I long for spring. Maybe it is that I grew up in California, and still hope that flowers will bloom all year long—even in Virginia. But they don’t, and we endure the cold of winter. This past week I saw the first crocuses pop up and out in our yard, and over the next weeks hundreds of daffodils will find their way into the sun of springtime too.

Perennials we call them, crocus and daffodil. Year after year they come, and they go. On a very different scale, with history weighing down upon us all, political conflict is like that, perennially drawing out of human hearts the wounds of war, full of the tensions of unsettled scores that often reach back over centuries. Year after year, sadness upon sadness, grief compounding grief.

As I look at the world around me, it is easier to make sense of spring flowers— the heartaches of history are harder. If it is Egypt and Libya this spring, not so far away Afghanistan and Iraq still cry out, as does Israel and Iran– and twenty years ago the same was true for South Africa and Eastern Europe. And of course that only touches the surface of the story.

I have spent years of my life trying to understand the world, and my place in it. What is history all about? What is human nature anyway? And what about God? These are the weightiest questions because they are the most perennial questions, and how we answer them has far-reaching consequence, not only for this year, but for every year—perhaps especially as we consider the future of Christian witness within the university.

As the 20th-century becomes the past, and the 21st-century is our life and time, there are two voices that still have resonance and relevance– and we would be fools to forget who they were and what they said. Both have been my teachers, even as they have been teachers to the world: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel. Giants among their own people and in their own places, as artists and citizens their hard-won insights are perennial truths, for everyone everywhere.

Solzhenitsyn is best known for his novels about the horrors of the Soviet Union, a social, political and economic experiment that went horribly wrong because its central thesis was rooted in lies about God, human nature, and history. While there are thousands of pages to draw upon, hear him here, wise man that he was, with words born of great suffering:

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.”

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend….”

“Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.”

These last two statements were made at Harvard University’s commencement in the spring of 1978. Up to that point Solzhenitsyn had been a celebrated dissident, a Noble Prize winner whose criticisms of totalitarianism were lauded by the West. But on that day he became a persona non grata in America, at least in the ivy-covered halls of the secular academy. Why? He stepped on toes, especially the presumption of moral autonomy at the heart of the modern world, arguing that it was producing an anomie that no society could live with for long. Prophetic, perceptive, and yet he was scorned for his parochial vision.

A different man in a different time, Havel was the most distinguished playwright of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s, but because of the artful critique of totalitarianism implicit in his art, he was banned from Prague, and eventually imprisoned. When the communist world imploded, the Czech people made him their president, and he served in that capacity for the 1990s. In those years, he traveled the world giving speeches to parliaments and universities, always with one question at the heart of his address: what are the conditions in which human beings can act responsibly in history?

With passion and eloquence, he pressed his question—and offered a surprising answer. We need God, if we are to act responsibly in the world. Without God, Havel argued, we lose access to meaning and purpose, accountability and responsibility. Not far really, from the conclusion of Nietzsche a century-and-a-half earlier. Again, there are volumes to draw from, but hear him here:

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

“It always makes sense to tell the truth.”

For Havel, that truth-telling meant years of persecution, as in a different way it had for Solzhenitsyn. But seeing things as they really are was the heart of their common calling, come what may– prisons, prizes or presidencies.

Their words are lines-in-the-sand in the pluralizing, secularizing academy of the 21st-century, often institutionalizing the autonomy and anomie criticized by both Solzhenitsyn and Havel. If there is one great challenge that runs through the years in every generation, it is this: what will we do with truth? with the truth about God, human nature, and history?

There have been few weeks in my life over the course of many years of life when I am not with students. Most Mondays I am in class for three hours, trying to engage them with the double-edged vocation of learning to read the world and the Word, at the same time. From the most tender and complex places in the human heart that are deeply-bound up with sexuality, to the critical tasks of learning to learn in the face of numbingly 24/7 technologies, to developing the habits of heart that sees our citizenship as both profoundly local and global—all this and more is my labor of love among students.

But I know that if they are to keep on keeping on, for life, they will need to become people who form their hearts and minds around the truest truths of the universe, perennial as they always are. So I have them read widely and deeply, learning from good people with good insight, from Simone Weil to Wendell Berry. But before their studies are done, I always insist that they listen to Francis Schaeffer and Lesslie Newbigin, still sure that these voices need to be heard—if we are to make sense of faith in the face of the most honest questions that still long for honest answers. Both men lived lives remarkably open to the world, listening carefully to anyone with a serious question; and both men staked their lives on the possibility that we can know the truth about God, about human nature, and about history. As a student in the 20th-century I needed that, and students in the 21st-century will need that too.

If the gospel of the kingdom is not true, true to the way the world really is, then so what? If the Christian vision cannot make sense of the deepest questions about life and the world, then why bother? Perennial questions, yes—and only perennial truths will answer them sufficiently.

 

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