman civilization. We should be grateful for these good practices and institutions and attitudes, and honor them. This was a tremen-

dously positive—and God-honoring —change in culture

How was pagan Rome overcome, transcended, by a Christian civilization? That, of course, is a long and complicated story, and historians do not agree on it. To start reflecting on it, I highly recom-mend the book by Rodney Stark called The Rise of Christianity.3

How was pagan Rome overcome by a new civi-lization inspired by many Christian values? Stark says it was not because Constantine, a century after the building of that triumphal arch, seized power under Christian symbols, banned paganism, and made Christianity the official religion. That story is not true. Constantine did not ban paganism and did not make Christianity the official religion. That was done by a later emperor.

What then is the true story about why Christianity grew and paganism was displaced? That story has various parts, but beyond the invis-ible movement of the Spirit that was leading people to convert, there was a visible factor, the visible good works of Christians—exactly what the apos-tle Peter wrote about in those verses we just saw.

Rodney Stark writes about a wide range of good works—of things Christians did differently than pagans did, because Christians believed in Christ and not pagan gods. He talks about compassionate care for the poor, that Christians neither aborted babies nor put newborns out to die because a family didn’t want them, that women’s status and rights

were lifted up, that Christians bridged the gap be-tween rich and poor and between different ethnici-ties in their communities of the faithful. And there were other differences. Let me remind you about one good work that the pagans, no matter what they thought about Christ and Christians, just could not ignore.

Roman cities, civilized and yet crowded and

Sphere sovereignty is a reminder that government does not create society and its many organizations.


dirty, were subject to periodic plagues. The epidem-ics could claim a large proportion of the popula-tion. There was no medicine, no understanding of how the plague was spread nor how to contain it. When the plague arrived, the pagan priests and the pagan leaders of society fled as far as they could go, leaving the sick and poor and powerless to fend for themselves.

Christians, the Christian church, acted differ-ently. They had no medicine, either, and no greater understanding of public health than the pagans did. But they had love for their neighbors and for each other. So they stayed when the plague came. The church, the community of the faithful, took care of the sick and dying. Just by providing food and water and care to the sick, the church strength-ened many of those who had become infected, kept them strong enough so that their own bodies could fight off death. Because of care like this, the death rate was cut by as much as two-thirds.

Then, after a plague or two had swept through a city, a disproportionate number of those who re-mained living would be Christians helped by other Christians and pagans helped by their Christian neighbors. Those pagans who had been helped, well, they had seen visible good deeds. And many of them converted. As Andy Crouch says, through these epidemics the church grew, “not just because it proclaimed hope in the face of horror but because of the cultural effects of a new approach to the sick and dying, [because of] a willingness to care for the sick even at risk of death.”4 Here were visible good works, good works with Christian roots.

Just as the apostle Peter said, these Christians lived such good lives among the pagans that, al-though pagans were sure that Christians were wrong, the pagans could see the Christians’ good deeds and they were prompted to glorify God. Paganism was displaced by Christianity because Christians were faithful—they neither assimilated to pagan culture nor fled from it. Instead, they served their neighbors with the good deeds that Jesus inspired and shaped. They contributed to the common good in an uncommon way.

Now, when I think back to this church and tri-umphal arch, and when I remember Rodney Stark’s history of the social impact of early Christianity, and when I think of those verses in I Peter 2, then

I say, we do not know what will happen in the years ahead, but we should not become pessimists because we see strong negative trends and growing distrust of religion and a growing desire to restrict religious freedom. No, it is possible for our fellow citizens to admire good deeds inspired by faith and then to change their minds about religious freedom and about religion.

But that is only possible if those good deeds are visibly connected to faith and cannot be interpreted as being just humanitarian good deeds. So a win-some case for religious freedom, I believe, is built by showing our society good deeds that they ad-mire, and clearly connecting those good deeds to the faith that produces them. Not only do faithful faith-based organizations do good, but they also communicate the value of religion and religious freedom, even to those convinced that these are evils that should be suppressed.

Friends, brothers and sisters: we live in a chal-lenging time. This is a time for courage and com-mitment and compassion. Many in our society have decided that Jesus is not good news but bad news. But our calling is not to hide our heads, nor to hide our light. Rather, now is the time to dem-onstrate the good news of Jesus in visible acts that are clearly rooted in our faith. And now is the time to pray: not for a lost Christian America but for religious freedom so that we can live godly lives and be faithful and winsome witnesses to the King of Kings. Thank you.

Endnotes1. James Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader

(Eerdmans Publishing and Paternoster Press, 1998), 488.

2. Peter Greer and Chris Horst, with Anna Haggard, Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches (Bethany House, 2014), 25.

3. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSan-Francisco, 1997).

4. Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP Books, 2008), 157.


Should a School be a Business? (or) What is Education?

by Roger Henderson

I once heard a business professor make reference to the “product mix” of his school. Many readers will have heard such things at their American colleges or universities. These and similar remarks inadver-tently remind us that the distinctive character of an educational organization is in need of recognition and defense—in our financially driven (read “ob-sessed”) times. Few would deny that a barrel could be used as a skirt; is it therefore equivalent to a skirt? Few would doubt that a new-born child could be called the product of a household; is it therefore a product? Although such analogies can be drawn,

does this endow them with propriety or make them legitimate? Why did Jesus not like being called “Rabbi”? Wasn’t he a Rabbi of sorts? Sometimes the differences out-weigh the similarities in an analogy. The queen may be a princess but a very different sort of one; if you speak of her as a princess you miss most of what makes her a queen. It is easy to miss and fail to honor what makes a person or thing uniquely itself.

Why is a school or a college not a business, and why are students not customers or consumers? The reason people organize together into schools is to help students learn, to gain insight, to become edu-cated and changed—hopefully in the light of God’s Word. Their goal is not to make money or even to pay their own bills—most exist thanks to gifts, grants, and subsidies; they are not there to make a profit, “grow the business,” or “increase market share.” They are not organized for the purpose of perpetuating themselves as financial units, or at least not traditionally. No such goals are theirs, not what makes them tick. A school is not a business and should not be operated as a business; its rai-son d’etre, its nature and end as an organization (of teachers and learners), is to pass on, to give away what the Lord has given to the already educated—hand it on to the next generation of young people. When a school or college starts talking and think-ing of its work as intrinsically anything other than educational, it will have lost sight of it peculiar and distinctive calling.1

Schools, like all other organizations, exist in a world where economics is a reality, but that’s not

Dr. Roger Henderson is a former Dordt professor of philosophy. He now lives in Aptos, California, where he teaches Logic and Ancient History in a classical Christian school.


part of their defining purpose. If business principles are allowed to guide decisions and dictate priorities in schools, mistaken characteristics and motives will appear that tend to compromise or corrupt their founding educational purpose. Money must change hands and bills must be paid but just as families and churches are not characterized financially, so edu-cational institutions operate with a different goal and organizing principle. We see the difference in a word like “tuition,” which does not mean pay or money; it comes from the Latin verb “to look at” or “look after.” Tuition is supposed to be used to look after the needs of the teacher; it is not strictly speak-ing offered as “pay.” If it were simply pay, it would most often be unfair pay in view of the required qualifications and value of teaching.

Have I been too quick in rejecting the analogies between business and school, product and educa-tion, tuition and pay? Let’s try again. Perhaps the product of a school or college is a certain kind of “insight,” intellectual-spiritual maturation, along with various “skills.” You pay us money and we “give” you knowledge, maturation and skill. It is obvious, at least to most teachers, that this is not how it works; it isn’t possible to simply “give” these things in the way things are handed to you in a store. Neither is it the same as receiving the “filling” the dentist “puts” in your tooth, or the pill the phar-macist puts into your hands. And it is not like the experience that entertainers or movie makers offer while we are watching or thinking about their show. What about the “product” of the exercise club? Such clubs typically have one or two trainers and many members. After receiving pointers from the trainer, most members work out alone, whereas teachers must keep coming back to give more and more instruction, trying to take the student deeper and deeper, layer by layer, to discover more and more about the world—for themselves. What the student does and or has done when a class is all over is invis-ible. It cannot be seen. It can only be approximately assessed and tentatively recognized.

It also evident that our “product” is not infor-mation. Encyclopedias, documentaries and the In-ternet offer that in a greater abundance than any school or teacher ever could. Nor is it the mere “handling” of knowledge that schools teach, for un-less there is understanding of information, the sig-

nificance and connections of knowledge will remain in the dark.

Is our “product” our words? To start with, pre-cious few of our words or even sentences are really our own, so this would make us all bootleggers and plagiarists if words were considered “our product.” Moreover, such an “answer” loses sight of what is essential to education, i.e., thought, thinking and understanding. Students are not just being tested on their word-parroting skill but on their judgment-making abilities, using acquired concepts. The idea that we are selling words (or vocabulary) also fails since learning is not something that can be “given.”

Must we finally admit that teachers, schools, colleges and universities have no product? Well, perhaps we sell a “service” to our students. Isn’t our product the labor of talking, writing, composing ex-ams, listening to and reading what students write—grading exams? If that idea is correct, there would still be no “product” (since “goods and services” are usually distinguished). As such, educators would be merely day (or night) labors paid for their service hourly.

Education is something less tangible than labor. People can “labor at it” with little or no effect—it takes a very distinctive type of attention and con-centration that can then yield a distinctive affection in the learner. The recognition of the ideas and dis-tinctions behind the assembled words is what we aim at, our purpose and goal—which means that education involves cognitive movement or change. Would it be correct to say we sell change, changed minds, changed people? In the normal sense I think not. A person is not heavier or lighter, weaker or stronger by it; rather the student is altered in inde-cipherable ways, reordered inside through the effort he or she makes. The student becomes capable of judging things about which he or she was formerly ignorant, of discerning what is and is not (true). Awareness of this change can foster either humil-ity and thankfulness or arrogance and hubris. The broadened basis (or horizon) can further illuminate or blunt a person’s perception of the truth. This ca-pacity is most strikingly evident in its absence, that is, when we and the student have failed, when the student leaves as he came, when she remains unal-tered, unmoved, unaffected.

To educate is to connect and to disconnect be-


To learn is to explicate the nature of our various kinds of subjection to law and to divine ordinances.

liefs, to answer questions and support answers with understanding, to help a student gain in vision and comprehension and to help a person stand on his or her own two feet intellectually or spiritually. Education is supposed to expand imagination, ex-pose ignorance and show the students how they are attached to and dependent upon the workings of history, of the world around and in them. By un-derstanding the nature of our dependence and at-tachments, we become a little less simple victims of them. To learn is to explicate the nature of our

various kinds of subjection to law and to divine ordinances. This learning can offer the possibility of various degrees of liberation, making us able to plan for, cooperate with, and “harness” the regulari-ties of human and non-human nature. Education can mitigate slavishness and disclose possible ways of flourishing but it can also lead to hubris, arro-gance and the misuse of power over things, animals, other people and self. When organized on business principles, education tends to be narrowed down to learning for instrumental purposes, that is, as a way to acquire power, influence, and wealth instead of learning for the sake of good stewardship by means of understanding and admiring the work and wis-dom of God (or even “serviceable insight”).

ConclusionEducational institutions can be said to have a “prod-

uct” in only a very indirect sense. The way a school is organized and run should reflect its character, purpose and distinctive reason for existing. Its first and primary goal is learning, which is an intrinsic good, requiring no further justification beyond gratitude to God. This goal should be and has usu-ally been honored. Educational institutions receive support from a wide variety of sources, all of whom should be obliged to keep their distance, none of whom should try to direct teaching or research ac-tivities. This is a matter of respect for the nature of the learning process and trust in the people engaged in it. Such respect will serve everyone best.

We often find in the vicinity of colleges and universities a concentration of innovative and pros-perous businesses. This is not coincidental, not be-cause schools are businesses in disguise, but because the knowledge and insight generated in them is useful—enabling graduates with initiative to start companies and run very successful businesses. The teaching and primary research done at schools and universities prepares the way for ideas, products, and people to contribute to innovative forms of production. Recognition of their indebtedness to educational institutions (and God) should cause the people and companies assisted by them to make gifts and subsidies available with no strings attached. A school’s dependence requires trust and faith—a trust intrinsic to any Christian (educational) insti-tution and the faith needed to guard against try-ing to turn a school into a business or self-centered power base.

Endnote1. I am told that James K. A. Smith has written a similar

article—which I have not yet read—called “Are Students ‘Consumers’?” in The Devil Reads Derrida (Eerdmans, 2009).


The Customer is Always Right, Right? Freshman Commissioning Service

Dr. Erik Hoekstra is President of Dordt College

by Erik Hoekstra

This is the day that the Lord has made. How good it is for us to rejoice and be glad on this momen-tous day! This is a day that, I trust, all of us gath-ered here this morning have prayed over, planned for, and anticipated eagerly for many, many years. One of our incoming freshman, Jamie Shoots, posted a one-word tweet last evening as she set her alarm for 4:15 a.m., which really summed it up best: “WOOOOHOOOO!” Jamie, I am so with you—as president, this is one of the best days of the year! And yes, this is a celebration to praise God, for we are here today to celebrate and thank God for bring-ing us to this time and place together.

So friends, on behalf of the entire Dordt College community, it is my joy and privilege to welcome you and to commission these new students in ser-

vice at Dordt College as members of the 60th such group since the college’s founding. In order to wel-come you, new students, and give you and your par-ents a sense of this place, I want to share with you a quick story from my past. Bear with me: there are some important learning points in this story.

I can still remember my first year at Dordt College as a faculty member. It was 1997—the year some of you in Dordt’s class of 2018 may have been born, or maybe that’s off by a year or two, but it’s likely that for most of you, the hardest course you were preparing for was “Toilet Training 101” rather than courses that you are looking towards this year, such as “Biblical Foundations” or “Introduction to Engineering” or “Human Anatomy” or “Roots of Western Worldview.” I was teaching marketing courses here at the time and had come from the business field, where I had found an article about “Edu-tainment”: the concept that class time in college teaching should be entertaining as well as educational for students. I suggested to a senior fac-ulty member who was my mentor that it would be a great article for a broader faculty discussion, and later in the semester we did hold a forum for which we had all read the article and were set to talk about it in a larger group.

