The Beginning of Wisdom John M, Buchanan
Proverbs 1:1-7; 9:10 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
June 5, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

Exactly ten years ago the educational institutions of this country were in the
middle of the greatest crisis they had ever experienced, The memories of that era
are still painful: campus revolts, the Free Speech Movement, the burning and trash-
ing of University buildings, and Kent State,Beneath. the ferment the whole matter of
education - its purpose and goals - was questioned, And beneath that the definition
of an educated person came under intense examination. Ten years ago this week Time
Magazine reviewed a collection of essays by students at San Francisco State, a
center of the general ferment. I clipped and saved it, and as I reread it this weck
in preparation for this sermon, was struck by the following sentence: "The only one
left to believe in is man, so I figure we've got to prepare him for the responsibil-
ity of being God." (Time, 6/9/66, p.96).

That, of course, is the clarion call to secularism, in vulgar form. Philoso-
phers and theologians have been talking about it for years, As scientific knowledge
about the universe increases, mystery and the unknown decreases - so the argument
goes, What humanity used to attribute to the providence of God, is now understood
in terms of mathematical probabilities and chemical characteristics, Thus our need
for God diminishes in direct proportion to our accumulated knowledge, "God is dead"
or at least obsolete, the argument runs. In His place stands the individual human
being; proud, in control of his destiny, master of all he or she surveys.

Over against that secular philosophy is the hauntingly familiar sentiment in
our Old Testament Lesson this morning; a sentence used by many - perhaps too many -
graduating classes as a class motto: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom." Therein, I would submit, lies a rather substantial conflict: a clear
difference between the direction our culture so: to be taking and a traditional
tenet of Christian religion, I propose this woi:\.g to examine that difference in
some detail. The conflict between the new propenincs of secular wisdom and the
defenders of traditional religion is amplified by the lamentable fact that neither
side is comfortable with, nor knows much about, the other, On the one hand religion
is regarded with bemused indifference in the halls of academia: a shame too, be-
cause it is quite impossible to understand the Western World apart from the heavy
influence of Judaism and Christianity, The late Howard Lowry, President of the
College of Wooster, said more than the provei’is1 mouthful when, in an address, he
observed: "There are very few vagaries of college students that one, with a Little
time and patience, cannot understand, But there is one that has always stumped me
completely, Why is it that students who will sit up far into the night talking
about the philosophy of religion or the psychology of religion and be content to
remain in almost abysmal ignorance of the Bible, which is the great original
document in these matters? In no other department of learning would such flimsy
research procedure be even tolerated," (College Talks, p.7~-8).

My own initiation into the conflict came abruptly. After one week at the
University of Chicago I had heard so much about two theologians, Paul Tillich and
Reinhold Niebuhr, that I concluded that I ought to own one of their books in order
to speak the language, Still very new and naive about such matters, I set out one
day and happened on a small establishment called the Hyde Park Book Store, The
proprietor was what was then known, euphemistically | as a beatnik: beard, beads
and sandles; there was a strange, sweet aroma in the air and the books in the
window on Zen, Allen Ginsberg, the New Left should have warned me, In any event I
asked naively, "Do you have any books by Tillich or Niebuhr?" Hc flew into a rage,

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and allowed as how his was a University book store not a kiddie's library, I was
stunned, humiliated and for 18 years I have been composing and recomposing a brilliant
rejoinder - which at the moment eluded me altogether,

That is extreme, of course, But academic regard for relision is not always
very high, Wo are, frequently, tolerated but barely. The other side of it is that
religion has not been consistently on the side of free and honest academic inquiry,
Academics will never forget that it was the Church that forced Galileo to deny what
he knew to be scientific fact; that the Cuurch fought for years before agreeing that
the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, Scientists will never forset
that it was the voice of religion that shouted down a young man by the name of Scopes
when he tried to teach scientific fact in a Tennessee classroom, Intellectuals can't
help but note tie heavy religious overtones in the recent effort in West Vire‘-ia to
dictate what literature English teachers may present, And if that sounds renoic,
please note that at this moment a well organized effort to force public school
teachers to present Genesis 1 and 2 as biology curriculum is succeeding all over the
country, It is called Creationism: it tries to make the story of God and humanity
into a laboratory science ~ which it is not, It discredits religion in the process.

There is, in any event, an historical suspicion in the eyes o” ‘ghez education
and religion as they look at each other, The tragedy is that they ai. not natural
enemies: in a very real sense they are both about the same business: they need, I
believe, each other very badly,

In a way, ve have made education a religion in our culture. Sydney Mead in
The Lively Experiment suggests that what emerged from the demise of state religion
“as state education. We have come to rcyard education as our salvation, the salution
to all our problems and, individually, the passport to the good life, "You must get
an education": perhaps the most familiar litany in the American Middle Class, And
Why? The answers came too easily, I fear. Because «. education vill allow you to
get a good job and a good job vill enable you to earn money and if you have money
you'li be happy. The key in education is grades. Grade. are the magic door te the
right graduate achool which, in turn, produces the best j b, Educators realize chat
the total emphasis on grade production has severely weakened the honer system which
was based on an older idea that integrity counts for more than class rank, Harpeys
Magazine published an excerpt from The Chronicle of Hig! zr Education on the subject
under tne title Grades for Sale, “Near the end of the fall quarter at the University
of Denver, Michael Rock walked into the course he was teachin; on microcconomic
theory and announced that he would auction off grades in the class - for money,

"Although a few students protested, Mr. Rock took in almost $2,000 getting an
average of $85 for an A, $55 for a B, and $35 for a C. One student, noticing that
several others werc absent, bought up ali the extra C's and D's and tried to sell
them for inflated prices. Mr. Rech took promisory notes from mast of the students,
but one gave hie $80 in cash, A fev students said they destroyed term papers and
stopped studyin,; after the auction,

“Tuo days later, Mr. Rock announced to the class that it was all a hoax, "The
most depressing thing was to see how easy it was to manipulate them, he said."

