“My first and most persistent goal in life was to become a saint.” So writes Luke Timothy Johnson in his academic autobiography, which I have, so far, only read about. In this interview with Nijay Gupta, Johnson reflects on how this goal shaped his work as a scholar:
“First, I have always considered only one thing essential — to become (or better, to allow God to make one) a certain kind of person. Everything else I have considered as secondary and non-essential. The judgment of other humans is trivial compared to the absolute judgment of God. Such a conviction enables one to speak boldly and without fear.
“Second, I have considered scholarship as a serious enterprise, but one without ultimate importance. It is, indeed, a game that, like all games, must be played seriously if it is to be played well. But it is played best when it is played with the freedom that authentic faith gives and is not erected into an idolatrous project.
“Third, if scholarship is non-ultimate, then an academic career is even more nugatory. The academy should be regarded as a social arrangement whose importance is measured solely by the way it serves the ends for which it was designed. Do students learn? Do teachers grow in knowledge? Is the church and society made better by these processes? To the degree that “the academy” becomes absolute and self-serving, to that degree it has lost its way.” (Read the whole interview here.)
Johnson, a Roman Catholic New Testament scholar, is surely riffing off of Thomas Merton:
“There’s a wonderful moment in Thomas Merton’s The
Seven-Storey Mountain when Merton — a new convert to Catholicism
— is whining and vacillating about what he should be: a teacher, a
priest, a writer, a monk, something else altogether maybe, a labor
activist or a farm laborer. And his friend Robert Lax tells him that what
he should want to be is a saint.” - Alan Jacobs
Academics who fail to get their ambitions straight all too easily end up with the apotheosis of scholarly vices that C.S. Lewis described as hell:
“We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually
concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a
grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy,
self-importance, and resentment.” - C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (HT: Sean Davidson)
I suspect C.S. Lewis’s picture of hell is part of what Willie James Jennings has in mind when he argues in After Whiteness that western theological education tends to form students into white, male plantation owners—those who seek control, possession, and mastery, and who know how to get it. “Whiteness,” Jennings says in this OnScript interview, is
“A way of being in the world and a way of seeing the world at the same time, a way of organizing, shaping, and envisioning the world. And whiteness is having the power to realize that vision. Whiteness is imagining the world from an imperial position of thinking and making. And whiteness has been presented as an aspiration for all those who have seen the possibilities of a world after the rise of colonialism—a world in which things can be changed, people can be owned, land can be owned. ... A white self-sufficient man ... embodies what I call three demonically derived virtues: control, possession and mastery. And that man has been imagined as the one who would build the world.” Willie James Jennings –– After Whiteness | OnScript
So which will it be—white male plantation owner or saint?