My mentor at the time was Dr. James Schaap, an English professor, a Dordt College graduate, and a giant in Reformed circles for his commitment to a biblical approach to living “all of life” before the face of God—of taking every moment of time and every aspect of reality captive to Christ. I believe he truly knew that my suggestion of this article might

Editor’s Note: This is a transcription of the fall Convocation Address, delivered by Dr. Erik Hoekstra, President of Dordt College on August 29, 2014.


cause a stir in the faculty—which is why, I believe, he encouraged me to start such a faculty conversa-tion. I was “fresh meat,” you see, and I think Dr. Schaap thought it was going to be fun to watch the fireworks. The meeting didn’t disappoint. And, I might add, Dr. Schaap’s classes were always enter-taining while also certainly being educational. As we talked through the article as a group of faculty, I can still remember where I was sitting when a dif-ferent senior professor said something that I’ll never forget. In a rather dismissive tone he groused, “All of this talk about entertainment in the classroom just

makes me feel that we are talking about students primarily as ‘customers’ who have bought a ticket to a four-year journey aboard a cruise ship, and classes are the equivalent of the floor show.”

As a young, impetuous, business professor, I just couldn’t help myself, and I blurted out, “You’re fi-nally starting to get it.” As you can imagine, I was never asked again to provide a possible article for a faculty discussion. Then, as now, that professor’s disdain for the concept and my rather immature ex-clamation caused nervous laughter and consterna-tion in the room. I hope that I’ve grown a bit wiser since those days, as well.

But, fast forward with me to this spring. l read a research study by Zachary Finney & Treena Gillespie, from the University of South Alabama, in which 52% of over 1000 college students in the study identified their main relationship with their university as “customers.” In a similar editorial re-cently, titled “Customer Mentality,” a faculty mem-

ber at a large public university bemoaned that his alma mater had just installed a climbing wall and resort style swimming pool in their effort to attract students. He stated,

We are undeniably in an era where the governing model of education is one that conceives of students as customers. In fact, this cognitive model of how colleges and students relate to one another, that of a business selling to customer, is currently so deeply rooted in how we see and discuss higher education that it can be difficult to even imagine other frames or metaphors for the relationship between educators and those who access that education.

The author did have some positives to mention about using the metaphor of education as a business. He writes,

If there’s an upside to thinking of students as cus-tomers, I think it is that the model reminds us that we and our universities are directly accountable to students. Ours is a role of service, direct service to the students we enroll, and indirect service to the so-ciety those students will populate and some day run. We are accountable to manage university resources — human, financial, and other — around the pri-mary mission of providing education.

But ultimately, his thesis, which I largely agree with, is that the college as a corporation goes too far. The zenith of his article was this sentence:

We know that within the cliché-driven logic of our culture that if students are customers, then the old main street American, folksy business mantra that “the customer is always right” can’t be too far behind.

When I read that quote, I was reminded of my young and somewhat foolish days as a new professor and that conference room session years ago on this campus. But, I was also reminded of some wisdom I learned in my first formal work experience more than 30 years ago. I will be forever grateful to a mentor of mine, a gentleman now in his 90s whom I first worked for in my teens. I washed cars at his auto body shop after school and on Saturdays, and, being partially retired and having mostly turned the main operation over to his son, he’d often work beside me, preparing the cars—-for final delivery to the customer after having their dents pulled out

But the larger point is that the metaphors we use for things matter. The words we use influence how we act. That is why I want to be clear this morning that this college—although we focus on running well—is different from a business.


and having been repainted. Early on in my work he taught me a more appropriate thought regarding that statement about customers: One day, he asked me, “Son, have you ever heard the statement, ‘The customer is always right?’” and I told him that I was familiar with that mantra. He said, “That’s total rubbish. Many times our customers are misguided, uninformed, manipulating ignoramuses.” He went on, “Sometimes, the customer is flat-out wrong, but remember,” he said with a smile, “The customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer.”

His point was that when it came to the intrica-cies of auto rebuilding, most car owners know very little about how it all actually happens, and they might often be off base. But they always deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and afforded ev-ery courtesy if we expect to have the privilege and opportunity to serve them. “The customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer”: Wise words that have served me well in many settings—both in business and more broadly in life.

But, the larger point is that the metaphors we use for things matter. The words we use influence how we act. That is why I want to be clear this morning that this college—although we focus on running well—is different from a business. And while I con-cur that our work at Dordt College should center on students, you are not customers—God made you for so much more than that. Rather, we see you as image bearers of God and servants of His son, the Lord Jesus Christ. You are God’s workmanship—or another translation says “masterpiece.” That sounds much more like the students I see here today—cre-ated in Jesus Christ to do great works, which God prepared in advance for you to do.

That’s much more than a customer choos-ing a product—that’s the Providential God of the Universe, who has been shaping you and heading you towards this day, when you sit in that seat, and he’s got great work for you to do. And, we are eager to be here to help. That’s why this institution exists and why we aim to run it wisely as stewards, watch-ing over the human talents and material assets that God has given us. However, our primary focus is not the financial bottom line but rather the eternal purpose of building up servants for effective service

in God’s Kingdom.While we do welcome you here today as stu-

dents, my role is more than the Walmart greeter at the door, saying “Welcome.” We’re actually com-missioning you, new students, into Kingdom service here. A commissioning is different from a welcome. Perhaps some of you have participated in commis-sioning ceremonies at your church when you’ve sent forth mission teams or hired a new pastor fresh from seminary. Or maybe some of you have a friend or relative serving in the military, and they’ve had a commissioning ceremony as part of their induction into service.

Today, we are enlisting you as office bearers in the educational community here. We want you to know specifically that we take up the task with you as mutual office bearers—all of us together as a part of this Christian educational community, called by the Creator God of the Universe; redeemed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and nurtured through the Holy Spirit, whose presence we acknowledge as integral to the proper function-ing of this campus on a daily basis. You see, you are far more than a customer of this place. And while we will serve you with a focused passion that you might see in the very best business environments, your enrollment at Dordt College is far different from taking a cruise or choosing to buy a new car or boat with the brand “Dordt College” affixed.

We should not be surprised that we have a dif-ferent lens from that of the broader culture or state universities. The apostle Paul admonished us to conform no longer to the patterns of the world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And, while we may offer some of the same programs of study that other universities do—and, just to be clear, our program outcomes are, most often, superi-or to those programs on many objective measures—the reason we do what we do here at Dordt College isn’t focused on conforming to the way of the world.

Parents and other loved ones of these new stu-dents at Dordt College: I want you to know that we take this hand-off of these your sons and daugh-ters seriously—as a sacred trust—a covenantal re-sponsibility. We know that you, as Christian par-ents, have promised God to raise them up in the fear and knowledge of God, and you have already dedicated them for service in God’s Kingdom. And


we now join you—we now come alongside to take that development beyond your household and into the broader world. We are honored that you have helped your son or daughter respond positively to God’s call to come to Dordt College, and we will do everything we can, God helping us, to do so obedi-ently and faithfully for God’s glory.

We humbly accept your invitation, parents, to work with your sons and daughters in this next phase of their mission as Christ’s children. Because students, in the middle of that word “commission” is “mission,” the sense of going on a journey or tak-ing up a cause. You are starting a journey, or at least taking a significant step in a new leg of that journey. You are enlisting in a cause. You are starting a task. You’ve been called to this work.

You’ve been called to this job, this cause, this mission, by God—the creator God of Scripture. That’s the kind of a community Dordt College claims to be, a community that affirms the author-ity of God’s word in the Bible and the centrality of this truth—that “the earth is the Lord’s and every-thing in it, the world and those who dwell therein.” The education you receive here—both in the Core Program and in your major field of study, both in the dorms and on the athletic fields, and both on the theatrical stage and in the musical ensemble, all of your activities here—will affirm that central truth time and time again: “The Earth in the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and those who dwell therein....”

I want you, freshman, and your parents to know that this school has invested much time and en-ergy to bring together a faculty and staff who are deeply interested and expertly equipped to live and learn together with you during your time at Dordt College—to help shape, mold, and fashion you into effective servants for Christ’s purposes in the world.

And, we have also invested in facilities—and I’d encourage you all to tour the just-completed first phase of our science expansion as evidence of that—but you’ll find no climbing wall here. And while we do have a pool across the street, it is shared in a stewardly way—along along with our athletic fields and several other of our facilities, in partner-ship with the local community school and citizens of this community—to keep Dordt College as af-fordable as possible.

We have also taken seriously the important no-tion—as a residential learning and living commu-nity—that what you learn in college is not entirely through your courses or reported in your grades. As novelist Walker Percy once said, “It is possible to get all A’s in class and still flunk life.” We are com-mitted as a campus community to full partnership between the curricular and co-curricular aspects of your education as mutually supportive and in-ter-dependent efforts in the shaping process. Your residence life staff, your internship supervisors, the athletic coaches, your work-study supervisors, the off-campus studies office, and the career-develop-ment team are just as committed to developing your God-given talents as are all the faculty. We aim to open up every area of life with you in light of God’s revelation—to help you ask the right questions and then have the worldview, gleaned from Scripture and born out of God’s creational structure, to begin to find obedient answers to those questions.

We will push you—as students desiring to faith-fully carry out your God-ordained office—to wres-tle with big questions. You will talk with faculty and other students, and you will listen to one another to gain wisdom and insight and a sense of camarade-rie as you walk this road together. Over the past 60 years, we’ve assembled this community to engage and challenge you to ask and answer those tough questions, to journey with you on your mission, to be your trusted mentors as you bump up against the limits of your own understanding, and to be grace-filled partners with you in the process—supporting and encouraging you so that you won’t stumble and fall as you step out into new challenges and adven-tures.

So, remember: the words and metaphors we use matter. Remember: you are God’s workman-ship, his masterpieces, “created in Jesus Christ to do good works, which he ordained for you” before the beginning of time. And remember: today is far more than just a welcoming of new customers to Dordt College. Today is a day to thank God for His great gift to us in Jesus Christ—and to commission you, new office-bearers, as enlisted in the mission of Jesus Christ. And we will do all we can, God help-ing us, to equip you for effective work in His already started but not yet completed Eternal Kingdom.


by Bruce Kuiper

Dr. Bruce A. Kuiper is Associate Professor of Communication at Dordt College

Women and Sportscasting: A Different Kind of Ballgame

IntroductionSports announcers appear as though they have it all together: they look good, they sound good, they work in a fun industry, and they can show off their knowledge in front of millions of fans. For the av-erage armchair quarterback, being a sportscaster might seem like a dream job. In this perception of sports commentators, women are no exception, but behind all the fun and glamour is a profession still heavily dominated by men, a situation that of-ten makes the job of sportscasting more stressful than enjoyable. Women working in this field often have a very difficult time establishing themselves as credible professionals in the minds of their col-leagues, the viewers, and even their own families. Specifically, women in the world of sports broad-casting face direct discrimination, reduced cred-

ibility, and increased division of loyalties as com-pared to their male counterparts.

It has been only within recent history that wom-en have been able to be part of the sports broadcast-ing industry, beginning with Jane Chastain’s brief tenure with CBS in 1974 as a sportscaster for NFL games. Her experience is one of many examples that showcase both the joys and the struggles of trying to break into this demanding industry. Since the realm of sports has been a “man’s world” for many years, examining how women entered one arena of that world will highlight how rhetoric has been and is used to prevent and to foster such dramatic changes. By focusing especially on the relationship between the audience and various situations, this paper will emphasize the power of mediated mes-sages in this specific area. Since the introduction of women into sportscasting was a fairly radical move, the ways in which the media facilitated or blocked such a move—and how the audience knew or didn’t know about the machinations—will prove to be especially helpful in our outlining the chang-es that took place in society.

As will be shown below, women have experi-enced difficulty establishing a professional presence in sports broadcasting, perhaps more difficulty than they have faced in other professions. Very fre-quently, any foray by a woman in this field has been met with mixed feelings, sexist perceptions, and a strong resistance to the new faces in front of the camera. These issues will be explored through three main research questions:

1. How has the role of audience affected the in-troduction and the utilization of women in the


world of American sportscasting? 2. How does the perception of women in sports-

casting affect issues of perceived credibility and professionalism?

3. How do the specific experiences of Jane Chastain and Phyllis George inform the history and status of women in sportscasting?

We will approach these questions through the framework of feminist theory, evaluating the ex-periences of two female sportscasters to help high-

light the history and status of women in broadcast-ing. Appropriating the feminist framework seems especially well-suited for Christianly analyzing the ways in which women have dealt with the sports-casting profession. This analysis first looks at per-tinent writing on the general situation of women in sportscasting, on the perceptions female sports-casters have of their profession, and on the pro-posed analytical frameworks. Next, it examines the beginnings of women in sportscasting through a feminist theoretical framework, followed by the actual analysis and its significance. Finally, it con-cludes with the implications of the findings and possible avenues for further research.

Literature ReviewTo frame the discussion of women in sportscast-ing, we will examine related literature that shows the major issues of gender and discrimination in the profession. The following literature review covers a wide range of material, but this material can be categorized into three main areas: the general per-ception of women in sportscasting, the perception women have regarding their work in the sports in-

dustry, and the ways in which feminist theory and media theory can be applied to this subject. The re-view shows that even though the process of women’s entrance into the sportscasting profession has been difficult, it has also provided opportunities for both men and women to think and act more deliberately in terms of equality and mutual respect.

General Perception of Women in SportscastingOne significant area of pertinent research is the pri-mary struggle that women have faced and still face: the typical sports audience’s general perception of women and the industry’s perception of women. Eastman and Billings, who deal with the issue of how women are perceived in sports by analyzing the perceptions of the athletes and the announcers in college basketball, discovered that the announcers’ perception plays a significant role in taking down or building up stereotypes.1 Likewise, Billings, Angelini, and Duke discovered a similar phenom-enon when they looked at the way athletes and an-nouncers interacted in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Their results clearly show that male athletes received positive kinds of descriptions more often than did female athletes.2 Such findings prove the overall gender imbalance in the sports world, which in it-self can paint a picture of the foundation women sportscasters have to fight against. More specifically, the study indicates a relationship between the sex of the announcer and the way in which the announcer refers to athletes or even other announcers. Such studies show a relationship between athletes in gen-eral and the reporting of their athleticism—often including the downplaying of women’s roles.

