¹

Harold K. Bush, Jr., Ph.D.

In the future society as portrayed in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1950; reprinted 1982), firemen are not called upon to save burning buildings. Rather, they are asked to locate books and to spray not water but fire itself, and thus destroy the books, the house where they are found, and the residents of those houses. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who begins to have second thoughts and, through the course of the story, rebels against what he finally determines to be a harsh and inhumane system. One of the key relationships that Montag has in the novel is with a retired English professor named Faber, who assures Montag that it is not simply books he should be after:

"it's not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books…. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid to forget.” (82-83)

Faber’s passionate speech is remarkable for several details. First, he continually repeats a pronoun, “it,” which he insists must be the object of Montag’s search. Unfortunately, he never quite defines the nature of “it,” but that is in keeping with a great American tradition which is perhaps highlighted by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. For example, here is the master of evasion himself, Abraham Lincoln, describing the sublime object of desire that made the Declaration of Independence such a special document: “I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was . . . something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future times” (213, emphasis added).

The American hope, for Lincoln, is somehow subordinate to a greater hope, a cosmic hope in which the American version is perhaps the great exemplar in human society, and this cosmic hope transcends language's ability to contain or confine it. Even for Lincoln, the object of American hope is, to some extent, impossible—impossible to name, impossible to define, and impossible to embody completely. This mystery somehow contained within the document comports with another important idea announced by Professor Faber—the fact that books are merely receptacles of this unnamed “it.” But so are movies, recordings, friends, nature, and other things, including, according to Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence.

Recently, as I was teaching Fahrenheit 451 in one class, I was concurrently teaching W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982) in another class. This is a wonderful pastoral novel about the famous outfielder, Joe Jackson, who was banned for life from baseball for his alleged participation in the Black Sox scandal of 1919. You may be more familiar with the luminously beautiful film version titled Field of Dreams. I was struck by how much these two novels had in common, and it was Professor Faber’s comments just quoted that instructed me about their commonality. In Bradbury’s story, the books are missing. In Shoeless Joe, pure and unadulterated baseball is somehow missing, but beyond the game, peace and order are missing as well:

They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it, and arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the gentility of the past, . . . –for it is money they have, and peace they lack. . . . They’ll watch the game, and it will be as if they have knelt in front of a faith healer, or dipped themselves in magic waters where a saint once rose like a serpent and cast benedictions to the wind like peach petals” (212).

These remarks suggest the real object of building the baseball stadium in the middle of Iowa cornfields. They are like Faber’s comments from Fahrenheit 451: both remind us that the object of our yearning—the “it”—is not just books or baseball; these are mere receptacles for something else, this undefined “it.”

But what is this “it”? Unfortunately, like Bradbury, or other masters of the American mystery like Lincoln or Whitman, I will leave you hanging for the moment, except to suggest that the “it” might be more properly, or theologically, called the object of hope. And it is this object of hope that is the single, unifying goal of all true human education—regardless of whether the teacher is aware of it, or of a particular religion, or denomination, or political party, not to mention any particular race, gender, economic class, or sexual proclivity. The “it” is the sublime object of human hope. We educators, among other things, are in the business of imparting hope to our wards. Furthermore, we, as scholars, are in the business of trying to unravel and to understand what human hope should actually look like. These are not easy tasks, and historically Christians in America have greatly underestimated the complexity, or the fullness, of God’s sublime vision for humanity.

Fahrenheit 451 ends with a loose band of rebels banding together to form a kind of oral library in which each member is responsible for memorizing some major text for the future of all humanity. Montag, the ex-fireman, agrees to memorize two books from the Bible: Ecclesiastes and Revelation. We might well ask, “Why did Bradbury throw in that little detail?”

My short answer (which assumes that the readers of this periodical are more familiar with the biblical texts than most of my undergraduates) has to do with my sense that we humans, especially we teachers who are charged with the education of our youth, must be fully conversant with both Ecclesiastes and Revelation. In other words, we all need to be able to understand the futility of life and the inexpressible joy of the glory of God—the pain and the endless doubts that all educated humans face, as well as the amazing, radiant vision of God’s hope for all creation. If we are not fully conversant with both Ecclesiastes and Revelation, whatever hope we offer will not ring true.

All of this is a preface to my first point, which is that Christian intellectuals are called to understand the true complexity of the world we live in. Christian scholars must, first and foremost, maintain a real humility regarding practically everything not directly related to their areas of expertise. Even in those areas of so-called “expertise,” we must stay humble and teachable, or else we will miss many crucial angles that can open up our areas of study. I believe that Christian intellectuals, and Christian believers in general, need to understand what they do know as well as what they do not know. Otherwise, they become susceptible to a kind of cultural arrogance that has become one of the major reasons why many folks have been so turned off by the Christian religion and the followers it has spawned. What I am suggesting is that we all try very hard to understand how little we know about most things, try to interrogate our own conclusions from opposite vantage points, and go on from there. For those of you somewhat unconvinced, I would suggest the sobering account of how preposterous and arrogant academics can be when they pontificate on subjects beyond their expertise, which can be found in Richard A. Posner’s recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001). On the lighter side, you might consider Daniel Taylor’s excellent volume, The Myth of Certainty: The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment (2000).

