A Gospel Ground for Education: An Academic Credo

by John S. Tanner

I am honored to be with you tonight to speak about faith and scholarship knowing that so many of you embody a seamless unity of these values in your own lives. The organizers who invited me to speak likely envisioned a talk on the horizontal relation between the faith and scholarship: that is, how they complement or conflict with one another. Tonight, however, I want to take a different tack. I want to address the vertical relation between faith and scholarship: specifically, how faith – or, more broadly, religious beliefs – undergirds and grounds education. I have called my remarks “A Gospel Ground for Education.”

By “gospel ground” I mean the theological basis for education. I recognize that this is an inherently abstract topic, about as appetizing as dry toast—without butter. I shall try to make my views more palatable by focusing on two familiar foundational scriptures: the two Great Commandments in the New Testament and the Olive Leaf revelation in the Doctrine & Covenants. The first allows me to comment on the broadly Christian underpinning for education; the second allows me to consider its specifically LDS basis.

Both these scriptural texts contain commandments; they express religious imperatives. This focus is intentional for I believe that education is a religious duty, that God expects us to use our minds to love Him and neighbor. Since education is based on eternal imperatives, what follows is not just an analysis but also an academic “credo” of sorts—a statement of what I believe the Lord expects of me as a believer. Hence my subtitle. (“Credo” of course means “I believe.”)

I believe that the mind is a divine gift, that we are fashioned to love and serve God wittily, in the tangles of our minds-as Thomas More says in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons:

“God made the angles to show him splendor, as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man he made to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind.”

This sentiment is similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who exclaims:

“Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust [mold] in us unus’d.” (Act 4.4. 37-40)

Likewise, the Lord affirms the mind as a divine gift in His great charter of Christian discipleship, the so called “Great Commandments” to love God and neighbor.

The First Commandment explicitly sanctions the mind as a means of worship. It is telling that Jesus added “mind” when he reformulated Deuteronomy 6:5 as the “first and great commandment.” “Mind” occurs in all three versions of this commandment in the gospels. What is more, “mind” also appears in similar formulations found in modern revelation. (See appendix for comprehensive list.) There are at least ten such instances in LDS scripture containing similar lists that include “mind.”

Let me draw out some implications from this remarkable emphasis on mind by focusing on several words in the First Commandment:

• First, of course, “Mind”: As I have already stated, I believe that the inclusion of mind is both deliberate and deeply significant. The First Commandment dignifies the intellect as a vehicle with which to worship God and honor His creations. Some religious traditions disparage the intellect because of its potential for misuse. By contrast, the First Commandment recognizes that the mind as fundamentally holy, on a par with the heart or the soul. To be sure, there are spiritual dangers associated with the intellect, but these are perils from the misuse of a good gift not from any inherent evil in the gift itself. “To be learned is good,” Jacob affirms, “if they hearken.” This gets it just right. The Lord expects scholars to hearken: scholars are not exempt from obedience or meekness. At the same time, the Lord expects them to use their minds to love Him and to understand His creations.
• “Love”: We often think of loving God as something we do solely or mainly with our hearts and with our hands in service. The First Commandment obligates us to love the Lord with our minds. What a powerful idea, that the mind can be an instrument of love! I believe that God expects us to love Him thoughtfully, attentively, studiously. We demonstrate our love for God by learning about Him and his Creation. The First Commandment reminds us that there is a relation between learning and loving. To love with the mind describes my deepest experience as a learner, as a student not only of sacred but of secular matters. For me learning at its best is an intense form of loving, culminating in delight.
• “All”: We are commanded to love God with all our minds? Given this injunction, I believe that it is improper to segment our minds into hermetically sealed spheres, such as “sacred” and “secular”—as if all truth were not ultimately one. To love God with all our minds, means that our views on the disciplines must be informed by our discipleship. The First Commandment calls us to intellectual wholeness or integrity.
• “Heart, Soul, Strength”: Similarly, the First Commandment links mind with other faculties, with heart, soul, and strength. Like the emphasis on “all,” this list suggests an integrated approach to matters of the mind. It implies that properly the mind ought to be integrated with our other faculties. We are not simply minds in a vat; we are embodied beings who are commanded to love God with the totality of our being.
• “God”: The First Commandment focuses on loving God. What does it mean to bring our minds to the love of God? Does this enjoin us only to study religious subjects? I think not. Rather, I believe that the command to love God with our minds invites us to contemplate not only the Creator but His wondrous creations. To love God with our minds implies understanding his handiwork. The D&C says that anyone who has looked up into the starry sky “hath seen God moving in his majesty and power” (D&C 88:47). Those in former times spoke of God’s revealing himself in two books: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. I believe that he First Commandment invites us to read the testimonies of the divine inscribed in both books.
• “First”: Jesus states that this is the first commandment, and in another gospel, “first and great commandment. This priority is crucial. To me, it signifies that the love of God must claim precedence as our highest love; properly, the love of God orders and subordinates all other loves. This is to say that the First Commandment obligates believers to engage the disciplines as disciples.