However, the perception of women in sports-casting can become even more specific. An often-cited facet in this issue is how much less credibility female sportscasters enjoy compared to male sports-casters. In this light, Etling and Young undertook a 2007 study in which they examined the effect of the sports commentator’s sex on his or her per-ceived credibility. They discovered that both men and women gave more authority to male sportscast-ers than to women sportscasters.3 Gunther, Kautz, and Roth, in 2011, also covered the subject of cred-ibility in their historical overview of the profession. In an interesting dichotomy, they found little bias against female sportscasters in a quantitative-based

As will be shown below, women have experienced difficulty establishing a professional presence in sports broadcasting, perhaps more difficulty than they have faced in other professions.


survey, but they found high bias in several quali-tative-based studies.4 When Mastro, Seate, Blecha, and Gallegos studied the perception of women in sportcasting in 2012, they focused on the differenc-es a sport itself might have in various perceptions of credibility. The results of their study showed that men are perceived as having more credibility when they commentate on sports as compared to women.5 Similarly, Sargent and Toro’s 2006 study examined “the impact of attractiveness and knowl-edge on impressions of credibility of male and fe-male sportscasters,” proving that not only are male sportscasters given more credibility than female sportscasters, but that female sportscasters are criti-cized in especially negative ways.6

Women Sportscasters’ Perceptions of Their ProfessionThe previously mentioned studies show clear differ-ences in how women and men are portrayed in the sportscasting profession. With this establishment of difference, the next step is to examine what people in the broadcasting industry think about the world of sportscasting. Hardin and Shain’s 2005 study looks at self-perception among female sportscast-ers. In it, they attempt to discover women’s moti-vations for getting into this profession, revealing the high level of discrimination against women in the process.7 Surprisingly, their subsequent study in 2005, a quantitative study that analyzed the “at-titudes and experiences of women in sports media careers,” showed general job satisfaction despite discrimination and abuse.8 They followed up that study in 2006 with a more comprehensive look at how women feel about their professions and about femininity in the field of sportscasting. Once again, the results showed frequent discrimination in the way female journalists are treated as well as the di-vided loyalties in their lives. Discrimination was of-ten seen as something inherent to the job that the women just had to tolerate.9

In a similar way, Hardin and Whiteside per-formed a qualitative study in 2009, primarily to explore how women in sports broadcasting balance the various aspects of their jobs. The results of the study had three major ramifications. First, the over-all dialog about one’s career was often couched in idealistic terms, but actual choices of career paths

and job placement were often made pragmatically in response to various societal structures. Second, nearly all the women cited some sort of discrimina-tion in their jobs, but most downplayed this aspect of their lives. Third, the most significant aspect of their lives tended to be the “juggling” or balancing that was needed in family, work, and social circles.10 Their study was confirmed by that of Grubb and Billiot, in 2010, who found that women sportscast-ers faced more challenges in the profession than did their male counterparts.11

Application of Feminist Theory Another area of literature that helps explore the issues in this subject is the proposed rhetorical analysis of feminist theory. Although an older ar-ticle, Hargreaves’ 1986 study on gender relations in sports provides key ideas on the entirety of the sports world and, thus, on the role of women in the specific role of sports commentator. Hargreaves pointedly says, “In all countries in the West[,] sport-ing attitudes, values and images are products of a long and relentless history of male domination.”12 Such a viewpoint becomes an underlying theme for several other articles along the same lines. Hardin, Dodd, and Lauffer examine the role of journalism textbooks in their 2006 study, showing how such textbooks can be highly influential upon students going into sports broadcasting, but also finding that such books do little to fight against the prejudice against women.13 Weiller, Higgs, and Greenleaf, in 2004, more specifically look at the way in which the 2000 Summer Olympic Games were presented and how the perception of both the commentators and the athletes “reinforce traditional gender ideol-ogy.”14

Two other studies take a slightly different ap-proach. Sargent’s 2003 study examines the funda-mental ways in which men and women appreciate different sports, ways that underscore basic gender roles in the world of sports.15 Mean and Kassing’s 2008 study, which examines the basic constructs of identity found in sports, is primarily geared to-ward perceptions of athletes, but many of the con-siderations are applicable to the sports commentary profession as well.16 In a similar way, Whiteside and Hardin’s 2011 study, which looks at the ways in which sports are perceived by the viewers, un-


The reviewed literature shows general discrimination against women in sportscasting, and it shows the conflicting attitudes women have toward the profession.

derscores the relationship of the viewer with the sportscaster.17

ConclusionThese studies give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a world that is not nearly as glamorous as it might appear on television. Because of the general limita-tions of gender in athletics, because of a tendency to give female sportscasters little credibility for their work, and because many women in the field plainly see the problems they must face every day, the role of a female sportscaster is a tough one to play. The reviewed literature shows general discrimination against women in sportscasting, and it shows the conflicting attitudes women have toward the pro-fession. The literature also reveals the great extent to which the male perspective and dominance af-fect the perceptions of gender. By revealing this world to both men and women, we can perhaps initiate change and begin to provide opportunities for everyone in the profession, regardless of sex.

MethodologyIn light of the findings listed above, Christians can appropriate elements of feminist theory to analyze women in sportscasting. As Sellnow sug-gests, a key point in this perspective is how “the hegemony (dominant American ideology)—which is reinforced and reproduced by both women and men—simultaneously empowers men and oppress-es women.”18 This perspective is “useful” because it shows “the subtle ways in which patriarchy and masculine hegemony are embedded in popular cul-ture texts.”19 According to Foss, “feminism is, at its core, very simple: the belief that men and women should have equal opportunities for self-expres-sion.”20 When such self-expression is hampered, the results prove that gender perceptions affect the freedom of both genders.

To carry out a feminist criticism of a given arti-fact, Foss suggests a four-step process:

(1) analysis of the conception of gender presented in the artifact; (2) discovery of the effects of the artifact’s conception of gender on the audience; (3) discussion of how the artifact may be used to improve women’s lives; and (4) explanation of the artifact’s impact on rhetorical theory. 21

With this outline in mind, we will explore two dif-ferent events, each highly significant to the role of women in sportscasting. The first rhetorical arti-fact is the work of Jane Chastain, one of the first women to become a national sports commentator. The second artifact is the work of Phyllis George, who followed Chastain on the same network just a few months later. These two women shared the same television network, the same sport, and es-sentially the same job, but their experiences were markedly different. As different as the two experi-ences were, however, they both revealed key ele-ments of how perception of gender affected the perception of these women’s abilities.

Rhetorical Artifact AnalysisGeneral IntroductionThe first experience under scrutiny here is Jane Chastain’s brief tenure as a commentator for CBS, a role that is often cited as being the first nation-ally televised female sportscaster.22 Ryan agrees, citing the significance of “when she broke net-work ground and arrived at CBS Sports in 1974.”23 Walburn also says that Chastain’s impact on wom-

en in sportscasting was especially significant, citing current Hall of Fame sports reporter Lesley Visser as saying Jane Chastain is “our Jackie Robinson.”24 According to Grubb and Billion, it was against tra-dition and amidst a male-dominated viewing au-dience that CBS hired Jane Chastain to be one of their NFL broadcasters.25. However, met with com-plaints about a “broad on football,” CBS dropped Chastain after only one season, explains Rader. 26 Walburn claims, “Chastain has said in interviews since her personal Waterloo that CBS executives told her ‘she wasn’t the girl we hired.’ Not surpris-ing. She says they made her wear her hair in a bun


and vetoed her makeup.”27 Quoting Bernie Rosen, Ryan says about Chastain, “Every woman sports-caster ought to kiss the bottom of her feet for what she went through to pave the way for them,”28

Following Jane Chastain’s time with CBS, Phyllis George took the position but with different results. According to Walburn, “After firing Jane Chastain, CBS later decided that maybe sexy was okay after all. The company hired Phyllis George, a former Miss America, as a commentator on Monday Night Football. Then Ms. George proved that pul-chritude absent pigskin erudition simply ticked off real fans.”29 According to the Paley Center for Media’s report, “As a result of the publicity she gar-nered after being crowned [Miss America in 1971], CBS producers approached her to become a sports-caster in 1975. That year, she joined the cast of NFL Today, cohosting live pregame, halftime, and postgame broadcasts of National Football League (NFL) games.” 30 By many accounts, it was more than clear that CBS hired George for her looks and not her knowledge of the game. Interestingly, she “became a permanent… ‘decorative’ fixture of CBS football telecasts,” outlasting the perhaps more-qualified Chastain, explains Rader. 31

As is evident in the George story, the portray-al of female broadcasters has been an issue since women started working in the field of sportscast-ing. The “looks” of these first female broadcasters predominantly influenced the male perception of women reporters. Early on, women in sportscast-ing added an image, rather than knowledge value, which slowed their acceptance in the studios and on the field. Grubb and Billiot cite George herself as indicating that “despite her hard work, viewers positioned her as a sex symbol.”32 In fact, accord-ing to Schwartz, “Although she was good on air, George had little journalistic background, thus she often presented what someone else wrote.”33 This kind of reputation, of course, only added to the per-ception that she was hired more for her looks than for her journalistic or sports writing abilities.

Women sportscasters also faced negative re-sponses from viewers. In these first years, many people, male and female, opposed the idea of women reporting sports. Men considered the new (female) sportscasters uneducated in the sports, while women thought the occupation did a ter-

rible disservice to their gender, often inferring the idea that “Sports programming is an area which is the preserve of men. Not only is it dominated by masculine sports and male commentators, it … cel-ebrates the male values of competition, toughness, endurance and physical prowess.”34 Often female sportscasters were seen as not fully belonging to the world they were trying to enter.

Analysis of Jane Chastain’s Experience as the First Female SportscasterThis perception of an “unwelcome stranger” is highlighted in the experience of Jane Chastain, es-pecially given her status as the first woman to be featured as a nationally televised sports commenta-tor. It was a difficult year for her in many ways. Ryan quotes Chastain—about her entire sports career—as saying, “I had 15 great years, and one miserable one—the one at CBS.”35 A major factor in this evaluation was the concept of gender, which seemed to have especially strong connotations in the world of sports. Rose et al explain gender as “defined by society and expressed by individuals as they interact while shaping evolving societal expec-tations regarding gender.”36 Chastain certainly did encounter such notions of gender during her year at CBS. For example, Schwartz says that Chastain “contended with difficulties from the male TV crew who were not ready to accept a female sports-caster.”37 Such response is not terribly surprising, since Etling and Young, among others, indicate that more credibility has often been given to male sportscasters as compared to female sportscast-ers. 38 Ryan details some of the gender ambiguity Chastain faced during this year at CBS:

One week she’d be instructed to “not sound so much like a woman” and the next be told that she sounded “too technical, too much like a man.” On top of that, as the first woman on a man’s turf …, she was often the story. While on assignment in some cities, Chastain would grant more interviews than she conducted. 39

In short, Chastain had to be somehow both a rep-resentation of femininity and a credible force in the sportscasting world. Such a difficult balancing act underscores Grubb and Billiot’s findings that “Women sportscasters stated that they felt pressure


Chastain opened many doors for subsequent female sportscasters, but her experience also provides insights into the broader scope of rhetorical theory.

to maintain their appearance, constantly prove their credibility, confront inequitable treatment, work longer hours for promotions, and tolerate the network’s informal policy of hiring ‘beauty over intelligence.’”40

Not only did Chastain have to deal with gen-der-related problems from colleagues and her work-place, but she had to deal with audience expecta-tions as well. Andy Rooney, as cited by Gross, said as a spectator of sports,

The only thing that really bugs me about televi-sion’s coverage is those damn women they have down on the sidelines who do not know what the hell they are talking about. I mean, I am not a sexist person, but a woman has no business being down there trying to make some comment about a football game. 41

Such a curmudgeonly statement is reflected in Gunther, Kautz, and Roth’s suggestion that sports-viewing audiences often do give female sportscast-

ers less credibility than male sportscasters.42 In one surprising twist, Ryan says Chastain “was even burned in effigy by some feminists who thought it demeaning to women that she did things like use a shopping cart in a supermarket aisle to demonstrate to viewers how to set a basketball pick.”43 Sargent and Toro discovered similar ideas in their study-- that often the harshest critics for female sportscast-ers are female viewers.44

Although Chastain had to deal with negative gender perceptions, the experience seems to have positively affected the way that women are now able to enter the sportscasting world. According to Grubb and Billiot, Chastain and subsequent women sports commentators are “female pioneers

who helped to create paths for other women pursu-ing sportscasting careers.”45 Because of Chastain’s struggles, it is more common now for people from all spheres of life to accept women in the role of a sportscaster. Summing up the effect, James Brickhouse, as quoted by Schwartz, says, “Women have another dimension that men cannot give. They can give a female’s insight into women ath-letes in swimming, golf, basketball, tennis, etc. How does a man know what problems a woman would have in a particular sport?”46 More specific about Chastain’s effect, Ryan writes, “many of the doors were opened, the barriers pushed aside, and the narrow minds widened a long time ago by a somewhat unlikely pioneer: a soft-spoken, petite brunette named Jane Chastain.”47

Chastain opened many doors for subsequent female sportscasters, but her experience also pro-vides insights into the broader scope of rhetorical theory. The concept, for example, that a female sportscaster’s appearance is somehow more impor-tant than a male sportscaster’s appearance seems to affect any given sportscaster’s rhetorical ability. Mastro, Seate, Blecha, and Gallegos find evidence that the perceived expertise of the sportscaster is often related to the reaction of viewers toward a sportscaster’s sex.48 Similarly, Hardin and Shain suggest that the discrimination female sportscaster face in their jobs ultimately hurts their overall rhe-torical power.49 Referring to rhetorical power, Roy Firestone, as quoted by Ryan, says that Chastain “got things done by being persistent, not militant. If she were more uppity, she could have raised a ruckus, but that would have probably set back the cause.”50

Analysis of Phyllis George’s Experience as the Second Female SportscasterLike Jane Chastain, her “successor” in sportscast-ing, Phyllis George, had to struggle with accep-tance in sportscasting. However, there are a few differences in their experiences. While Chastain was often criticized for trying to break into a man’s domain, George was often criticized for be-ing just a pretty face and not really knowing what she was doing. In fact, Chastain “admits to being rankled… by the fact that too many people think it was a certain ex-Miss America who broke the gen-


der barrier in TV sports.”51 In George’s experience, the concept of gender seemed especially highlight-ed by how often her looks were contrasted with her knowledge of sports. As outlined above, the move by CBS to hire George seemed blatantly made to find “eye candy” that provided no real threat to the male perspective on sports. According to Grubb and Billiot, “the looks of female sportscasters were perceived as a major concern by the networks and that image was a higher priority for female than for male sportscasters.”52 They add that “This objecti-fication serves a vital function in the sports culture by reinforcing women’s role in a male-dominated society and for men their cultural position.”53

In spite or because of the gender effect, George’s connection with the viewers is unique. For example, her experience lasted nearly three times as long as Chastain’s did and might be explained by the fact that “Though viewers originally questioned the network for choosing George over a woman with more experience, audiences soon warmed to her.”54 Grubb and Billiot observed that “female sportscast-ers may have to prove their credibility with infor-mation about sports in a way not expected of male sportscasters,”55 and for George, that credibility be-came a matter of conducting personal interest sto-ries rather than “hard sports” as was the tradition. The Paley Center for Media suggests, “Her ease in interviews caused numerous athletes to open up and reveal a personal side, which, though common to-day, was not part of the sports reporting landscape of the midseventies”56 On the other hand, an opin-ion piece published in The Newnan Herald remem-bers several of the negative comments surrounding George’s time as a CBS sports commentator: “What the hell is a woman doing in the locker room? She doesn’t know anything about sports. She never played the game.”57 However, she seemed to weather such criticism and eventually gain a measure of re-spect in the industry.