That said, one thing Christian academics must try harder to understand, and ultimately to counteract, is the hatred and vilification of Christianity by much of the academic world these days. I have learned over the years that many of the critics of American religion turn out to be people who actually know little or nothing about either Christian faith or the Bible itself. On the other hand, my own knowledge of the history of the Christian church convinces me that these secular critics have a fairly strong case regarding the institutionalized forms of our faith. We might compare this hatred for Christianity with a growing recent phenomenon in the world press—the seeming hatred that much of the world currently has for America, the Bush administration, and the colonizing power that they associate with it. Particularly, in his famous statement immediately after the 9/11 catastrophe, President George W. Bush wondered aloud why so many people around the world do not like America. This naïve yet genuine sensibility, it seems to me, is shared by many in the church today. American Christians, however, need to be more mature and reasonable in understanding the historical and epistemological reasoning that has contributed to the growing animosities, both toward America and the institutional church.

If we do our homework, then, those of us in the Christian faith will be well positioned to respond to both the historical realities and mischaracterizations, or outright delusions. Within our own fields, we are strongly positioned to notice how badly specialists have remained unable, or unwilling, to incorporate viewpoints or breakthroughs that are somehow religious in nature or based on religious assumptions. By noticing these things, and by then working them into our own research, teaching, and dinner-party conversations, Christian scholars can offer much to the world of academia and beyond which has for so long excommunicated the thoughts of the lonely Christian. The vast numbers at the numerous conferences on these themes over the past few years indicate that we are not so lonely any more.

As George M. Marsden has argued in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997), the emergence of postmodernism has resulted in the stunning realization that the excommunication of Christian voices in academic practice is no longer tenable, or defensible, in a postmodern ethos. Until we get this straight, the university will simply be continuing its search for truth in an inauthentic, and finally fraudulent, manner. But we Christian scholars must model the truest and best impulses of the intellectual mind. Christian scholarship should and must be the one scholarship most wholly and fearlessly committed to the truth—whatever that truth turns out to be and wherever we can find it. All true scholarship, according to this position, is seeking the same object—what I called earlier the sublime object of hope—whether practitioners admit it or not.

It is amazing to me, now at mid-career, how people will spend the best years of their lives just to approach a place where they can honestly say they actually know “a little.” Early in my own religious pilgrimage, I think, I actually believed one could learn pretty much all there is to know about God, the Bible, Christianity, or the church. Such an idea today seems preposterous to me. And yet isn’t it true that much of the church is bent on having an answer for every question, every apologetic difficulty, every emotional or cultural event? Having all the answers is clearly not what Christian scholarship is all about. I would associate that primal concept with the heart of both Ecclesiastes and Revelation. Those two books seem to share very little, except this: God is glorious, mysterious, sovereign, and clearly beyond our little peanut-sized brains.

Finally, I would like to suggest that, among all of these matters, Christians in the academy should be most responsible for dispensing hope to our colleagues and our clientele—the “it” I mentioned at the beginning. If the postmodern theorists are even vaguely correct, and if we are living in a time of near hopelessness, to generalize in the extreme, then the universities and colleges, which exemplify the spirit of the intellectual times, are plausibly the most hopeless places of all. These are strong words, but let us not underestimate the effects of the intellectual community’s so-called incredulity toward metanarratives—and the long-term effects that such an incredulous spirit must eventually manifest in the media and the popular culture. Jimmy Long, for example, a veteran campus minister, has written convincingly, in Generating Hope: A Strategy for Reaching the Postmodern Generation (1999), that hope is the key missing ingredient among today’s youth; Cornel West and bell hooks have basically agreed that hope is the major deficiency of the African American community—especially among the poor urban black communities (see Race Matters (1993) by West and Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) by hooks). Humans crave hope because they are hope-hunting creatures. Our students crave hope, and so do I.

But what precisely is HOPE? The political philosopher Glenn E. Tinder begins his analysis in the following way: “Hope is not a private dream. It unites us with the concrete human beings inhabiting our own historical time and place…. To live with hope is…to live in one’s full humanity” (xiv). So, first of all, hope is profoundly communal; it involves the communities to which we ally ourselves, including our classrooms, departments, schools, churches and synagogues, soccer teams, knitting groups, or whatever. All of these communities must somehow manifest shades of hope. Tinder says elsewhere: “True HOPE is never for God alone but is rather for an all-encompassing and never-ending community, centered in God. By “community” I mean perfect unity among personal beings. . . a love transcending justice and fully expressed in the absolute affirmation of the other which occurs in self-sacrifice. Accordingly, if HOPE is for God, it is for a triumphal community—for a final and eternal reunion of God and his human creatures” (43).

