Book review: Finding God at Harvard

            Finding God at Harvard, ed. Kelly Monroe Kullberg (Veritas Forum Books, div. IVP, 1996, 2007).

            Harvard University has the justifiable reputation of being one of the most difficult institutions of higher learning in the world, and, therefore, one of the most difficult to get into.  One irony is that it was founded by persons with Christian principles, but over the last two centuries has moved to a direction where it is even more antagonistic than most schools to a Christian worldview.  Still, there has been and is a committed Christian minority at the school, and in 1992 started a series of lectures titled the Veritas Forum.  Veritas, which means truth (think, as in the KJV, which has Jesus saying, “Verily, verily” and more modern versions saying “Truly, truly’) was the original motto (dated 1643) of Harvard.  The Veritas Forum lectures, which over time have spread to many college and university campuses, have speeches from Christian intellectuals on a variety of subjects dealing with the intellectual congruity of being a thinking person and believing in Jesus.

            To that effect, “Finding God at Harvard” is a group of 42 three to seven page essays written by persons who were students, faculty, or in some way connected to its campus and intellectual life writing on something connected to their spiritual journey.  Except possibly for a couple of essays near the end, they are all written in a style that doesn’t demand that the reader himself is college material to understand. 

            In my opinion, this is a good book for either a believer or non-believer in Jesus that is honestly struggling with the intellectual congruity of faith in Jesus and living on the intellectual cutting edge of the real world.  For the person, believer or non-, who doesn’t want to deal with intellectual issues, this book isn’t even close to something that person, except possibly Chapter 1, the first five essays.

            Since this book has been out for many years, one can probably find issues at www.half.com in addition to new book outlets.  I would not be surprised if this book is one of those IVP books that get updated and re-released every decade, a trait that imprint has with regard to their most timeless subjects.

Simple Church Minute 23--seminary and Bible schools

23—seminary and Bible schools

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute.

            Where did the idea come from that a believer cannot preach, baptize, administer communion, or lead other believers without certain formal education and/or formal approval of an organization?

            You can’t find it in the Bible—the early church spread quickly with a small group of persons that Jesus mentored.  Jesus, though, directed the disciples and others to be a new God’s people, based on faith, not on ceremony, status, but by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus taught a shared life to the disciples, and they taught the same.  People became believers, shared the life of the church, became experienced believers, where others could learn from him or her by word and example in a relational, living, working context.

            When Roman emperor Constantine (quote) converted (unquote), pagan orators soon converted and brought their attraction to logic and philosophy, and priests became trained in liturgy and ritual, mainly borrowed stylistically from paganism.  Around 1200 AD, the first universities began to form around the ideas of Aristotle, Abelard, and Aquinas.  After the Reformation, Protestantism promoted a well educated clergy class. In many places, the Protestant minister was the highest educated person in town.  Catholicism followed suit.  In the U.S., the first universities were founded by Calvinists who hired the highest educated individuals without regard to belief.  Those people renounced orthodox theology and Christian ethical standards, the legacy of which resides in the Ivy League, first, and the public university systems.  From that came the formation of Christian liberal arts colleges and the Bible school, which concentrated on Christian studies, over a shorter period of time, for the purpose of training missionaries, ministers, and parachurch workers.  Parachurch was a new construct—a Christian organization for a certain purpose that did not consider itself a church.  For all the positives of these various institutions, they were not the example Jesus gave us.

            You can email me at simplechurchminute@gmail.com.  You can find out more about organic church* at http://www.simplechurch.com/ or locally at (local website).

On the recording, at this time, it says, “house churches.”  While that phrasing is OK, to say “organic church” is better.  I comment on that in blip 94.