George’s experience served to improve the status of women in a couple of ways. First, the fact that she, like Chastain, was a pioneer in the sportscasting world provides a positive example to other women interested in developing careers as sportscasters. Like many other women in the field, George had to endure a series of harassments, which Grubb and Billiot list as the ways “fans,

coaches, athletes, employers, colleagues and view-ing audiences humiliated women sportscasters with derogatory comments, sexual innuendos and hate mail.”58 A second way that George’s experience can serve as a model for women is how she handled discrimination. Hardin and Shain indicate that many women sportscasters see discrimination “as something inherent to the job” that women just have “to tolerate.”59 However, a model like George shows that working as a female sportscaster means more than just toleration; it entails head-on con-frontation with the discrimination and working to end it. For example, Lesley Visser, as quoted by Schwartz, says, “When women (sportscasters) are given greater responsibilities and prove that they can manage them, they build a good reputation as sportscasters,” and in the end, “The three most im-portant things for a sportscaster are knowledge of the game, a passion for sports and the profession, and the stamina to struggle.”60

The effects of George’s experience on rhetorical theory are also significant and are similar to the ef-fects of Chastain’s experience. “As sports journalism evolved,” and as “women sought careers as sports journalists…[,] the challenges they encountered were perhaps more distinctive because they entered a domain which many have considered sacred for men,” write Grubb and Billion,61 a domain that depends on rhetoric. Their entry emphasizes the fact that the language used to both undermine and enhance George’s credibility was powerful. When women sportscasters are seen as being deviant from the normal considerations of sportscasting, explain Mastro, Seate, Blecha, and Gallegos, how people react to such deviancy can create either receptive or resistant atmospheres.62 In George’s case, the ini-tial reception was generally negative, but through her persistence and her overall rhetorical ability, she was able to establish a sense of credibility. Further, even though they feel divided loyalties in this ca-reer, explain Hardin and Shain, ultimately they find fulfillment despite – or because of – such chal-lenges.63

Results and Discussion of the AnalysesGeneral ResultsIn both women’s experiences, the common factor of discrimination seems to be a hallmark of their


years forging the path for other female sportscast-ers. Billings, Angelini, and Duke suggest that there is an overall gender imbalance still taking place in the sports world, a problem that in itself can cause the difficulties any woman might have in any role in the world.64 In fact, suggests Douglas, the pres-ence of “successful, attractive women journalists in front of the camera” can often belie “how vastly outnumbered women are by men as experts and pundits,” and how often such roles indicate a di-chotomy of “dismissive coverage of powerful, suc-cessful women versus their real achievements.”65

Even though both Chastain and George fought their way through a profession dominated by a male perspective, the fight can be perceived as disheartening to those interested in more equal-ity between the sexes: disheartening in how much discrimination still exists in sportscasting, even 40 years after these described experiences. Still, it can also encourage women to the extent that it cracked the door open wide enough to allow more women opportunities in the sportscasting field. Even with this trailblazing, women will still find sportscasting a demanding job. Since, according to Grubb and Billiot, “Men have used sport to transform boys into men and affirm their masculinity” and since “As spectators, society has approved these rituals,” women sportscasters have, “as in other professions, …encountered traditional barriers such as not be-ing considered for promotion and being relegated to covering minor sports or lesser roles.”66 An at-mosphere so based in male hegemony will be dif-ficult to change and will, as Sowards and Renegar suggest, happen on a smaller scale before achieving national prominence: “In most accounts, the rhe-torical strategy of consciousness-raising has been defined as a small group process.”67

An essential aspect that emerges in these stud-ies is how much both Chastain and George loved their work. They did not fight their battles for over-all women rights per se but instead fought for the opportunity to work in a field that they loved and in which they worked well. Because of that love, Chastain felt compelled to fight against the general reluctance to allow women into sportscasting, and George felt compelled to fight against the percep-tion that women just did not know anything about sports. But in the end, their respective victories and

failures helped to change the face of the profession. Such experiences support Hardin and Shain’s find-ings that most women in sportscasting like and are satisfied with their career choice, while at the same time recognizing lingering effects of discrimination that can hurt their chances for job advancement.”68 Analyzing the experiences of people like Chastain and George can provide one step in the road to-ward more equal treatment.

Basis of StudyAs this analysis reveals the discrimination women often face in sportscasting, we should consider the Scriptural and faith-related concepts that have guided our thinking. For example, the sports im-agery found in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 suggests that as women in sportscasting face a difficult challenge, their situation will require extra discipline in order to “win the prize.” 1 Timothy 4:7-8 similarly uses the concept of training to highlight its potential re-wards. Outside of Scripture, the example of Mary Ashton Rice Livermore in the late 19th century shows someone who connected faith to equality, providing another example of a woman trying to succeed in male system. When Gayle and Lattin say that “Livermore’s argumentation style allowed her to counteract the hostility of many of her audi-ence members as she reinterpreted key biblical pas-sages to support women’s equality,”69 such use of skill and ability foreshadow the ways that Chastain

and George found a niche within the sportscasting profession. In a broader sense, Austin argues that the general field of sports is a place where “humans can reflect God’s nature in their relationships and other common activities and goals.”70 For a profes-sion in which women still face discrimination, the Bible offers a vision of the world without such chal-

For a profession in which women still face discrimination, the Bible offers a vision of the world without such challenges.


lenges. Galatians 3:26-28, for example, holds much promise for the unifying power of Christ: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is nei-ther Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”71 Until then, we wrestle with human-cre-ated inequalities, all the while striving toward the harmony that God intended for his world.

ConclusionThe profession of sportscasting can act as a micro-cosm of society in general, especially in terms of how it perceives gender. Like many other areas of life, sportscasting shows a male predominance of power and authority, and often preference is given to men for job placement, credibility, and general acceptance by peers and viewers. Even in the 21st century, the opportunities in sportscasting are clearly more limited for women than they are for men. Grubb and Billiot overview the prospects by saying, “For women to have equal opportunities as sportscasters, the sports culture needs to change …. These changes to the sports culture rely on men seeking to define themselves not through their masculinity but as human beings which requires a wider cultural shift.”72 Any woman interested in developing a career as a sportscaster should be ad-vised on the deep challenges that await her.

She should know that even though cracks in the overall male-dominated sports world are be-coming larger, much room for improvement re-mains, thanks in part to the efforts of women like Chastain and George. As in other professions, the discrimination against women is still readily appar-ent in sportscasting. But whenever the potential for job advancement, salary earnings, or even a pleas-ant work environment is hindered by discrimina-tory concepts of gender, any given culture needs more awareness and policy development to ensure that both genders are treated fairly. Sportscasting might still be a man’s world, but with continued improvement, it can become a human world.

Endnotes1. Susan Tyler Eastman and Andrew C. Billings, “Biased

Voices of Sports: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in

College Basketball Announcing,” Howard Journal of Communications 12, no.4 (2001): 83-201.

2. Andrew C. Billings, James R. Angelini, and Andrea Holt Duke, “Gendered Profiles of Olympic History: Sportscaster Dialogue in the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 54, no.1 (2010): 9-23.

3. Lawrence Etling and Raymond Young, “Sexism and the Authoritativeness of Female Sportscasters, Communication Research Reports 24, no.2 (2007): 121-130.

4. Amanda Gunther, Daniel Kautz, and Allision Roth, “The Credibility of Female Sports Broadcasters: The Perception of Gender in a Male-dominated Profession,” Human Communication 14, no.2 (2011): 71-84.

5. Dana Mastro, Anita Atwell Seate, Erin Blecha, and Monica Gallegos, “The Wide World of Sports Reporting: The Influence of Gender and Race-based Expectations on Evaluations of Sports Reporters,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2012): 458-474.

6. Stephanie Sargent and Heather Toro, “It’s All About the Looks: Public Perceptions of Credibility of Male and Female Sportscasters, in Conference Papers -- International Communication Association (2006): 1.

7. Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain, “Female Sports Journalists: Are We There Yet? ‘No’,” Newspaper Research Journal, 26, no. 4 (2005a): 22-35.

8. Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain, “Strength in Numbers? The Experiences and Attitudes of Women in Sports Media Careers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2005b): 807.

9. Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain, “Feeling Much Smaller Than You Know You Are: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 322-338.

10. Marie Hardin and Erin Whiteside, “Token Responses to Gendered Newsrooms,” Journalism 10, no. 5 (2009), 627-46.

11. Max V. Grubb and Theresa Billiot, “Women Sportscasters: Navigating a Masculine Domain,” Journal of Gender Studies 19, no.1 (2010): 87-93.

12. Jennifer A. Hargreaves, “Where’s the Virtue? Where’s the Grace? A Discussion of the Social Production of Gender Relations in and through Sport,” Theory, Culture & Society 3, no. 1(1986), 110.

13. Marie Hardin, Julie E. Dodd, and Kimberly Lauffer, “Passing It On: The Reinforcement of Male Hegemony in Sports Journalism Textbooks,” Mass Communication & Society 9, no. 4 (2006): 429-446.


14. Karen Weiller, Catriona Higgs, and Christy Greenleaf, “Analysis of Television Media Commentary of the 2000 Olympic Games, Media Report to Women 32, no. 3 (2004): 14.

15. Stephanie Sargent, “Enjoyment of Televised Sporting Events: Evidence of a Gender Gap, “Communication Research Reports 20, no. 2 (2003).

16. Lindsey J. Mean and Jeffrey W. Kassing, “‘I Would Just Like to be Known as an Athlete’: Managing Hegemony, Femininity, and Heterosexuality in Female Sport,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 2 (2008), 126-44.

17. Erin Whiteside and Marie Hardin, “Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women’s Sports,” Communication, Culture & Critique, 4, no. 2 (2011): 122-43.

18. Deanna D. Sellnow, The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture : Considering Mediated Texts (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 89.

19. Ibid., 98.

20. Sonja K. Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, Press, Inc., 1989), 151.

21. Ibid., 155.

22. Lou Schwartz, “Women in Sportscasting: A Brief History,” American Sportscasters Online, 1999, http://www.americansportscastersonline.com/womenins-portscasting.html.

23. Jeff Ryan, (2001, January 23). “A Woman’s Place: Jane Chastain, Sports Broadcasting Trailblazer,” Village Voice, January 23, 2001, 120.

24. Lee. Walburn, “Locker-room Blues,” Atlanta, 47, no. 2 (2007): 220.

25. Grubb and Billiot, 88.

26. Benjamin G. Rader, In its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 133.

27. Walburn, 220.

28. Ryan, 190.

29. Walburn, 220.

30. Paley Center for Media, “Phyllis George: Television Sportscaster: Profile,” She Made It, 2005, http://www.shemadeit.org.

31. Rader, 133.


33. Schwartz.

34. Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer, Boxed In: Women and

Television (New York: Pandora Press in association with Methuen, Inc., 1987), 7-8.

35. Ryan, 190.

36. Jessica Rose, Susan Mackey-Kallis, Len Shyles, Kelly Barry, Danielle Biagini, Colleen Hart, and Lauren Jack, “Face It: The Impact of Gender on Social Media Images,” Communication Quarterly 60, no. 5 (November–December 2012): 589.

37. Schwartz.

38. Etling and Young, 121.

39. Ryan, 190.


41. Ernie Gross, This Day in Sports (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), 1.

42. Gunther, Kautz, and Roth, 82.

43. Ryan, 190.

44. Sargent and Toro, 28.


46. Schwartz.

47. Ryan, 190.

48. Mastro, Seate, Blecha, and Gallegos, 471.

49. Hardin and Shain, 2005a, 32.

50. Ryan, 190.

51. Ibid.


53. Ibid., 91.

54. Paley Center.


56. The Paley Center for Media.

57. The Newnan Times-Herald, Inc., “Remember Miss America Phyllis George?” Opinion, March 6, 2010, http://www.times-herald.com/opinion/Remember-Miss-America-Phyllis-George-1028271.


59. Hardin and Shain, 2005b, 818.

60. Schwartz.


62. Mastro, Seate, Blecha, and Gallegos, 460.

63. Hardin and Shain, 2006, 337.

64. Billings, Angellini, and Duke, 22.

65. Susan J. Douglas, “Where Have You Gone, Roseanne Barr?” in The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation, Sept. 11, 2009.


66. Changes Everything, ed. H. Boushey & A. O’Leary (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2009), 2.

67. Grubb and Billiot, 90, 91.

68. Stacey Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-raising in Third Wave Feminism,” Communication Studies 55, no. 4 (2004): 536.

69. Hardin and Shain, 2005a, 34.

70. Barbara Mae Gayle and Bohn D. Lattini, “The

Religious Rhetoric of Mary Ashton Rice Livermore: Early Arguments for Women’s Biblical Equality”, Journal of Communication & Religion, 20, no. 1 (1997): 62.

71. Mike Austin, “Sports as Exercises in Spiritual Formation,” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 3, no. 1 (2010): 70.

72. All biblical references are taken from the New International Version.



Operative Metaphor and Antinomy: A Framework for Understanding the Two-Kingdoms/Neo-Kuyperian Debate

by Donald Roth

Donald Roth is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Business Administration at Dordt College.

I. IntroductionThe theological debate between advocates of what has come to be known as “Two-Kingdoms Theology” and other theological camps, particu-larly those who identify as “Neo-Kuyperians,”1 can sound quite esoteric to the average Christian. At the same time, the sharp tone of the critiques ex-changed by the various camps can be acerbic and often give the impression that either our entire con-

ception of Christianity is at stake or that this is one of those “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” debates that is a lot more bark than bite when it comes to substantive differences. The rea-son for this wildly contrasting perception is rooted in the difficulty of truly understanding the claims at stake, and, if the many conversations I’ve had on this issue in the past years are any indication, this confusion is pervasive.