This concept—a triumphal community—has been spurned by postmodernists, largely as a result of the tyrannies and abuses of the twentieth century, among other things. If anything, much of postmodernism is diametrically opposed to the very concept of any community being triumphant. Thus does so much of our current culture teach and proclaim against the idea that is at the very center of HOPE—a concept that Jesus Christ called the Kingdom of God. I think that it is not much of an exaggeration to admit that research universities, like my former home Michigan State University and my present home St. Louis University, are replete with an ingrained and remorseless hopelessness—almost by definition—one that simply dismisses the possibility of communal hope. Instead, our students today simply latch onto some miniscule version of individual hope, a secularized hope that is really no hope at all. Such an observation might not be so remarkable, except for the grand history of the college, which was for centuries premised on a hopefulness regarding individuals, society, and culture. Not anymore.

Secondly, says Tinder, “If HOPE is for God, then it is manifest in listening for the Word in which the depths of divine reality are expressed…. hope is for a conversation with and in eternity” (36). How might we transform our teaching, research, committee work, home life, and so forth, without understanding them, and treating them, as conversations with and in eternity? Rather than attempting to say more about Tinder’s concept of the conversation, it would be enough to suggest that in the daily course of our hectic lives, we frequently, if not usually, fail to see how what we are doing is in any way an aspect of a conversation with heaven. Thus, we are called to a profoundly intense awareness that what we do and say matters—perhaps in ways that are never to be revealed to us, at least in this life. Several times (and I do wish there were many more!), I have received word from former students, usually years after I have forgotten most details of a course, that they considered their experiences in my class as the best of their college careers, or in some way formative for their own lives. Sometimes I barely recall (if at all) the detail, or the book passage, or the classroom moment, that is emblazoned on their memories. I was reminded recently in a meeting of professors at Valparaiso University how true it is that we are mere sowers, and that typically sowers have little to do with the actual germination and maturity of the seeds themselves.

By way of conclusion, I am moved to say that we are the bearers and sowers of hope in what can only be described as a largely hopeless environment—and a recalcitrant and stubborn one at that. What this means is that we are the bearers of cold fresh water in a hot desert; we are bearers of bread and wine to a starving and homeless generation. This should make us quite popular. It certainly explains why Professor Ken Elzinga at the University of Virginia has a two-year waiting list for students desiring to get into any of his classes. These are students hungering for a fond embrace of hopefulness. Elzinga’s students sense in their guts that he believes hope is possible, and that a triumphal community as a real possibility has somehow been programmed into each of us. We would all be blessed to have such a reputation among our students. I have personally been very challenged on those occasions where I have been fortunate enough to hear Professor Elzinga speak about his teaching philosophy, which goes a long way toward explaining his popularity. Essentially, he talks about an attitude of washing the feet of his students—praying for them to come to his office hours, praying for them in their troubled emotional states, opening his home to them and to student groups in general, getting involved in their extra-curricular activities; in short, serving them the way that he believes the Bible instructs him to and the way Jesus Christ modeled servanthood.

When we talk of “synthesizing or integrating faith and the academy” or “integration of faith and learning,” it must really begin with the incarnation of our faiths that we bring to the office every morning. True integration begins in our own lives. We are living, breathing, sweating, laughing, and crying embodiments of that “integration” no matter what our books, articles, syllabi, and conference papers say. To end where I began, as intellectuals, we must consider in deeper ways how to integrate Ecclesiastes with Revelation. Students, as well as our friends and neighbors, easily sense when we are artificially unbalanced toward one side or the other. This lack of balance leads not to authentic hope but to a bowdlerized, counterfeit version of therapy, or worse. I firmly believe Christian academics are providentially placed to reach out to a very large community of people most of whom are conscientious, hard-working, and moral. For many of our students, it comes as such a relief to encounter a learned and ranked professor who does still maintain a living faith in God. As such, we stand as exemplary witnesses to hope in a culture that has for many decades become more and more hopeless. We are like books and baseball, and many other things; we are mere receptacles for something else, this undefined “it,” the sublime object of hope.

Endnotes

¹ An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the faculty of Missouri Baptist University on October 9, 2003.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1950. New York: Ballantine, 1982.

Fehrenbacher, Don, ed. Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865. By Abraham Lincoln. New York: Library of America, 1988.

hooks, bell. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: William Morrow, 2001.

Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe. New York: Ballantine, 1982.

Marsden, George M. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Long, Jimmy. Generating Hope: A Strategy for Reaching the Postmodern Generation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999.

Posner, Richard A. Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Taylor, Daniel. The Myth of Certainty: The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000.

Tinder, Glenn E. The Fabric of Hope: An Essay. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

HAROLD K. BUSH, Jr. <bushhk@SLU.EDU> is Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University and the author of American Declarations: Rebellion and Repentance in American Cultural History (University of Illinois Press, 1999). His current project is a book on Mark Twain and American religion, tentatively called Mark Twain’s Pastor. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Christianity & Literature, Religion & Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University. Dr. Bush's complete CV is located online: <pages.slu.edu/faculty/bushhk/VITA.html>.

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