Now let me turn to the Second Commandment. The Second Commandment calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This, too, has important implications with respect to a gospel ground for education. I believe that the imperative to love our neighbor implies an obligations to understand our neighbors—their culture, history, language, science, and so forth. For how can I love someone “as myself” whom I do not understand?

I also believe that the Second Commandment implies a responsibility to understand and care about our neighborhoods, which shape the soul for good and ill. As Ken Myers has written:

…fulfilling the commands to love God and neighbor requires that we pay careful attention to the neighborhood: that is, every sphere of human life where God is either glorified or despised, where neighbors are either edified or undermined. Therefore, living as disciples of Christ pertains not just to prayer, evangelism, and Bible study, but also our enjoyment of literature and music, our use of tools and machines, our eating and drinking, our views on government and economics, and so on. (“About Mars Hill Audio.)”

Neighbor-love thus requires thoughtful engagement with the world, including serious reflection on the academic disciplines, which serve as the repository of its wisdom.

Together, the Two Great Commandments call us as disciples to seek wisdom in light of our discipleship. All of us who embrace these divine injunctions live under a religious imperative to learn: about God and his mighty creations, as well as about neighbors and neighborhoods in which Christian love must be practiced.

Modern revelations makes our duty to learn even more explicit and concrete. A revelation to Joseph Smith entitled the “Olive Leaf” (D&C 88) sets forth an expansive vision of education for Latter-day Saints. According to Elder Dallin H. Oaks, the Olive Leaf, “which defined the objectives of the School of Prophets” still serves as “the basic constitution of Church education.” (“A House of Faith” in Educating Zion, 115.) Let me briefly describe how this grandly constitutional revelation articulates the how, what, and why of a gospel ground for education.

How: In the Olive Leaf the Lord enjoins his people to “diligently” “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). This counsel, which is repeated three times in the D&C (see also 109:7, 14), describes how Latter-day Saints should approach education. The key commandment as to how we should learn is likely familiar to all of you. We should learn by diligent study and by faith. Note that both study and faith are divinely sanctioned means of learning. I believe in a holistic pursuit of wisdom, which embraces such dichotomies as intellect and spirit, reason and revelation, head and heart.

I also believe that we should approach learning “diligently.” Modern revelation frequently uses the adverb “diligently” to describe how the Saints are to seek and search. I find it telling that at root “diligent” connotes not only strenuous effort but delight. “Diligence” derives from diligere, meaning to esteem highly, to love, to choose, take delight in. “Diligently” thus captures not only the rigor and assiduousness that should attend our study but also the joy and excitement that should characterize gospel-grounded learning.