For me, however, the contours of this de-bate strike a deeply personal note. I was raised in Escondido, in the shadow of Westminster Seminary California, and I attended school from Kindergarten straight through college at institu-tions that were avowedly Neo-Kuyperian. Then, in the summer of 2007, I moved to Washington, D.C. for law school and became involved with a church plant there. Suddenly I was hearing new terms, like “Two Kingdoms” and “Law/Gospel Distinction,” promoted as central doctrines of the Reformation. While I had been skeptical of the more sweeping claims of Neo-Kuyperianism at Dordt, I now often defended those ideas against what seemed to me to be a radical swing in the other direction. The ten-sion this difference created became acute when I returned to Dordt in 2011, this time as a faculty member. While I had defended Neo-Kuyperianism


in Washington, D.C., I now found myself frequent-ly defending Two-Kingdoms advocates. Resolving my often conflicting thoughts in this area became compelling when I joined the teaching team for Core 399: Calling, Task, & Culture, the capstone class of Dordt’s Core curriculum, in 2013-14. Finally, when I took over the course’s team lead in fall of 2014, I concluded that I had to wrestle with these ideas even more intentionally until I could get them straight in my head.

In wrestling with the issues raised by this de-bate, I have become convinced that the concern does in fact go to the root of our entire conception of Christianity, and I believe that the theological distinctions between many Neo-Kuyperians and Two-Kingdom Advocates are, as logical matters, irreconcilable on these root issues. However, in another sense, I don’t think that the positions are really that far apart, and I think the values animat-ing the critiques being exchanged underline the necessity for community rather than the inevitabil-ity of schism. What follows is my humble attempt to reconcile the tension in this thesis through the concepts of both operative metaphor and antino-my, two terms that I will define and then apply to this theological debate. Through these concepts, I will show that this debate is a valuable and essential conversation within the context of Christian dis-cipleship.2

II. Operative MetaphorA. DefinedThe concept of operative metaphor can help us conceptualize the Neo-Kuyperian/Two-Kingdoms debate and understand Christian discipleship in general, but the term needs definition. I find this idea most useful with respect to discipleship, and in that context an operative metaphor is a Biblical analogy, metaphor, or picture that helps us to frame and engage in our call to live as heirs of an immor-tal inheritance in a mortal world. This explanation may still sound a bit fanciful, so to better explain this concept before applying it, I will lay out what I do and do not mean by the term.

The concept of operative metaphor is not con-nected to Stephen Pepper’s concept of “root meta-phor” or the philosophical developments that have come from this line of thinking. In his 1942 book

World Hypotheses, Pepper speaks of certain rules for what sort of evidence individuals will accept as good and compelling, calling these “root metaphors.”3 For Pepper, these metaphors are tools for reasoning from common sense to more refined knowledge, such as science.4 Although I am aware that subse-quent theorizing in this area of metaphysics does speak of the operative nature of these metaphors, this area is not what I have in mind with the term, and whatever parallels might be useful are granted, but my view should not be seen as rooted in this philosophical tradition.

Instead, operative metaphor is a way of ex-plaining how we go about the process that Walter Brueggemann refers to as “cultivating historical imagination,” in The Bible Makes Sense. In this book, Brueggemann speaks of the Bible as a cov-enantal history carrying “a peculiar memory and promise, a very particular identity and vocation,” making it a Christian goal “to become a responsible participant in that covenantal history, to share in its perceptions and nuances so that our life-world conforms to that which is central to the Bible.”5 Brueggemann then discusses how we can accom-plish this process: we increasingly become insiders in the Biblical story by adopting Biblical imagery and symbolism as ways to apply Scriptural prin-ciples through a process of faithful improvisation.6

The Biblical call to discipleship is not without a basic level of content, but reasoning exactly how Biblical commands should be specifically lived in the world can be difficult. Operative metaphor, then, is a guide we can use to figure out for our-selves what exactly it means to “love your neighbor as yourself” or to “make disciples of all nations.” This means that our choice of which operative metaphors we use to shape our imagination in this process has a substantial impact on how we live our lives.

B. Neo-Kuyperian Theology and “the Kingdom”It should be fairly self-evident that Neo-Kuyperians imagine discipleship within the framework of the operative metaphor of “kingdom.” Using this framework doesn’t mean that this group has a mo-nopoly on the term but that Neo-Kuyperians speak of discipleship in terms of “kingdom service” and our call to “extend the kingdom,” “usher in the


As an operative metaphor, “kingdom” encourages an optimistic Christian engagement with the world, often grounded in a goal of transformation.

kingdom,” or “live as kingdom citizens.” By using the metaphor of “kingdom,” Neo-

Kuyperians tend to emphasize the message of the gospel in very broad terms. For instance, Al Wolters says, “the restoration in Christ of creation and the coming of the kingdom are one and the same.”7 This broad view then becomes a strong motivator

for action, as Wolters explains: “[t]he rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.”8 This view makes pressing the king-dom claim into every sphere and “square inch” of creation, whether the natural world or man’s cul-tural development of it, the animating goal of what Christians are to “be about” in this world.

As an operative metaphor, “kingdom” encour-ages an optimistic Christian engagement with the world, often grounded in a goal of transformation. It also gives an eternal significance to even the oth-erwise mundane aspects of life. All of our cultural work becomes, as Andy Crouch calls it, “the fur-niture of heaven.”9 For believers motivated by this metaphor, a nearly assumed soli deo gloria perme-ates life in a way that encourages confidence in in-novation and comfort in participation in broader culture.

C. Two-Kingdoms Theology and “Pilgrims”For those who advocate Two-Kingdoms Theology, the predominant way that discipleship is imagined is through the operative metaphor of “pilgrim.” Again, this usage does not mean that only Two-Kingdoms folk talk about Christians as pilgrims (some Neo-Kuyperians speak in similar terms10) but that advocates of Two-Kingdoms Theology predominantly speak of discipleship/disciples as be-ing “sojourners”11 or “pilgrims on the way.”12

By thinking in terms of “pilgrim,” advocates of Two-Kingdoms Theology tend to emphasize the message of the gospel in more technical and juridi-cal terms. The emphasis in the gospel is on a thing completed in Christ’s incarnation, death, and resur-rection. Michael Horton describes the gospel as “an announcement that someone else has performed everything and now gives the inheritance to us as a gift.”13 He further elaborates that “[t]he gospel changes lives precisely because it is not about us – even our changed lives – but about Christ.”14 While this perspective still encourages going out and en-gaging with the world around us, it is framed as the work of “ambassadors”15 and “exiles in Babylon.”16

As an operative metaphor, “pilgrim” draws deeply on the experience of the Judean exiles in Babylon. The cultural calling is an echo of the prophet’s words in Jeremiah 29:8-9: “seek the wel-fare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” There is engagement, but, as David VanDrunen describes it, this cultural engagement is a joyful, detached, and modest en-gagement that expresses “gratitude for the small blessings that God bestows for a time” while rec-ognizing that “our cultural products themselves are not meant to endure into the world to come.”17 For believers motivated by this metaphor, there is a sus-picion of becoming too complacent with the world, and comfort is found primarily in fellowship with believers now and a hope of better things to come.

III. AntinomyA. DefinedWhen I refer to antinomy in this context, I have in mind J.I. Packer’s discussion of the concept from his classic work Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Packer refers to an antinomy as an “apparent contradiction” between two things we hold to be equally true, and he compares an antinomy to the simultaneous wave and particle characteristics of light in physics.18 Antinomy is distinct from a para-dox, in which contradictory words are used to de-scribe a single essential fact; as Packer says, “a para-dox is always dispensable.”19 An antinomy, then, is an irreducible incompatibility of two true states, and Packer encourages us to deal with them by “not[ing] what connections exist between the two


truths and their frames of reference, and teach[ing] yourself to think of reality in a way that provides for their peaceful coexistence, remembering that reality itself has proved actually to contain them both.”20

I believe that many of the debates that rage in this theological arena, as well as some of each side’s suspicions about the other, are rooted in a stron-ger affinity with one side or the other of a num-ber of important antinomies that run within the Christian faith. In that light, we would do well to take Packer’s advice to heart in how we deal with these antinomies and to recognize that these dis-tinctions can do much to advance dialog in this area.

When I say that these perspectives are rooted in a “stronger affinity with one side or the other,” I mean that it is impossible to hold both ideas—be-cause they are antinomies—in our minds equally, and so we tend to emphasize or resonate with one of the two truths more strongly. For instance, with the antinomy of Christ’s simultaneous divine and human nature, it is impossible for us to imagine someone being completely two things at once, and so it is natural for us to resonate with Christ’s hu-manity or His divinity to a greater degree. Those who resonate with His humanity will often seek a “more personal relationship” and tend to see Christ in more brotherly terms. These people also tend to emphasize the healing and caring works that Christ performed while on earth and encourage us to imi-tate them. Those who resonate with His divinity will often be concerned with proper reverence to-ward Christ and speak of Him in more hierarchical terms. These people will usually put a priority on Christ’s ongoing work of salvation and emphasize our roles as messengers rather than imitators.

Perhaps the concept of antinomy is not yet ob-jectionable, but once we begin to wrestle with ap-plying the concept to this debate, those objections may quickly crop up, so I will add a few caveats and explanations to further demonstrate what I mean by the idea: If I am honest with myself, I find that I resonate more with the sense of Christ as divine than as human. This does not mean in any way that I reject Christ’s humanity, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I believe Christ to be any less human than He is divine. However, since I cannot logically

imagine Christ as both, I find myself, more often than not, imagining Him in a divine sense, seated on the Throne of Heaven, making intercession for His people and ruling over Creation. This emphasis doesn’t mean that a human can’t do those things (obviously Christ does these as a man), but in my mind’s eye, I am prone to envision Christ in these roles by emphasizing His divine nature.

My point about antinomy here is that our affin-ity with one side or the other will work its way out in significant ways in terms of how we believe our faith should be ordered and lived out. With respect to the example we’ve been considering, this means I tend to emphasize proper reverence and a con-servative approach to the worship order, since our Lord is the Almighty God, but it also trickles down into little things, like my conscious practice of capitalizing pronouns referring to a member of the Godhead. Those who feel an affinity for Christ’s humanity might indeed share some of these prac-tices, but their persistence or underlying reasoning will likely differ.

At the same time, recognizing something as an antinomy is a constant call to keep our imagina-tions in check. As much as I may imagine Christ as divine, I also affirm that He is human, and it’s important that I step back and rein in my imagina-tion to remain respectfully cognizant of that fact. Just in working through this example, I had to stop myself after referencing Christ on the throne and recognize that Jesus sits on the throne every bit as much as a man as He does as God. That realization forces me to wrestle with my concept of the proper role of man and to temper and deepen my under-standing of Christ. In other words, keeping both aspects of an antinomy in robust dialog is not only an antidote to error but an essential tool for reach-ing deeper understanding.

With this understanding, then, I believe there are three prime antinomies at play in this particu-lar debate, although certainly others could be men-tioned. In the following sections, I will detail each of these in turn and demonstrate some of the ideas and applications that come from differing affini-ties. I will then offer some concluding reflections on how to balance these often conflicting tenden-cies.


The difficulty comes in expressing how we see this accomplished ascendancy worked out in the fallen world: to what degree is the kingdom “already” and how is it “not yet”?

B. The Already/Not Yet of the Kingdom of GodOne of the great concerns of early Christianity was the nature of the kingdom of God, particu-larly its immanence. This topic was the subject of numerous teachings and parables of Christ, as well as the writings of the Apostles, and from this the Christian church has developed the notion that the kingdom of God both has come and is yet to come. This “already and not yet” tension is more than just a paradox or difficult saying; it is an an-tinomy. We can see this in the fact that the state-ment contains two essential truths that are logically irreconcilable. By saying “already and not yet,” we do not simply mean that the rule of Christ is only established tentatively or partially. Christ sits en-throned in heaven, and all things are already sub-ject to His rule, which He already providentially carries out over “every square inch” of Creation.21 At the same time, Christ has not yet returned to purify the world and usher in the New Jerusalem so gloriously prophesied in Revelation. The difficulty comes in expressing how we see this accomplished ascendancy worked out in the fallen world: to what degree is the kingdom “already” and how is it “not yet”? There is a cognitive tension at play in our un-derstanding of the kingdom that bears many of the marks of an antinomy, and the debate between Neo-Kuyperians and the Two-Kingdoms Theology maps across affinities for each side.

Neo-Kuyperians will, by and large, resonate with the “already” of the kingdom. Again, this does not mean that they totally reject the “not yet,” but as their affinity increases, descriptions will in-creasingly emphasize both the degree to which the Kingdom of God is realized in the present world and Christians’ increasingly active role in bringing the world under Christ’s dominion. This approach can be seen, for instance, in Al Wolters, who, as pre-viously mentioned, describes the coming of Christ as His establishing “a beachhead in his territory,” which calls us to “press his claims ever further in creation.”22 Similarly, Wolters maintains that rec-onciliation in Christ “reinstated [Christians] as God’s managers on earth.”23 In his critique of the Two-Kingdoms Theology, Tim Scheuers draws on Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen when he says, “this divine plan ‘unfolds progressively through [God’s] work in the life of Israel and in the person

and work of Jesus, and it continues today in the mis-sion of the church.’”24 In emphasizing the “already” of the kingdom, then, NeoKuyperians focus on a progressive rolling out (or reconciliation) of the new order which will be completed in Christ’s sec-ond coming. In other words, an emphasis of Neo-Kuyperians is on the continuity of this world and the next by virtue of this progressive breaking in of the coming kingdom. This view makes Christians into reinstated viceroys of creation through Christ, enlisted in Christ’s task of reconciliation, redeem-ing creation, and taking up the cultural mandate driven by this progressive hermeneutic of a move-ment from garden to city.

Two-Kingdoms Theologians, on the other hand, resonate much more deeply with the “not yet” of the kingdom, and as their affinity with that view increases, the tendency will be to increasingly emphasize the discontinuity of the present age and the one to come while attributing redemption/rec-onciliation in more exclusive terms to Christ alone. David VanDrunen maintains that “[b]elievers themselves are the point of continuity between this creation and the new creation. The New Jerusalem is the bride of Christ (Rev. 21:2). Asserting that anything else in this world will be transformed and taken up into the world-to-come is speculation

beyond Scripture.”25 Michael Horton emphasizes the unrealized aspect of the coming kingdom, say-ing, “The church is not yet the realized kingdom of Christ on earth, but it is the only place where that kingdom becomes partially visible through the ministry of Word and sacrament.”26 In this view, Christ’s work did not reinstate Christians as vice-roys of creation. As VanDrunen says, “Christians


will attain the destiny of life in the world-to-come, but we do so not by picking up the task where Adam left off but by resting entirely on the work of Jesus Christ, the last Adam who accomplished the task perfectly.”27

Perhaps at this point it appears that I’ve erred. The quotations I’ve selected evince a substantive disagreement between Neo-Kuyperians and Two-Kingdoms Theologians with respect to the nature of the work of Christ and the degree of continuity between this world and the next, so how is it helpful to analyze this difference, using the concept of an-tinomy? If we focus solely on the theological issues mentioned, the distance between the camps seems wide indeed, and I do not want to downplay the significance of the differences in the doctrinal con-cerns considered; however, there are also points of significant-seeming harmony. For instance, neither side actually disagrees that humans are to be about cultural labor. VanDrunen says, “God first grants [Christians] all the rights of the world-to-come as an accomplished fact and then calls them to cul-tural labor in this world as a grateful response.”28 At the same time, in his critique of Two-Kingdoms Theology, Scott Swanson says that the kingdom message of Revelation does not “encourage us to see our cultural engagements as in themselves ad-vancing Christ’s kingdom. They can and must aim to be expressions of our faithful witness to that kingdom.”29 At the extremes, the gulf between the camps widens, and the theological differences be-come more pronounced, but I believe that a useful way to understand these perspectives still centers around how they aim to resolve the tension of the “already/not yet,” something that Neo-Kuyperians accomplish via their affinity for the “already”; and Two-Kingdoms Theologians by an emphasis on the “not yet.”

