Seventh. The triad of fidelity invites to vocation whereas the triad of control invites to a career.
The triad of control is all about joining the firm, fitting in and advancing so someone at the club is sure to say, "You'll want to look out for this young woman because she is a comer." The pressure of higher education is all about career and how to make a good living and the university must do that. But the university is not just about making a living.
It is about something deeper and more serious than the advancement of what [leads to] might and wealth and wisdom.
So the best case study I know is the career of the young Daniel in the Book of Daniel who knew how to work the Babylonian system. And every narrative ends by saying Daniel got promoted to another office in the Babylonian empire . But along with all of these promotions you can see the sub-text of the Book of Daniel, that he did not give in, he did not forget.
And so his three friends whom we know by their imperial names, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are in are in fact remembered as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, by their Jewish names and their Jewish identities.
So education is a struggle for identity. Perhaps we might judge that these four handsome Jews had a double identity, imperial by day and Jewish by night. Imperial in the market, Jewish in the Synagogue. Or perhaps we may judge that they forgot their Jewish names and identity because they disappear in the narrative. Or perhaps they pretended their career names but knew their baptismal names.
Either way the matter is complex, either way, education may help people struggle with identity and vocation.
It is either the name imposed, the name and the brand imposed by consumer ideology. Or it is the preservation of baptismal names assigned to make us, as we say in my church, sealed as Christ's own forever. Education is about name and identity, about true identity and imposed identity. Clearly the names to which we answer are determined by the triad in which our life is situated, of faith identity amid steadfast love, justice and righteousness and empire given identity amid wisdom, might and wealth.
The issue of identity is very complex, it is clear, nonetheless, that education that aims only at the totalizing regime of wealth and might will never yield a covenantal identity that can respond outside the box to the divine impetus for mercy, compassion and generosity.
I don't know if Walter Breuggemann would agree with me but I think the arc of the academic establishment, being an establishment with a pay roll and an elaborate edifice of overhead has always tended to move in the direction of the triad of control, wisdom in service to might and wealth because might and wealth are what its patrons are all about. Even if the non-mercenary tendency might dominate in an individual academic or a sub-specialty or even an entire school, the overall tendency, especially under the bean-counting oversight of the institution that pays those idealists' salaries or, more these days, piece-work wages, will make sure things come out on balance with the smart money. That is especially true of private schools and universities, even with their false fronts of inadequate exercises in something more idealistic.
I think that that tendency, especially as the regime of scientistic, atheistic materialism dominated both academic specialties and, in time, the general culture of academia and, they producing the professional class and the media, the dominant culture. This is true that while it might not totally dominate within religion departments, its influence is ubiquitous and very influential. Those who want to make an academic career will certainly know that is the way to respectability.
Even when the religious department or the entire "religious" university might most strongly reject the academic side that is in service to it, they will be all in with the patrons of that, the beneficiaries of the triad of control, those who benefit from the wealth and might and who hold such a huge role in determining which wisdom gets the grants and gifts. Notre Dame is certainly one I've pointed that out about, Catholic University of America, Liberty University, . . . the list of such places would probably go into the hundreds even those which officially reject scientistic, atheist materialism all end up working the same wealthy, mighty patrons of and users of wisdom.
If any of this might sound familiar to you it may be because the same thing is true for many if not most religious denominations which have a payroll and, especially, a physical plant that is in need of financial support. The same sources of corruption from any moral purpose are at work there too. If there are those who resist that corruption they tend to be few. While the academics will be happy to give you a list of particulars and even some made up lore about the corruption of churches in pursuit of wealth, they aren't are keen on even an honest but deep look into the consequences for the corruption of academic institutions and, even more so, the powerful influence that materialism, both vulgar and the ideological type, in setting the culture of modernism and the alleged enlightenment and, indeed, science, too. If there is a school within a university that has been patronized by the holders of wealth and might, it is the sciences, especially if you include the dismal one, economics as among those. Alma mater is a gold digger when she sees a big ward of cash.
There are times I think that the only reliable source of an education free of that is the education of the dedicated autodidact. There are times I think that, while not a guarantee of being moral or on the right way, a small house church supported only by the householders freely giving the use of their homes and supported only by the uncontrolling resources of the congregation might stand some chance of getting on with it uncompromised.
The people who manage what Daniel is said to do, flip things around to rig the system for their own benefit but not be corrupted by it are mighty few and probably not something we should rely on encountering very often.
No doubt there is a lot to say about the identity that is conferred by college credentials, especially in the more prestigious private and some elite public institutions. It is still something of a ticket to, if not the exact top, far higher than someone may have started out. I'm tempted to go into the career of the recently fired head of the Board of Postal Governors, rather dubious figure on organized labor, Ron A. Bloom but that would take me a long time and would get us into those golden boys of the establishment being discussed here, Obama and Tim Geithner -Ivy Leaguers all. They certainly know the identity of each other so credentialed. Maybe another post another time.
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