The Tragedy of Teaching: Greatness Without Goodness

It is the time of year when those of us who serve as teachers, from college to Kindergarten, are ramping up our preparation for the upcoming term. In my home university, new faculty are arriving on campus this week for onboarding, next week will be devoted to faculty meetings at the university and college level, and then the students arrive.

University faculty need this time to prepare. In pursuit of efficiency and cost control we have reduced the number of hours students spend in the classroom to the minimum required by our various accreditors. At the same time, in an attempt to improve the competitive value of our programs we have upgraded the learning outcomes promised to our students. Faculty need to prepare every lecture, assignment, experiment, exam, discussion, and exercise if they are going to meet all their course objectives in the limited time available.

Student expectations are also high. We have promised them greatness. We have assured them our classes can transform them into great writers, great speakers, great problem solvers, and great thinkers. We have touted to them the success of some of their select forebearers who achieved prestigious graduate school acceptances or cool jobs with high starting salaries as a result of our training. Those kinds of commitments, although usually moral rather than contractual, drive our need for preparation. Greatness is not easy, and it will take all our skill and energy as educators to prepare our students to achieve it.

Unfortunately, this swirl of well-meaning activity may mask a common failing of the university, particularly for Christian faculty and institutions. Is our frenzy of planning at this time of year preparing students to be great, while ignoring training them to be good? It invites the old saying mistakenly attributed to C.S. Lewis, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”¹

At the same time, most of us are not trained in theology or moral philosophy. As Christian instructors, should we not be concentrating on being good stewards of the students before us by imparting the expertise of our particular disciplines? We may well prefer to stay within our realm of proficiency and rely on others within the university to focus on the students’ Christian worldview. If moral education must happen in the classroom, we would often rather demure on integrating faith into our subject matter and merely allow our students to experience Christian values through the way we conduct ourselves and engage with them. Is that sufficient? What is our responsibility as Christians in higher education?

When my brother and I were children, our parents taught us a simple prayer to say at mealtimes. “God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food.” The simplicity of this prayer conceals some profound theology. When theologians describe the properties of God, they often divide them into His communicable characteristics and incommunicable characteristics.² Communicable characteristics are the moral attributes of God and include qualities like God’s love, compassion, forgiveness, patience, and kindness – the qualities of God’s goodness. God’s incommunicable characteristics refer to His unique metaphysical attributes such as His qualities of omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternality – His qualities of greatness.

The Bible is replete with instructions to emulate God in His moral attributes. Saint Paul admonishes the Christians in Rome to “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer”³ capturing three of God’s moral attributes and applying them to the Romans’ contemporary issues. More often, both Christ and the Apostle Paul instruct Christians to directly emulate God in His own expression of His moral attributes. For example, Christ instructs His followers to “be merciful as your Father is merciful”⁴ and “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”⁵ Likewise, Paul commands, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”⁶

By contrast, the Bible never instructs believers to emulate God in His greatness.⁷ God’s metaphysical attributes are exclusive to Him. Self-preservation would invite us to believe that divine greatness is only safe in the hands of a being with divine goodness. Our ersatz C.S. Lewis would argue that the same relationship of goodness and greatness should apply to the students we educate. If we want to train them to be great, we must also train them to be good. The greater level of moral goodness we can inculcate in our students, the safer it will be for them to achieve the greatness we have promised them.