C. The World is Created Good/Corrupted by SinThere is a divide similar to the “already/not yet” antinomy with respect to the nature of Creation. Genesis 1:31 describes God’s completed work of Creation as “very good”; however, Genesis 3 re-counts man’s fall into sin, which, as Romans 8:20 explains, subjected all of creation to “futility.” In the Reformed tradition, the fall has been under-stood as a pervasive frustration of purpose, most

frequently referred to as “total depravity.” Total de-pravity creates a tension in how Christians look at Creation and plays out as another antinomy across which we can map the Neo-Kuyperian/Two-Kingdom debate.

Neo-Kuyperians tend to resonate with the fun-damental or original “good”-ness of Creation. The redemption and reconciliation brought by Christ, then, is spoken of in terms of cosmic restoration for all of Creation. As Wolters says, “[God] re-fuses to abandon the work of his hands—not to imply that God scraps his earlier creation and in Jesus Christ makes a new one, but rather to suggest that he hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it.”30 Taking the statement in Colossians 1:20, that God is reconciling all things to Himself through Christ, Neo-Kuyperians tend not only, as mentioned above, to emphasize continuity be-tween this world and the next but to emphasize this continuity as rooted in the created order, in some cases even by virtue of an eschatological, develop-mental character to the original Creation itself.31 Tying this continuity to the discussion above, then, the progressive hermeneutic at play in the Neo-Kuyperian understanding of the coming kingdom of God finds its roots not just in the incarnation of Christ but in the Creation itself, and many Neo-Kuyperians take the accounts of the Garden in Genesis and the Heavenly City in Revelation not just as a plan of redemption but as an eschatological development of Creation by mankind set in motion before the Fall.32

Two-Kingdoms Theologians, on the other hand, resonate with the corruption and passing nature of Creation. David VanDrunen asserts that mankind failed its cultural task in the first Adam and that Christ has completed that work, but de-spite mankind’s failure, God entered a covenant with Noah that promised to allow man’s cultural activities to proliferate for a time, a time which would come to an abrupt and cataclysmic end with Christ’s return.33 In other words, Two-Kingdoms Theology sees Creation largely through the lens of the Noahic Covenant, namely, that God once cleansed the earth of man’s corrupt culture-making with water, but that He has promised not to do so again until the Last Day. With this view, Two-Kingdoms Theology is much more guided by the


Total depravity creates a tension in how Christians look at Creation and plays out as another antinomy across which we can map the Neo-Kuyperian/Two-Kingdom debate.

purifying fire described in 2 Peter 3 than the uni-versal reconciliation mentioned in Colossians 1:20. As mentioned above, the emphasis on the “not yet” of the Kingdom fits well with a strong awareness of the fallen and temporary nature of the current regime. Just as the Kingdom is to be ushered in ex-clusively by Christ, so the renewal of Creation is accomplished solely by Christ, and the reconcilia-tion and purification of Creation involves a sweep-ing away of the mess man has made of the current order. As Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert say, “the gospel is the good news of a salvation, in all its parts, that is for us, and not in the least by us.”34

Again, like with the concept of kingdom, there are deep theological distinctions and differences at play in the views of both Neo-Kuyperians and

those who advocate Two-Kingdoms Theology. The differences between the progressive, or the preservational, hermeneutics of the two sides are in particularly strong relief; however, it is again worth noting that the gulf isn’t always as wide as it appears. While they see culture in very differ-ent terms, the Neo-Kuyperian idea of a movement from garden to city in Creation is not totally alien to the Two-Kingdoms perspective. VanDrunen ar-gues that humanity’s original calling was to “com-plete its task in this world and then to enter tri-umphantly into the world-to-come.”35 In his view, “this present world was never meant to exist forever.”36 To put this idea in context, VanDrunen argues that Adam was originally charged with a cultural task that would culminate with an ascendancy and eter-nal life in Zion. That is, Crouch and VanDrunen both agree that man was set on a path from garden to city from the beginning. They differ on theologi-

cal details and the hermeneutic of arriving there, but there is an essential agreement between at least some of those in the two camps on this general tra-jectory. It is important not to trivialize the existing differences, but I believe that seeing some continu-ity here helps us map this debate across antinomies such as the good/tainted nature of Creation.

D. “In the World, but not of it” and the ChurchA third antinomy is rooted in the long tradi-tion of affirming that we are “in the World, but not of it.” Viewing this as an antinomy is par-ticularly apt when it comes to the interplay of in-dividual Christians and our corporate identity as the Church. Both sides of the theological debate over the Two Kingdoms agree that Christians are citizens of the kingdom of God, that we possess a heavenly nature and ethical calling that causes us to live differently, and that we are called to gather together in a visible, regular form we usually refer to as “church.” However, emphases within these points of commonality vary, and the overall articu-lations of the role of the church differ in ways that reflect a varying affinity with the two poles of this antinomy.

Neo-Kuyperians tend to emphasize the “in the World” nature of Christians and the church. Because of their broad and immanent view of the Kingdom of God, Neo-Kuyperians see the church as only a small (but important) part of the king-dom. As Michael Williams says, “The church is the citizenry of the kingdom, but the kingdom is broader than its citizens.”37 Since “Christ’s disciples did not proclaim the church but the kingdom,” the church then exists to help advance the Kingdom of God.38 This means that Christians, both as in-dividuals and as the community of the church, are called together to a task of working out this man-date by engaging the world. By way of enumeration of the “every square inch” principle, Wolters lists marriage, sexuality, politics, art, and business all as fields in need of redemptive engagement and an ef-fort to conform these areas “again to God-honoring standards.”39 This approach does not mean that there is a total disregard for corporate worship, but the emphasis is on broader engagement under the idea that “[t]he rule of God is realized through the righteous action of God’s people in spheres of life


lying beyond the institutional church.”40

Advocates of Two-Kingdoms Theology, on the other hand, have an affinity for the “not of the World” aspect of this antinomy, which leads to an emphasis on both Christians as a people called out and the church as a particular institution. By contrast to the cultural-activity focus of Neo-Kuyperians, David VanDrunen says, “The church is where the chief action of the Christian life takes place.” Horton goes further, calling the church “the only place where [the Kingdom of God] becomes partially visible.”41 He puts this provocatively in his book The Gospel-Driven Life, with a chapter titled “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!”42 Tied to their emphasis on the “not yet” and the temporal nature of Creation, Two-Kingdoms Theologians tie the Christian life strongly to the institutional Church, and they speak of the institutional church strongly in terms of faithfully awaiting the coming age and bearing witness to salvation in Christ.

In many ways, it is this issue that sees the sharp-est practical divide between Two-Kingdoms and Neo-Kuyperian thought. At their extremes, Neo-Kuyperians will downplay the role of the church as institution or blur it into the broader cultural man-date; at the same time, Two-Kingdoms Theologians will emphasize both the centrality of worship as an institutional body and our passive role in receiving the kingdom to such a degree that they become virtually incoherent on any ethical or moral com-ponent of the Christian life. This is not to say that all members of either camp dwell at these extremes, but concern over the potential to either neglect the church or neglect the world provides much of the heat that drives the often passionate tone of this debate.

Ultimately, this is why I believe that the evalu-ative framework of antinomy is so valuable in this debate. Despite everything said in this section, there is substantial overlap between Neo-Kuyperians and Two-Kingdoms Theologians in this area of the church’s importance, perhaps more even than in others. Williams calls the church the “locus of the Kingdom” and says that “God alone can and will build his kingdom; it cannot be built by men. But God calls the church to witness to the kingdom.”43 At the same time, VanDrunen says, “even in their most ordinary and mundane tasks, Christians

must act from faith, in accord with God’s law, and for God’s glory…hence making their cultural work, in this respect, uniquely Christian.”44 With selective quotations and adequate space to do so, it would not be a difficult task to make the two sides sound virtually identical on many issues that touch the church, so why is there at times such a sharp practical difference? I believe the difference reflects a guiding affinity for the respective sides of the debate to be either “in the World” or “not of it,” and each side will often work itself out in a primary practical concern either for Sunday or for the rest of the week.

IV. Concluding ReflectionsThroughout this paper, my goal has been to provide a couple of interpretive tools to add clarity to what can all too often be a confusing debate. My pur-pose has not been to obscure the genuine theologi-cal issues at stake in this discussion or to attempt to paper over differences. One of my colleagues re-sponded to an earlier discussion based on these top-ics by saying I had failed to convince him that this was “all semantics,” and I have failed in my efforts if that’s what it appears that my thesis is. The ques-tion of whether or not Christians are reinstated as vice regents of Creation as part of our restoration in Christ seems to me a critical point of disagreement in this debate. At the same time, the hermeneutic of a movement from garden to city and a passing from temporal to eternal bear similarities, but it would be a deep mistake to conflate them. Rather than seeking to minimize differences, I have tried to show that the concepts of operative metaphor and antinomy can help provide a platform for un-derstanding what drives these differences. If Neo-Kuyperians and advocates of the Two-Kingdoms imagine their task in terms of different operative metaphors, their theology and conception of what Christianity is will be fundamentally different. At the same time, if these differences map over an af-finity for different aspects of antinomies that run through the Christian faith, there is some funda-mental commonality and relatedness on these is-sues that in a sense transcends the disagreement.

If what I’ve argued is true, Christians have a responsibility to keep this discussion going in a ro-bust, charitable way. Scripture is full of metaphor


and imagery, and if metaphor, particularly opera-tive metaphor, is so powerful in shaping our faith-ful improvisation and our way of imagining dis-cipleship, then it is equally important that we not become myopic or obsessed with a single one. We need to keep these operative metaphors in dialog with one another, not by trying to hold on to all of them at once but by owning which ones are par-ticularly inspiring for us and then being sensitive to what insights and inclinations these create as we interact with the rest of the body. At the same time, it is inherent to the very concept of antinomy that we won’t be able to practically conceptualize both aspects of the antinomy as equally true. We will naturally resonate with one or the other irreconcil-able truth. Rather than seek to solve the antinomy, we can embrace it, resolve our own answers, but re-main cognizant of our affinities and recognize that the only way to see that both of these truths are fairly expressed is through our community togeth-er. This process takes profound humility and toler-ance that will be difficult to maintain. Ultimately, the practical differences created by working out these ideas may mean that federative unity is not always possible, but it’s vital that an overarching spirit of ecumenism and mutual respect keep this discussion from creating walls of silent division, be-cause if my thesis is correct, we will all suffer in our faith without these differing voices.

Endnotes1. I will try to stick to the term Neo-Kuyperian in this

article; however, I recognize that this term is ill-defined and has significant overlap with those who would self-identify as Neo-Calvinists. My intention by selecting this term is to suggest the third (or perhaps fourth by now) wave of theologians and philosophers coming at the latter half of the 20th Century and into the new millennium who identify strongly with the work of Abraham Kuyper and those around his time who were, at the turn of century, referred to as Neo-Calvinists. It is primarily a distinction as to time, and I am not here weighing into any potential distinctions as to theology.

2. In defending my thesis, my intent is to provide a con-text for dialog. I am not trying to imply that any one person embodies the whole of one perspective or the other or that persons who feel an affinity to one camp or the other necessarily agree with everything else stat-ed by their peers. Despite the generality required here, I do hope that I am being fair to the respective beliefs,

and any misrepresentations are wholly unintentional.

3. Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (University of California Press, 1942), 84.

4. Ibid., 91-92.

5. Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003), 25.

6. Brueggemann demonstrates how this can work, specif-ically with the example of “manna in the wilderness.” Ibid., 29-36.

7. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd Ed. (Eerdmans, 2005), 73.

8. Ibid., 74.

9. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Intervarsity Press, 2008), 170.

10. See e.g. Timothy R. Scheuers, “Dual Citizenship, Dual Ethic?” in Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective, edited by Ryan C. McIlhenny, 125-154 (P&R Publishing, 2012), 142-143.

11. See e.g. David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Crossway, 2010).

12. See e.g. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Zondervan, 2011).

13. Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life (Baker Books, 2009), 109.

14. Ibid., 127.

15. Ibid.

16. VanDrunen, 73-74.

17. Ibid., 166.

18. J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (InterVarsity Press, 1961), 18.

19. Ibid., 20

20. Ibid., 21.

21. See e.g. Hebrews 1. The whole book grounds its ar-gument in the accomplished work and ascendancy of Christ.

22. Wolters, 74.

23. Ibid., 71.

24. Emphasis in original. Scheuers, 142 (citing Craig G. Bartholomew, and Michael W. Goheen, Living at the Crossroads (Baker Academic, 2008), 52).

25. VanDrunen, 66.

26. Michael Horton, The Gospel Driven Life, 248.

27. VanDrunen, 50.


28. Ibid., 51.

29. Scott A. Swanson, “How Does ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ before the End?” in Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective, edited by Ryan C. McIlhenny, 201-226 (P&R Publishing, 2012), 225.

30. Wolters, 70.

31. See Lief, Jason. “Eschatology, Creation, and Practical Reason” in Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective, edited by Ryan C. McIlhenny, 227-249 (P&R Publishing, 2012).

32. This view is present in many Neo-Kuyperians but is probably most clear in Crouch, 109-110.

33. VanDrunen, 28-29.

34. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Crossway, 2011), 208.