What: The “Olive Leaf” also articulates what should be studied. It sets forth a broadly inclusive curriculum. Early Latter-day Saints were to “be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine.” They were to learn of things “both in heaven and in the earth and under the earth”; “things which have been, things which are, [and] things which must shortly come to pass”; things “at home” and “abroad,” “the wars and perplexities of nations” (D&C 88: 79). They were further commanded to seek wisdom “out of the best books” (D&C 88:118) and to “study and learn and become acquainted with…languages, tongues, and people” (D&C 90:15).

To my knowledge, these injunctions have never been revoked or rescinded. Therefore we too, as the early Saints, ought to understand the broad domains of human knowledge. For me, this is not only a daunting but a thrilling prospect. It invites me to indulge my intellectual curiosity. It is an antidote to intellectual sloth, narrow-mindedness, and self-satisfaction. And it is an injunction never to cease learning and ever seek to learn from those in every walk of life, not just from those in my narrow area of expertise.

The stunning scope of the Lord’s Curriculum in the Olive Leaf lends support to the proposition that the gospel embraces all truth. So wide is the expanse of things the Lord would have his Saints know!

This breadth may also bespeak the fact that ideas have consequences. The Lord knows that ideas in the academic disciplines can deeply affect discipleship, for good and ill. Hence, disciples in every generation must be “wise as serpents.” They must take the measure of the philosophy, science, art, culture, technology, etc. of their age if they are to be prepared in all things to proclaim the gospel. What the age propounds affects how disciples must expound the gospel to their neighbors. Hence, disciples have a double obligation to the disciplines: they have much to learn from them and they bring an important perspective to them.

Why: Finally, modern revelation describes why believers are to seek learning—its telos or purpose. Traditionally, two competing reasons are adduced to justify learning: instrumental and intrinsic. Modern revelation endorses both. The Doctrine and Covenants ascribes both instrumental and intrinsic value to learning.

The early Saints were commanded to seek learning so that they would “be prepared in all things” to “magnify” their calling as witnesses (D&C 88:80). That is, they were to seek learning for the sake of a world they were called to serve and save. This implies that learning is an instrumental good, one that helps disciples act more effectively in the world.

In addition, however, the Saints were to seek intelligence to become more like God. To this end they were taught that the “Glory of God is intelligence, or in other words light and truth” (D&C 93:36). This doctrine implies that learning truth is an intrinsic good, a good in and of itself, for it is an attribute of the Divine.

I cannot conceive a more powerful argument for the intrinsic value of learning than this, nor a more inspiring incentive to learn all the truth we can—even while in this life. For we have the promise that “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come” (D&C 130:18-19).

Intelligence makes us more like God. Obviously, intelligence is not coterminous with knowledge of academic subject. But I suspect that there is some overlap, since the truth is knowledge of things as they were, are, and will be. Further the habits of truth-seeking by study and faith will also rise with us in the resurrection and aid us in our quest for perfection and eternal life.

This is finally the true goal of education. The ultimate end of true education is to help us become more like God. As Milton says in Of Education:

“the end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.”

I have offered tonight an academic “credo” regarding the gospel ground for learning—a credo founded on the Great Commandments and on a modern revelation. I have focused on our religious obligation to learn. If, however, I were to reduce my academic credo to a sentence, I would state it as follows:

Credo: I believe that as disciples we have a religious duty to learn truth, to love truth, and to live truth.

Tonight I have focused almost exclusively on our duty to learn truth. This, however, is only the beginning of a disciple’s duty. It is not enough merely to learn truth; we must love it. And it is not enough only to love the truth; we must live it. Loving and living truth constitute higher obligations than learning truth, but to explore them would clearly require another lecture, which none of us has time for tonight. Thank you for your attention. May you found your scholarship on your faith.

Appendix
Deuteronomy 6:5
2 Kings 23:25
Matthew 22:37
Luke 10:27
Mark 12:30
2 Nephi 25:29
Mosiah 2:11
Alma 39:13
Moroni 10:32
D&C 4:2
D&C 11:20
D&C 20:31
D&C 33:7
D&C 59:5
D&C 98:47

© 2006 BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.