Cousins

These are my remarks for the NSA Convocation 2013

Just over a decade ago, I spoke at convocation, much as I am doing now, and gave a mock convocation address for the year 2022, now just nine years away from us. In that address, among many other cogent observations, I said this:

“We continue to recruit the children and grandchildren of alumni, particularly those who have alumni on both sides of the family tree. This in its turn has had the result of ensuring that the entire student body is made up of cousins.”

Now since we are past the halfway mark on that prediction, I thought perhaps we should check on our progress. Members of the student body, if the following describes you, please raise your hand. Are you related, to the degree of cousin or closer, by blood or marriage, to any current or past faculty, administration, alumni, or current students? I mean cousins, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. Now let’s include those who are in what Facebook is pleased to call “a relationship”—let’s see your hands. You already told the world, why not tell us? For the last group, it would not be appropriate to ask them to raise their hands, but we should at least include them in the thought experiment. If you are still getting up the nerve to call her dad, and she is just sitting there two rows ahead of you acting like she doesn’t know about it, you two can raise your hands in your hearts. If we include those folks, Dr. Atwood, our work here is almost done.

Now this is all a great deal of fun, of course, but let’s see what we can do to make it edifying, serious, and worthy of air time at convocation. Actually, that should not be hard at all.

We find ourselves in a dangerous and exhilarating time. We are Kuyperian and Reformed in our understanding of the world, which means that we believe the Lord Jesus has functional authority over every inch of the cosmos. We are postmillennial in our eschatology and expectations, which means we are on the move. We believe that the unchanging and triune God placed an antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent in the first pages of the Bible, and we believe that this antithesis is a structuring theme for all human history. In short, all this together means that in the name of Jesus, we lay claim to the whole world, and in the name of the Holy One of Israel, we defy the spirit of the whole world. This means collisions.

In our day, one of the key places where these collisions will be increasingly in evidence is in the realm of human sexuality. And thus we pass from light-hearted jokes about cousin-making to one of the most serious issues of our time. We are not talking about the perennial human tendency to misbehave, but rather we are speaking about the deepest bedrock of our rebellion. I mean the point where we have wanted to wrest control of God’s right to define and shape the world, taking it from His right hand (as if we could), and then to see how it goes when we do it.

At NSA, we stand against this. But we have to do it in wisdom. It was C.S. Lewis who said that we tend to guard against the error we are least likely to fall into. Confronted with a flood, we break out the fire extinguishers. And thus it is that some in our midst might fear that we are in danger of inculcating a false template for masculinity, where the men spit tobacco and drag chain saws around. Now this mistake is understandable, but only if you are the kind of person who has watched three episodes too many of White Collar, and have done so with all the discernment of a five gallon metrosexual shop-vac. Really? We live in a time where the girls have tattoos and the guys have silk scarves, and we are worried about all the excessive testosterone?

Look. If the Church Relevant got just a little bit more masculine, they might make it up to the vertebrate levels attained by the chocolate eclair. Our work here is counter-cultural, and in ways that include having to lean contrary to many public compromises in the church. My charge to you students, whether you have one year left with us, or four, is that you understand that God is using this time to fashion you into a woman or man of God. To use the phrasing of one scholar, we want your time here to be more about formation than information. But now I am perhaps going to embarrass you. You cannot become more of a woman of God without also becoming . . . more womanly. You cannot become more of a man of God without also becoming . . . more manly. More manly. I can’t believe he said that. The forehead reddens. One looks around in vain for a Victorian swooning couch.

We do not serve the God of mild improvements, but rather the God who raises the dead. When God grants the spirit of repentance to a generation, as we trust He will do with ours, the result will not be that our slide to perdition will be slowed down just a skosh. As Tyndale once put it, God is “no patcher.” He casteth all down first. The God who gives repentance is a God who gives, by definition, a different direction entirely.

It was Lewis again who once remarked that the Puritans were “highly-sexed.” This was quite true, and while we do not want to emulate the Puritans in every last respect, we are their heirs, and we do acknowledge them as our betters. We should want to imitate them in most respects, but especially in this area. In this area, they were not just our betters, but our far betters. They were the first significant group of Christians in history to bring together romantic love, sexuality, family, the meaning of calling and vocation, grounded in the gospel of sovereign grace, and tying it all together in a biblically political vision of a Christian commonwealth. We have been out-maneuvered for a few centuries now, but we are back, and we want to have at it again. It is time for another go.

Our prayer is that God grants us, here, in this college, a sustained vision. Our vision, like everything else we do, must be under the authority of the Scriptures, and so we want our vision to be encompassed by what Paul was talking about when he was praying that the Ephesians would know the exceeding greatness of God’s power toward us who believe (Eph. 1:19). We do not want a vision, sustained or otherwise, which is driven by ambitious men who are not tethered to the Word. God has shown us great kindness for twenty years, and we want to testify to that same kindness for 200 more.

We are God’s covenant people, and in Scripture God’s covenant extends over generations. As God’s covenant people, we are committed to a vision of Christian education, from the beginning of life to the end of it. Generations means education. Education means institutions—schools and colleges, where we meet one another and cultivate a common vision of the public good, a vision shaped by Scriptures. That Word of the Lord came from the prophets, not to mention the Word of the Lord who was born of a virgin.

This vision must extend over generations—and as soon as we are talking about generations, we are also talking about . . . cousins.