35. VanDrunen, 40.

36. Emphasis original. Ibid., 65.

37. Michael Williams, Far as the Curse is Found (P&R Publishing, 2005), 265.

38. Ibid., 267.

39. Wolters, 71.

40. Williams, 265.

41. Horton, 248.

42. Ibid., 103.

43. Williams, 266-7.

44. VanDrunen, 168.


Looking for Good Work: Western Christian High Commencement, May 19, 2015

Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He graduated from Western Christian in 1949, and from Calvin College in 1953. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught philosophy for thirty years at Calvin College, and for fifteen years at Yale University. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Claire, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has five children and seven grandchildren.

by Nicholas Wolterstorff

It’s wonderful to be back! This is my home coun-try. I was born in Bigelow and lived there for the first twelve years of my life. When my twin sister and I were three years old, our mother died of can-cer. Four years later, my father married a woman from Edgerton. After continuing to live in Bigelow for the next five years, we moved to Edgerton. In those days, the Christian school in Edgerton did not go beyond the tenth grade. And so it was that I,

along with about fifteen other kids from Edgerton, completed our Christian high school education here at Western. We went back and forth between Edgerton and Hull on weekends, boarding here in Hull during the week. Western gave us its oldest bus to use – naturally, since it was used only on weekends. The heater barely worked; you here can imagine what it was like to travel the sixty miles between Edgerton and Hull in the winter! Once we slid off the road. There were no cell phones in those days. You walked to the nearest farm and hoped someone was home.

I loved my two years at Western. We had won-derful teachers, and I developed many close friend-ships, some of which I maintain to this day. But the only time I’ve been back, since graduating in 1949, was for the sixty-year reunion of my graduat-ing class. Every now and then I do get news of your accomplishments; those make me feel proud. So I am truly delighted to be invited back to give this commencement speech.

I have given a number of commencement speeches over the years, most of them to college stu-dents. I have come to realize that commencement speeches are strange things. Nobody ever comes for the speech. People come for the graduation, not for the speech. And the only graduation speeches any-one ever remembers are the truly awful ones. I will try not to provide you with such a memory!

Those words were addressed to everybody. The rest of what I have to say is addressed to the gradu-ates.


I know, from my own experience of graduating from high school and college, that this is a bitter-sweet day for you. On the one hand, you are feeling proud of your accomplishments and of achieving graduation. If any of you just squeaked by, pride in your case is mingled with relief: “Wow! Made it!” That’s the sweet part of the day. The bitter part is that you have all developed attachments, as I did when I was a student here: classmates with whom you have become close friends, teachers whom you have come to admire. Many of those attachments will now be ruptured. Never again will all of you be assembled together in one place.

There’s another sort of tension built into gradu-ation, in addition to the tension of being both sweet and bitter. There’s the tension of both looking back and looking ahead. You can’t help looking back at what you have experienced here; but you also can’t help looking ahead to what your future holds. We call these ceremonies both “graduation” and “com-mencement.” The word “graduation” points back; the word “commencement” points ahead: the rest of your life now commences. For the remainder of my talk, I invite you to look ahead.

Each and every one of you will soon be looking for an occupation. Some of you will be looking for an occupation immediately. Others will be continu-ing your education for a few more years and then be looking for an occupation. Either way, looking for an occupation is now not far in the future.

In earlier days, young people didn’t look for an occupation. If you were the son of a farmer, you be-came a farmer; if you were the son of a blacksmith, you became a blacksmith; if you were the daughter of a housewife, you became a housewife. Many of your and my forebears emigrated from Europe to this country in order to escape that system. Maybe some of you will take over your father’s farm; may-be some of you will take over your father’s business. But you don’t have to. You can look around for an occupation.

When you look for an occupation, you look, of course, for a good occupation. Some occupations are not good; some are downright lousy. You look for a good occupation, for good work, for a good job.

And what is a good occupation? How do you tell whether an occupation is good or not? What

should you be looking out for when you look for good work? That’s what I want to say something about. I will suggest four or five considerations. For forty-five years I advised students. At first I was pretty bad at it. The advice that I give you now is the advice I learned to give after many years of practice.

Let me say in advance that you may not find work that fits all of the criteria I suggest. I can give you advice as to what to look for; but I cannot guar-antee that you will find it. There are thousands of people, in our society as in all societies, who look for work but can’t find any, or who find work but not good work. This is one of the ways in which God’s kingdom has not yet fully come. So we pray that God will provide good work, we lament the absence of good work, and we support those poli-cies that promise to increase the availability of good work.

First, when you look for work, look for work that is worthwhile, work that provides products and services that are genuinely good for your fellow human beings. Not all work is worthwhile. Some work provides products and services that are use-less, or worse than useless, products and services that are bad for your fellow human beings. Your and my work is to be one aspect of our love for the neighbor. And in loving the neighbor, we are serv-ing God. We are to serve God by loving the neigh-bor in our work, not just after work.

I find that lots of people never ask themselves whether what they are doing in their occupation is worthwhile. All they ask is whether it pays good money. Sad to say, Christians are among such people. They seem to think that one serves God by loving the neighbor only after work. I realize that it may well take considerable courage on your part to say, when some well-paying but worthless job is dangled in front of you, “No, I’m not going to do that; it’s not worthwhile. I cannot love my neighbor in doing that work.” I hope you have that courage.

Second, when you look for work, look for work that you can perform with integrity–work that does not violate your Christian convictions, work that does not require you to cut corners, to engage in shady deals, to bad-mouth your competitors. Currently a fair number of our national politicians identify themselves as evangelical Christians. What


strikes me about many of them is that they have no compunctions about bad-mouthing their oppo-nents and telling lies about them. I do not under-stand this. In the New Testament Epistle of First Peter we read, “Honor everyone.” I am not persuad-ed that to be successful in politics one has to bad-mouth one’s opponents. But if you believe this is required, then don’t go into politics; do something else. Do not compartmentalize your Christian con-

victions. Look for work that does not require you to put your Christian convictions on hold.

Third, when you look for work, look for work that you are good at, work that fits your God-given talents. Over the years I have found myself advising students who wanted to become profes-sional philosophers but who weren’t very good at philosophy. One of them was named Amy. “Amy,” I finally said to her, “there are other worthwhile things to do in life than teach philosophy.” “Not for me there aren’t,” she immediately replied. It turned out that she thought teaching philosophy was prestigious and she wanted the prestige. My advice to you is: forget the prestige. Look for work that fits your talents. If farming fits your talents, go for it. I love what the English Puritans wrote on this matter. Here is what one of them (John Dod) said: “Whatsoever our callings be, we serve the Lord Christ in them….Though your work be humble, yet it is not a humble thing to serve such a master in it.”

Let me add that you may not yet know what your talents are. I didn’t know what my talents were when I graduated from Western. I enrolled at Calvin College, and took the required philosophy course in the first semester of my sophomore year.

We were about thirty minutes into the first class session when I said to myself, “I don’t know wheth-er I am any good at this; but if I am, this is it.” As it happens, I did prove to have a talent for philoso-phy. But I didn’t know that when I graduated from Western. So keep your eyes open for work that fits your talents. Don’t over-rate yourself, as Amy did. But also don’t under-rate yourself. Most of you come, as I did, from a small town in the upper mid-West; don’t let those humble origins deter you from developing and using the talents you’ve been given. Don’t aim too low.

Fourth, when you look for work, look for work that you enjoy doing, work in which you can find fulfillment. In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes we read, “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This, I saw, is from the hand of God” (2:24). The writer clearly thought the point was important; so a few verses later he repeats it: “It is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil” (3:13).

From the time I was a teen-ager I have known that lots of work is onerous and boring. But I first became fully aware of the importance of this point when I found myself advising Korean and Chinese students who were planning to go into medicine but who told me that they did not expect to like medicine. So why were they planning to go into medicine if they anticipated not liking it? Because their parents were forcing them to go into medi-cine; if they did not go into medicine, the family would be shamed.

I haven’t mentioned money. Hundreds of com-mencement speeches will be given over the next several weeks in which the speaker urges the stu-dents to aim at being successful, with success be-ing understood as financial success. I haven’t said anything about financial success. I realize that most of you will have to make a living from your work. If so, then good work for you will not only be work that satisfies the four criteria I mentioned but work that provides you with a living. Not work that makes you wealthy; work that provides you with a living.

Lots of work does not involve making a living: volunteer work, for example, and the work done by housewives and, nowadays, by househusbands.

Your and my work is to be one aspect of our love for the neighbor. And in loving the neighbor, we are serving God. We are to serve God by loving the neighbor in our work, not just after work.


I wanted to include such work in my discussion. And as for working for a living, I am reminded here of what a businessman friend of mine, Max de Pree, once observed when someone said in his pres-ence and mine that the point of business is to make money. “No,” said Max, “I don’t agree. You see, for me, making money is like breathing. I don’t live to breathe; I breathe to live.”

Five pieces of advice for you graduates as you commence the rest of your lives and look for work: look for work that serves God and neighbor and is in that way worthwhile, look for work that does not compromise your integrity, look for work that

fits your God-given talents, look for work that you will enjoy, and, if necessary, look for work that pro-vides you a living. If you find good work, do not fail daily to give thanks to God. Good work is a precious gift.

Oh, one more thing. Work isn’t everything, not even good work. Look for work that doesn’t take up all your time, work that leaves time to delight in God’s creation, to enjoy family and friends, to assemble for worship. Look for work that does not require that you become a workaholic.

We, your relatives, your teachers, your friends, hope and pray that you find good work.


BOOK REVIEWSBeyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Roth, Michael S. New Haven: Yale University, 2015. (Paperback with new preface.) 248pp. ISBN: 978-0300212662. Reviewed by Walker Cosgrove, Assistant Professor of History, Dordt College.

American colleges and universities today are un-der fire for any number of reasons, including the cost of education, the impracticality of a college degree, the charge that good schools only service elites, and the seemingly out-of-touch faculty. In Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University and profes-sor in history and the humanities, seeks to combat this backlash through a staunch defense of “liberal education.” Rightly, in my opinion, Roth is concerned about the moves many colleges and universities are now making to become, supposedly, more practical. Common examples include the trend of offering more vocational-specific degrees, a questionable choice giv-en the number of times that the average students will change jobs and even careers before 30 years of age; “measurable outcomes” for everything, again ques-tionable because it is impossible to measure or quan-tify what is truly meaningful; and the paring down of core requirements, unfortunate because in many cases these courses once defined institutions of higher edu-cation.1 Roth wants to encourage his readers to recon-sider how they think about education, instead of fo-cusing on job or salary outcome, and to consider how education shapes and molds individuals. To that end, Roth’s book serves well as a wakeup call, reminding us of the true value and purpose of higher education.

It is important to note from the outset that Roth is no elitist who thinks Americans need to embrace an education-for-education’s sake mentality. He certainly does not propose a return to, or strengthening of, traditional art and science curricula, and I do not imagine he would recommend that most schools start Great Books programs (128, 131, 148-149). Instead, he has a nuanced idea of “liberal education,” and while he certainly connects it to the past and draws from those streams, he emphasizes the present and the future, as well as the meeting of specific, real-world needs.

The closest we get to a definition of “liberal educa-tion” comes in the introduction, when Roth writes, “Liberal education, as I use the term throughout this book, refers to the combination of the philosophical

and rhetorical traditions of how one learns as a whole person” (4-5). The rest of the book unpacks this idea of liberal education, particularly through a reflection on thinkers throughout American history. According to Roth, liberal education is important because:

In an age of seismic technological change and in-stantaneous information dissemination, it is more crucial than ever that we not abandon the human-istic frameworks of education in favor of narrow technical forms of teaching intended to give quick, utilitarian results. Those results are no substitute for the practice of inquiry, critique, and experience that enhances students’ ability to appreciate and under-stand the world around them—and to innovatively respond to it. A reflexive, pragmatic liberal education is our best hope of preparing students to shape change and not just be victims of it (10-11, emphasis mine).

After setting the stage with his introduction, Roth frames his argument in four chapters focused on American history. My first serious criticism of this work is this structure. While the basic chrono-logical organization is easy enough to follow, it is not completely clear how all the various components fit together, until the last few pages of the book. The first two chapters provide a chronological examina-tion of specific thought about liberal education in American history, from the foundation the United States through the nineteenth century. Chapter one focuses on Thomas Jefferson, includes discussion on African-American writers David Walker and Frederick Douglass, and concludes with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapter two traces the Emersonian influence in W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, and William James. In the third chapter Roth examines the various con-troversies over liberal education throughout American history, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s critique of Harvard and ending with current struggles. Chapter four, the book’s final chapter, emphasizes pragmatism and fostering a commitment to lifelong learning, and here John Dewey and Richard Rorty have the spot-light. There is no standalone conclusion, except for the aforementioned final seven pages, which do act some-what as a conclusion by providing overall coherence to


the broader argument.What makes those final pages of the book so im-

portant is that they provide the coatrack on which we can hang all the examples, individuals, institu-tions, and history discussed in the previous 190 pages, and thus begin to make sense of them in connection with Roth’s broader argument for a liberal education. Here Roth reflects upon a lecture on liberal education that he gave in China, which was organized on the concepts of “Liberate,” “Animate,” “Cooperate,” and “Instigate/Innovate” (191). His overall argument goes something like this: Jefferson illustrates “Liberate,” in his emphasis that education should allow individuals to discover what they can/will do, as opposed to train narrowly for a specific vocation. Emerson represents “Animate” because he believed education ought to ex-cite and encourage students to “tap into their creativity so that they can animate their world” (192). The four thinkers (Du Bois, Addams, James, and Dewey) as-sociated with pragmatism connect with “Cooperate.” The idea is that education ought to produce certain habits, especially geared toward living well together in society. Instead of studying what has no immediate use, education ought to empower and encourage stu-dents to engage and change their world; as Roth writes, “The point will be the transformation of the self and of one’s culture” (47). Rorty demonstrates “Instigate/Innovate” because he suggested that liberal education ought to challenge the status quo and encourage inno-vation to overcome it with something better.

This is an interesting and compelling argument, but not without its faults. To begin with, my second major criticism of the work is that Roth’s definition of liberal education is too fluid. True, he gives the defini-tion I provided above, but he also seems to embrace Dewey’s notion that “no disciplines [are] intrinsically part of liberal education” (193). At one point Roth re-fers to “an evolutionary approach to liberal education” (104), but he is not really clear who or what deter-mines/guides that evolutionary approach, and, more importantly, how to avoid focusing too much on prac-tical outcomes or vocational training, to me, the logi-cal conclusion of pragmatism. Ultimately, he suggests that liberal education is pragmatic and useful. But what does this mean? Who determines the definition of practical or useful? I would guess that most admin-istrators today would argue that vocational training is practical and useful. Thus, Roth should be clearer on how his pragmatic, liberal education is fundamentally different from the more practical, vocationally minded approaches that he critiques.