The Bible acknowledges the necessary role of those who bring instruction (Romans 10:14) and encourages us that the Spirit directly empowers us in our teaching (1 Corinthians 12:28). It also lays heavy responsibility on us to perform our work effectively (James 3:1). With respect to the technical skills and knowledge we have promised, we should keep our commitment to students to make them expert in those competencies but providing them that expertise without the moral framework to apply it would ignore our noble calling. In Titus 2, Paul commands Titus to provide the people for whom he is responsible with a combination of direct instruction and exemplary living. Titus was to “encourage the young men to be self-controlled.”⁸  At the same time he was told, “In your teaching show integrity, seriousness and soundness of speech.”⁹

Some of Jesus’ contemporaries described Him as a carpenter (Mark 6:3) but one way He described his own vocation was that of teacher (John 13:13). His earthly ministry to His disciples consisted largely of training them to follow Him in that work. He demonstrated over and over how to rightly handle the Old Testament scripture, how to answer hostile questions, and how to respond to requests for healing from listeners. Jesus told his disciples they would be great at it. He even told them that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they would do greater things than He did (John 14:12). Nonetheless, to describe Jesus’ work with the disciples as training them in the forensics of being a rabbi would be to grossly understate the moral training Jesus provided them. He repeatedly called on them to apply moral values to their work. He commanded them to love those they were instructing, even if they were hated in return (Matthew 5:44). He instructed them to submit to one another in humility (John 13:14). He required them to dedicate everything they had to their calling (Matthew 16:24). Christian educators often refer to Christ as a model teacher.¹⁰ How can we ignore that model when it comes to the question of whether to instill in our students the same goodness that Christ instilled in His?

Now over a decade ago, Ream and Glanzer reminded us that the business of a Christian college is to build the entire “house” of a student’s life, not just a few select rooms related to the technical skills their careers will require.¹¹ The option of being a “good Christian” in the classroom and leaving the values lessons to someone else is not really on the table.

Some of us have the capacity and authority to establish policies for our universities to better pursue moral education but every faculty member has the opportunity to engage students in this conversation, no matter their subject. In my own discipline of business, many faculty can creatively present more technical content and Christian values in tandem by utilizing famously Christian organizations like Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby as case studies. Others may organize our deliverables into a matrix form that matches discipline-specific information with policy questions that require moral engagement. Some faculty may be able to tap into some of the medieval or patristic era figures that founded their disciplines to communicate the faith-centered context in which they wrote and taught. The same can be done with select modern disciplinary luminaries, including some of us. Academic pedagogical articles on the integration of faith in the classroom are widely available. For business professors, I recommend one by the late, great Richard Chewning¹² and by my friend, Bob Roller.¹³ I would welcome commenters on this post to recommend solid faith integration texts in their own subjects.

Including moral instruction in our teaching will begin with a simple matter of setting it as a priority. Would saying that it is God’s priority be a sufficient reason for us to deepen our investment in it? In this period when we are taking a final look at our syllabi to make sure we are preparing students for greatness, let us also ask whether we will meet their need to walk in the path of Christ’s goodness.

1. Willam O’Flaherty, “What Lewis NEVER Wrote”, 2014, What Lewis NEVER Wrote (with William O’Flaherty) – Essential C.S. Lewis (essentialcslewis.com).
2. Wayne Grudem, “Guide to the Attributes of God”, Zondervan Academic, 2018, Guide to the Attributes of God | Zondervan Academic
3. Romans 12:12 (New International Version).
4. Luke 6:36 (New International Version).
5. John 13:34 (New International Version).
6. Ephesians 4:32 (New International Version).
7. Fred Zaspel, “The Attributes of God”, The Gospel Coalition, 2024, TGC Course | The Attributes of God (thegospelcoalition.org)
8. Titus 2:6 (New International Version).
9. Titus 2:7 (New International Version).
10. Marie Noël Keller, “Jesus the Teacher,” Journal of Research on Christian Education, 7(1): 19–36, 1998. doi:10.1080/10656219809484859.
11. “The Idea of a Christan College: A Reexamination for Today’s University”, Todd C. Ream and Pery L. Glanzer, Editors. Cascade Books, 2013.
12. Richard Chewing, “A Dozen Styles of Biblical Integration: Assimilating the Mind of Christ”, Journal of Biblical Integration in Business, Fall, 2001.
13. Robert Roller, “Twenty-One Methods of Biblical Faith-Learning Integration”, Journal of Biblical Integration in Business, 16(2), 2016.