We live in the portion of God’s grander story that is after the “fall” and “redemption, but before the final “restoration.” Theologians refer to this as a period of “already/not yet” tension: We have a down payment of God’s presence in the Spirit, but we long to be with him face to face; The power of sin has been dealt with at the cross, yet not the presence of sin. We will live forever, but we physically die.
In this chapter of the grander story, our lives—both inside and outside the university—are a confused amalgamation of heartbreak and hope.
Take your marriage for example
In his book What Did You Expect: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, Paul David Tripp addresses how our fallen brokenness influences marriages. Here’s his simple logic: We married (if we are married) a broken person, right? We ourselves are shattered and broken, right? And we live among other broken people in a broken-down world, right? So, Tripp muses: What should we expect in our marriage?
We irrationally (yet wholeheartedly!) expect marriage to be endless days of smiles and romantic bliss. Whoever coined the expression “expectations are premeditated resentments” is a genius. If a professor expects a marriage to be full of perpetual smiles and romantic bliss, when he or she faces the pressure of getting tenure while often soothing a colicky infant, there is a catastrophic collision of expectations.
Tripp’s wisdom is very helpful: we live out our married lives (and single lives) in the context of a broken world, and we should expect unmet expectations and difficulties. We are “not yet” experiencing the coming restoration of all things.
The university is no different
One day, in a small group at Duke University I asked the question “If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?” The group grew reflectively sober as they mentioned the hard journey of unmet expectations both personally and professionally. Don’t ask this question, to students or professors, unless you expect to be sobered by the pain-filled answers.
What do we expect on this side of the fall? Expectations, acknowledged or not, can lead us toward lives of bitterness. On the other hand, if we embrace that our stories will always be lived out in a world that has pain and difficulties, it will help us flourish despite this, even as we trust God to provide strength to do what he has called us to do. The life God has given each of us, including the call to the university, is one that will be worked out in the midst of challenges and difficulties.
Our intellectual pursuits reflect the same tension
This tension, or conflict, between God’s good creation and the broken state of the world is evident everywhere, not only in the relationships of academe but in our Christian intellectual pursuits as well.
In Alvin Plantinga’s insightful essay “On Christian Scholarship” he observes:
“Christian thinkers going back at least to Augustine have seen human history as involving a sort of contest, or battle, or struggle between two implacably opposed spiritual forces. … Augustine was right; and the contemporary western intellectual world, like the world of his times, is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for our souls.”
The “unhappy fact,” according to Plantinga, is that in this struggle Christians often find themselves a disdained minority:
“Scholarship and science are not neutral, but are deeply involved in the struggle between Christian theism, perennial naturalism and creative anti-realism. And the unhappy fact is that at present (and in our part of the world) it is the latter two that are in the ascendancy. Christian theism has perhaps made some small steps back in recent years; but it is surely the minority opinion among our colleagues in Western universities.”
Our lives, both personal and academic, are lived out in a very real struggle. The grander story helps us understand why this is our lot.
This is why Zack Eswine writes of embracing the realities of unmet expectations, “All this is to say that the wise learn to manage life, not by frantically trying to glue together the knocked-over vase, but by gathering all of the shattered jagged pieces and powdered dust from the floor and bringing them to God.”
Rick Hove
Executive Director
Faculty Commons