I agree with Roth’s view that liberal education

ought to be about the whole person and not simply vocational training; however, he never establishes how this education ought to be conducted. This leads to my third major criticism: the scope of the book is too narrow. Roth focuses only on American conceptions of education. Yet taking a much broader view of edu-cation to consider the classical world, the medievals, or even a variety of historic Catholic approaches (the Jesuits or John Henry Newman, to cite two examples) could help him clarify what he means by certain terms or ideas such as “character formation” or “education of the whole person.” The ancient world has plenty to say about these topics, the medievals gave birth to our modern colleges and universities and their curricula, the Jesuits globally established colleges and universities focused on whole-person education, and Newman’s The Idea of a University is a vital nineteenth-century work on liberal education. One common idea unit-ing these other visions of education is the necessary centrality of traditional arts and sciences, in shaping persons, and thus society, at the college level.

In starting his historical focus with Jefferson, Roth omits many of the major voices regarding education in human history. His excessive focus on the practical and useful reveals that he is working out of a similar paradigm as college and university administrators who push vocational and technical education and seek to drop fundamental core classes. Roth needs to more se-riously consider and engage with the deep past. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that, “Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as from a root,”2 and to do this Roth needs to consider the millennia-long tradition of the arts and sciences as they have been handed down—the same tradition that Jefferson, Emerson, and James were immersed in. Certainly, the traditional arts and sci-ences are not so apparently “useful” by any pragmatic standards, but to quote poet Charles Péguy, “Homer is new this morning and nothing is so old as yester-day’s newspaper.”3 And in a recent book, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein suggests that philoso-phy is as important and useful today as it was 2400 years ago in Plato’s Athens.4

I think that Roth and I agree that colleges and uni-versities ought to be places where students are broadly (liberally) educated; however, we diverge on the cur-ricula utilized to this end. Based on his notion of the “evolutionary character” of liberal education as well as the idea that no disciplines inherently fit liberal educa-tion, Roth is predisposed to the recent and current, while I would encourage traditional arts and sciences that have been “hallowed by usage and consecrated


by time,” to quote a character from the film Miller’s Crossing.5 It might be possible that the answers to our problems today lay beyond our own narrow history.

Roth does levy some thoughtful criticisms that every administrator at an institution of higher educa-tion ought to consider. For example, he is fairly dis-missive of emphases on both technical and vocational programs, as well as the specialized research institu-tion. While I do think there is a place for vocational development and specialized research, it is interesting that many small liberal arts colleges today, attempting to answer current problems, are moving away from their traditional arts and sciences roots to become ei-ther technical and vocational institutions (158, 190) or specialized research institutions where faculty no longer educate students liberally, but instead focus on their own research agenda (104).

A second poignant criticism regards student evalu-ations and the power they have to change the educa-tional experience for the worse (136-137). Roth writes, “[T]he great bulk of the information [that university officials] use to determine the quality of teaching is the satisfaction of the students as expressed on surveys. In his introduction to the 2002 edition of The Academic Revolution, Jencks puts it this way: ‘So instead of giv-ing students what grownups think the students need, most teaching institutions are under considerable pres-sure to give students what they want’” (137).

Despite my criticisms of Beyond the University, Roth has written an important and engaging book that speaks to some of the most important problems in higher education today. As a college president, criticizing certain trends that are particularly popular among college administrators, he shows that he swims

upstream, for which he ought to be applauded. This book ought to be required reading for any administra-tor considering a move to technical and vocational ed-ucation, or a push towards emphasizing research and grant-winning. It is also recommended for anyone in-terested in knowing at least one strand of the develop-ment of higher education in American history. I hope this fine book prompts discussion across American colleges about the ultimate purpose of higher educa-tion.

Endnotes

1. Regarding the latter point, I’m thinking specifically of Notre Dame’s 10-year curriculum review’s proposal of dropping philosophy and theology requirements. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/02/17/notre-dame-is-reviewing-its-curricu-lum-which-could-have-far-reaching-effects/.

2. G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Chesterton on Dickens (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 425.

3. As quoted by Charles Singleton in his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, translated, with a commentary, by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 371.

4. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).

5. Miller’s Crossing. DVD. Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1990.

To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Philip A. Wallach. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015. 319 pp. ISBN 978-0-8157-2623-4. Reviewed by Jack R. Van Der Slik, Professor Emeritus, Political Studies and Public Affairs, University of Illinois-Springfield.

For me, To the Edge is a headache to read. That is not because it is overly long. Its seven chapters are wrought in 218 pages. Nevertheless, the subject matter of corporate finance and regulation is highly complex. A plethora of laws, regulations, agency titles (with acronyms), corporate titles, and terminology from corporate and government finance litters the text. The book is about the Great Recession in the American economy that commenced in 2008 and the ways that government policy makers and regulators sought to deal with the causes and consequences of a plunging economy. The scholar addressing this in-quiry, Philip Wallach, is a Princeton Ph.D. in politics,

interested in the regulatory statutes of the American administrative state. To reckon with his subject matter, the reader must penetrate the inner workings, indeed shifting sands, of the nation’s governmental and cor-porate bureaucracies.

Even the headline issues were difficult to under-stand from the onset of the economic crisis. After ear-lier economic tremors, in March 2008 the country’s seventh-largest investment bank, Bear Stearns, ap-proached financial insolvency. In an elaborate arrange-ment primarily engineered by Henry Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, chair-man of the Federal Reserve, the government provided


federal loan incentives to press J.P. Morgan Chase Bank to acquire Bear Stearns and provide liquidity to Bear Stearns’ customers. Half a year later, Lehman Brothers, the nation’s fourth-largest investment bank, suffered liquidity problems. This time the government response was different. Judging that the consequences and liabilities of a Bear Stearns-like solution were dis-tinguishable from the Lehman case, Secretary Paulson let it be known that no government aid was forthcom-ing. The result was that Lehman’s Board of Directors unanimously voted for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.

Also teetering on insolvency as the 2008 financial crisis deepened were the federal government’s spon-sored enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, quasi-governmental lenders for home mortgages. Legally private corporations but created as federal insti-tutions central to the mortgage market serving Ameri-can homeowners, they were too big to be allowed, by the federal government, to fail. Thus to save these government-sponsored enterprises, Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) at Paulson’s and the Bush administration’s urging. Responding to stock-price declines in Freddy and Fanny shares due to investor fears about insolven-cy, Paulson used the new law to put Fanny and Freddie under government conservatorship. Among the details of the solution, the Treasury committed $100 billion to each of them, later raising the allocations to $200 billion, thereby backing the net worth of the firms and stanching downward market pressure on the prices for Fanny and Freddie stocks.

The world’s fifth-largest insurance company, American International Group (AIG), was also stuck in the home mortgage business. One of its divisions, by writing “credit default swaps” that insured the value of mortgage-backed securities, went underwater when the housing market downturn revealed that the mort-gages underlying these securities were seriously over-valued. AIG was obligated to huge losses. As property and security values plummeted, AIG exhausted its liquid funds and bankruptcy was imminent. Where could it access a capital infusion? After private sector attempts to generate a financing package fell apart, the Federal Reserve came up with a secured loan through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for $85 billion, but on very demanding terms (government ownership and 12.5% interest). AIG’s board approved the deal.

To illustrate how the fever of declining asset values can spread, he considers the money market mutual funds (MMFs). For depositors, accounts in MMFs were considered a safe preserver of financial value. But

when Lehman went down, F, Reserve Primary Fund (a major MFF), suffered a huge loss. When it was re-quired by law to make the loss public, a run on its funds began, and the run created panic in the MMF market. The MMF loan business sustains short-term financing for large corporate firms, for example, pro-viding timely cash for their payrolls. In short, the panic threatened to seize up a sector of the credit market that would endanger a wide range of corporate enterprises. The Federal Reserve created a short-term solution by dispersing funds to banks in order to purchase MMF assets so that they could satisfy investor redemptions. The program put $150 billion into this specialized market in its first ten days, successfully stanching the need for investor redemptions and thereby reducing redemption demands to normalcy.

Despite measures already described, the mort-gage market continued to deteriorate. Paulson and Bernanke expressed their need for more resources of money and discretion to President Bush, who agreed to a congressional proposal. The central element, re-membered as TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), was to allow Treasury to buy devalued mortgage assets from banks and investment firms. The initial proposal was rejected with bipartisan opposition. The reaction prompted the worst ever one-day drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average—778 points. Terror in the financial sector stimulated changed views in Congress. In the first week of October 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act became law, funding TARP with $700 billion and giving tools of discre-tion to Bernanke and Paulson. In a rapid fashion, the Treasury directly injected capital into banks by taking ownership of preferred shares of stock. It directed $125 billion to nine major banks and a like amount to smaller needy but healthy banks.

In a less anticipated move, TARP funds became the emergency source of funds to General Motors and Chrysler. An ambivalent President Bush responded to the ailing auto builders headed toward what he called a “disorderly bankruptcy” in the time between the election and President-elect Obama’s inaugural. Bush said, “I believe that good policy is not to dump [on Obama] a major catastrophe in his first day of office.” From TARP, short-term loans were made to facilitate restructuring at GM and Chrysler in an attempt to prevent both layoffs and bankruptcy. The Obama ad-ministration put in place an Auto Task Force, which oversaw subsequent orderly bankruptcies, resulting in Chrysler eventually being reorganized, then partner-ing with Fiat. In 2014, Fiat completed its acquisition of Chrysler. A reshaped GM also made a successful


recovery. The auto bail-outs made taxpayers unsecured creditors to these public corporations. It should be added that the Treasury began selling its stake in Gen-eral Motors in 2013 and completed the sale of its last holding in December, reportedly losing $9 billion on an investment of $49.5 billion (183).

The government’s reported loss regarding General Motors triggers the question, what did the crisis re-sponses by the federal government cost the American taxpayer? Perhaps the most authoritative judgment about the cost of TAROO cost is that of the Office of Management and Budget in 2014: an estimated $39 billion. Following a labored discussion of the question, Wallach argues that “any grand total calculated for the government’s crisis responses will say as much about the author’s assumptions as about the underlying facts…. [W]e can nevertheless say with certainty that the responses cost less than most observers initially ex-pected, so that citing the dollar costs of the bailouts became a less compelling critique of the administra-tion as time went by” (185).

What cannot be gainsaid is that the measures crafted by Paulson and Bernanke during the Bush ad-ministration, and continued under Geithner and Ber-nanke during the Obama administration, did prevent a financial collapse that might have become truly cata-strophic. As a political commentator myself, I think that it is remarkable to note how peripheral to the presidential election in the fall of 2008 the crisis was. Its issues were largely ignored during the campaign. After the transition from Republican Bush to Demo-crat Obama, there was no sharp reshaping of the crisis responses. To the contrary, Obama continued what Bush set in motion, retaining Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and moving Geithner from the Federal Re-serve in New York to Treasury Secretary.

It is true that the crisis responses did necessarily pick economic winners and losers. J.P. Morgan Chase was a winner because Paulson engineered a bargain price for its acquisition of Bear Stearns. Yet all of Lehman’s interested parties lost in its unaided collapse. AIG executives and investors suffered a great deal, but the company survives. So do General Motors and Chrysler, though hugely changed. But Ford, taking no federal funds, could have been a huge winner had GM and Chrysler bankruptcies been harsher. What about homeowners with mortgages who suffered value losses because overvalued mortgage-backed securities put the housing market into a downward spiral? Ordinary sav-ers, trying to live on interest earnings, took a haircut as interest rates plummeted to near zero, where the rates have persisted to the present day.

The complexity of Wallach’s explanatory task is ex-acerbated by the need to identify agencies, programs, and financial terminology relevant to the story. To Wal-lach’s credit, he did his best to account for and identify the agencies and programs relevant to the story told in this book. There is, for example, a four-page, fifty-two item, alphabetically ordered “glossary of crisis laws and programs,” listed by their acronyms (from “ABCP. Asset-backed commercial paper; short term bonds backed by physical assets” to “WaMu. Washington Mutual Bank.”) Wallach’s footnote citations fill over 80 pages of the book—pages 223 to 306—with 952 footnotes, most of them citing more than one source.

To the Edge actually celebrates the success of nim-ble policy administration because in reality, the Ameri-can economy was close to total disaster, one that was arrested by incentives to corporate America from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Prudently, Wallach does not expend much effort parsing out blame for the origins of the crisis of 2008. His critical observa-tions about how the federal government responded are simplified by applying the term “adhocracy.” He faults policymakers for improvising crisis responses, some quite arbitrary, with tenuous statutory support. Of course, that opinion was not rare in the financial community. To this day there are cases pending. For example, former AIG Chairman Maurice Greenberg is still in federal court contesting the fairness of the government take-over of his company without “just compensation” (see June 15, 2015 issue of the The New York Times). Indeed, Wallach gets the title for his book from former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, who saw the Fed’s actions as extending “to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers” (54). Wallach has an easier time delineating the stretching of legal boundaries than he does with differentiating legitimacy/illegitimacy standards apart from the law.

Before departing his rendition of the crisis and its aftermath, Wallach offers some prescriptions for how government should arrange policy for the “next time” such an economic challenge emerges. His expressed hope for a “more active legislature” sounds rather like dutiful constitutionalism instead of realistic advice. Congress does not do well at anticipating long-term future challenges, but, as in this case, it does l e n d legal authority in times of crisis. Wallach’s strongest pitch is for “an accountable slush fund” (213 ff), of $50 or $100 billion for the Secretary of the Treasury to spend with discretion in times of exigency. Imagine the Tea Party response to that proposition. What con-gressional members, seeking reelection, would defend a vote in favor of such a proposal?


Wallach has given us a seriously directed, thor-oughly documented rendition of a complicated, government-managed calming of the U.S. Great Re-cession. On the whole Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, and their governmental minions, though guilty of choosing winners and losers with some arbitrariness, contained the disaster to the benefit of and greater good for most Americans. We who seek public justice on moral standards can question specifics, but on the whole, public peace was preserved by the steady hands of those in governmental authority. Relatively mild protests from the right (Tea Party) and left (Occupy Wall Street) necessitated no tanks in the streets. Curi-ously, the elected politicians did not divide by party but coalesced in support of prudent policy measures

from first a Republican administration and then a Democratic one.

This book is not an easy read, but Wallach has de-vised his own eleven-page summary of its essentials in a recent essay, “Democratically Accountable Adhoc-racy? The Challenges of Legitimating the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis,” available online at The Brookings Institute’s website.1 Readers of this review may find Wallach’s essay as much as they care to know about Wallach’s recommendations.

Endnote

1. www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/06/17–legitimating–financial–crisis–adhocracy–wallach

Dordt College is a Christian liberal arts college in Sioux Center, Iowa, which believes that the Bible is the infallible and inspired Word of God and which bases the education it provides upon the Bible as it is explained in the Reformed creeds. Hence, the college confesses that our world from creation to consummation belongs to God, that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation, and that true comfort and reliable strength can be had only from his Holy Spirit.

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