Harpers - October 75, Wraparound, p.5).

The behavior of the students, while regrettable, seems to be Logical and con-
sistent at least. We have said that happiness depends on money, money obviously

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depends on a job, a job depends on a graduate school and graduate school depends on
grades. ‘The fear of the Lord is the berinning of wisdom''? Hardly,

Beyond the competitiveness fostered by our obsession with rvades, education
faces two other crises that bear heavily on cur topic, me first is the "knowledse
explosion", My education was not substantially different from my parents’. When
I studied mathematics - it was assentially the same math they had studied, In
Chemistry, we dealt with the same alements, essentially. In Physics, the same bagic
concepts maintained. That is no tonger true, Within one generation the nature of
what is known has increased so much that anyone who has been out of school for a
decade doesn't cven speak the lansuage, In the sciences, the task simply of keeping
up with new rescarch is nearly impossible for any but the full-time scholar, I
identified sympathetically with the author of a recent article who confessed his
failure to honor an early commitment to keep abreast of what is happening in kis
field, He had first compromised by reading journal articles rather than scholurly
texts, then. book reviews of the orisinals, and is now reduced simply to reading the
lists of new tities published in his field,

cole”

The only way to cope, apparently, with the knowledge explosion is sitecliaation.
Very subtly the definition of an educated person has shifted from the older, rennais-~
sance model of one who has a balanced Imowledge in mary areas, to th. finely trained
apecialist in a well defined, but narrow field.

The dangers in specialization are obvious. So.azone has called it "Majoring
in minutae and missing the momentous," But more to the point, as f.2 back as Plato
philesophers have known that the specialist mentality can be contrary to a free
society. The reason is that the specialist, within the confines of his own area,
cannet see and often will not bear responsibility for the entire process, That's
what continues to bother the brilliant people whe work in nuclear technology, Only
at the very hishest echelons did the peopie whe worked on the Manhattan Project know
that they were building a bomb, And Ajolf Eichmann could claim that he was not
responsible for killing Jews, merely arranging transportation,

The LOth Century English Peet Shelley once observ:d: "We have more political
and historical knowledge than we can reduce into practice: we have more scientific
and economic knovledge than can be accommodated, We want the creative faculty to
imagine: our calculations have outrun our conceptions: we have eaten more than we can
digest.'' - a sentiment even more to the point in our generation,

The second creat crisis facing education is technology. If specialization is
the only way to cope witha the knowiedse explosion, the technician is the new model
of the educated man. We have placed a preat deal of faith in technology and the
technician. President Kennedy ordered a moon landing within a decade and technology
did it in less, Host of us, I presume, still feel that American technology will
resolve all the major problems which confront us, such as food, energy and the en-
vironment, Bue. the jury is still out - and the scientists ara the ones who know that
most clearly. In the meantime, the very processes which we hope will solve the
problems continuc to create new ones, Our dependence on petroleum threatens the
ecological balance, Nuclear enevsy is not the panacea we lay people think it is
apparently, And out on the edge, in research with the DNA Melecule and Genetic En-
gineering, major cthical and moral questions must be confronted,

I am reminded of the importance of the issue every time I visit SL, Anthony
Hospital here im Columbus, On the vall of the Main Entrance is a stone with an
Albert Rinstein quotation inscribed, Every time L see it, I'm stimulated: it reads:

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“Science without relizion is lame,
Religion without science is blind,"

And that, I would suggest, is not far from the essence of that ancient proverb
with which we began this exercise, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom," Wisdom was a very important word for the ancient Jews, It did not mean
knowledge as we use the word, Rather, "wisdom" in the words of one Old Testament
commentator, “is the knowledge of how best to conduct oneself in God's world, and
action consistent with that knowledge." The Jews collected bits and pieces of this
wisdom in single statements called Proverbs: practical advice about how to Live life,
The Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is a major compendium of this wisdom. In
our lesson this morning we heard visdom equated with righteousness, prudence, equal-
ity, discretion, These, the Bivlical tradition maintains, are the qualities of a
truly wise person, a person capable of living faithfully in Ged's world, It begins
with the "Fear of the Lord",

Fear, in this sense, means reverence, awe, wonder, To fear God is, in the
Bible, to acknowledse one's creatureliness, It is a way of acknovledging that we
are the tenants, not the owners, It is a way of confessing that we are dependent
on one greater than ourselves, The Bible preposes that the very foundation of
wisdom resides in that fact,

In St, Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, we employed the same idiom, The
wisdom of God, incarmate in Jesus Christ, may appear foolish to the world, But it
is the way of life and wholeness and peace and salvation,

When people step fearing God in that sense; when people forset that all of
life is lived out within the sovereignty of Him who created it, things begin to co
badly, we believe, That's the problem with secularism. The Jews vrote their
history punctuating that point, Life must be lived in harmony with God: His Lav -
His moral imperative - His will, Pure lmowledge is not wisdom, The efficiency of the
gas chambers of Auschwitz forever preves the point, ‘vechnological skill is not
wisdom: for the same expertise that may heat our homes one day, thus far has been
devoted to weaponry capable of obliterating all life,

At the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the staggering proposition
that God is: that we are His: that our lives are a gift and that ve are accountable
to Him for the way we live them and that we are fully and completeiy human beings
ouly in relationship with Him,

Our world needs that. Our world needs people who know it, It is the be-
pinning of wisdom,
Amen,

Father, help us to know ourselves as Your children, Keep us from arrogance:
grant us faith to acknowledge Your Lordship over all the world and over our Lives:
through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,