History Repeating Itself

This speech was given by Dr. Mark Cole at the 2021 John Witherspoon Seminary student’s graduation.

2013, 2016
Intro – why are we here – the times we are in?

“Dostoevsky”

Artwork by Witherspoon graduate Shannon Mucha

So the first time we were together on an occasion like this, I thought that the world we were living in was a bit unpredictable but I thought that there was still enough you know, rationality, reasonableness, goodwill and just stable order out there in the larger world, to you know, see some reasonable relationship between my daily life and the rest of the world, I still thought it was you know, worthwhile to read a newspaper.

Then, we got together again on a second occasion like this, in 2016, and I thought, wow, the world is a little less predictable than I realized in 2013 and more out of control, a little meaner, a little more frenzied and fanatical than I realized, so I started glancing a little off to the side to make sure there was a table I could crawl under if things got worse and I started keeping on eye on that table and really started working one foot under that table.

But now here we are in 2021, a year late, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the world has gone absolutely mad. The world out there. I haven’t gone made, you haven’t gone mad, well most of you anyway, but the world has and the most insightful meme I have seen recently says let’s make Orwell fiction again.

Strangely, however, as the world out there becomes now predictably twisted, knotted and disarrayed, our lives are blessed with strangely a little more clarity and focus, aren’t they?

It’s like we are driving at night in a deep fog with the headlights on. You can’t see very far in front of you, and you can’t use your brights, but you can see what you can see, and as you slow down, you continue to fare forward, you get pretty intensely focused on what you can see and all of a sudden you are seeing changes and nuances in the asphalt cracks a few feet in front of you that you had never seen before.

At least that’s how it seems to me. Through the disarray out there, we can now become more focused. And we must.

And so, the theme for our graduation is, then, I hope appropriately, Love in action and this is a little phrase which Witherspoon students encounter and never forget when they read Father Zossima’s words in Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This is a special, loaded, meaningful phrase for Witherspoon graduates and we will try to put it to use today.

Our graduates today, artists and educators, they represent, it seems to me, the perfect response to the world we are living in.

With the certainty of faith, and faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, they forge ahead in a world which has in so many ways, out there, gone a bit insane, but they are responding to the world, within the sphere of their influence, with clarity, certitude and joy, and thus with real force, with active love; they respond to the world, to our world, with intelligence, grace, wit and the right amount of judiciously placed indifference because there are just some things which we can do nothing about, and we can’t spend time or effort on those things, because there are things to do where we can make a difference. Our graduates don’t seem to be surprised by anything out there in the world, they seem in fact, to just sort of take everything in stride, yet they soldier on, doing what God has called them to do.

In short, they are responding with love in action.

Each of our graduates have pursued education in exactly the way that all of us ought: diligently and competently, and with steadfastness, with sustained effort over many years. They have put in the time and the work. But really, it’s more than that. The dustbin of history is filled with hyper-educated barbarians. The question of how education affects you, as a follower of Jesus, is central and our graduates are exemplary in allowing their education to inform and challenge, to elevate and illuminate their walk with Christ, their education has helped them to love God and love neighbor and to be more civilized, more humane, more humble and more thankful.

And today we celebrate the unique callings of these graduates, we celebrate art and education and the teaching vocation, because each of graduates are both artists and educators.

Jo Beth has certainly raised teaching to an art form, she is an artist at work, and if you haven’t experienced that, you need to see her at work as a teacher. Like a true artist, she painstakingly interprets every student, no matter how young, no matter old and does so without judgment or condemnation, but only with an eye to elevating them educationally from where they are, to a better place ....likewise, she approaches her reading with the same level of all-in engagement and artistically relates her reading to everything else in her world, in her memory, and in her reflections on the world, and she asks the same of her students and somehow, in a process that borders on alchemy, she extracts results from her students as they go down this educational road together, she artistically brings something into the world in her student which wasn’t there before, and it is beautiful to behold. And the Cole family is a first hand beneficiary.

Shannon’s and Donna’s art also, in the best possible sense, instructs, edifies, provokes and challenges us, their art educates us, and not in any narrow, didactic, pedantic way, and rest assured, we had many conversations roundly condemning propagandadistic or overtly instructional art. Donna and Shannon in their art continually press forward and incorporate old and new technologies and ideas, as they find them, as a good educator does, and they do so in a spirit of openness and graciousness, but without ever abandoning their fundamentals. And this is how they approached their reading.

Their fundamental commitments, our fundamental commitments as a group, were never up for grabs, never in doubt, but we unceasingly explored as many ideas as we could and continually arrived, I believed, back at the great truths of life and of our faith with a renewed clarity and understanding.

But what the educational and artistic journeys of our three graduates do for us today is ultimately merge education, reading, contemplation, poetry, reflection, memory and art, the arts, all arts, all artifices, all human actions and endeavors together into the broader category of just doing human and humane things....and for a follower of Christ that means active love, love in action.

education when it is fully functioning within us, is about helping us to lead a flourishing life, helping us to see the world, to see all of God’s creation, more truthfully, more robustly, more tragically, more intelligently, more poetically, all of these things and even more so as followers of Christ. Art ultimately does exactly the same thing, it elevates us, as human beings, and our graduates again, educators and artists, are role models for us in this regard and today we celebrate that.

But since this is an educational landmark today, we are compelled to take a little time and try to understand the world in which we live

I know I’m compelled to try to understand, I know Sean is compelled to try to understand and you’re sort of compelled to listen, at least for the next few hours

let’s see if we can burn off some of that fog and look out a little bit further and like Dostoyevsky land somewhere where we feel like we can leave here today and confidently live in a meaningful way

Let’s take a minute or two to consider, as best we can, where the world is today.

I would non-dogmatically submit that we are in a period of time analogous to the end of the Late Middle Ages, or the beginning of the chaos and flourishing that followed the Late Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages

Let’s begin our history lesson, our march through history in 1077. Witherspoon only does history in thousand year chunks.

But in 1077, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, who had been excommunicated a year before, basically decided this is a battle he could not win against the pope, so he made a pilgrimage to the Pope and when he arrived, he waited outside the Pope’s palace, on his knees, barefoot, for three days in a blizzard. Pope Gregory VII, was inside. Gregory eventually let him in, accepted his repentance and restored him to good standing in the church and thus begins, with this decisive defeat of the HRE, the long period of consolidation and centralization as the RCC becomes the most important power

throughout Europe, not just theologically, but all secular power, civil government, military and financial power, education, culture, everything.

By putting the Holy Roman Emperor in his place, Pope Gregory VII, basically wins and all authority in Europe now flows from and through him and down through the Church.

It’s clear who is really in charge now, and it is the Pope and the church. So for the next few hundred years, the church and the state became inextricably linked, basically inseparable, indeed there is no real concept of church on one hand and the state on the other.

All authority flows from the top of the church down and not just authority and wealth, but, culture itself flows from the top down. Culture becomes controlled by the church through patronage, permissioned access and control. Of course there is some art, and Shannon, Donna and Jo Beth, have looked at the art of the Middle Ages, the art of the era is mostly painting, some texts, and some music...and of course it is spectacular, but nonetheless, it is all controlled by the church.

Even popular culture which flowed from the bottom up was tightly controlled, things like morality plays, festivals, carnival, and they were permissioned, sort of licensed by the church and serving the ends of the church and while they too do have real human value, and they served the awesome function of a community celebrating things like harvest, nonetheless this era in history is not a free-flowing culture, it is very much controlled and in taking part of the cultural events that the church sanctioned, you simply couldn’t get too rowdy, they would excommunicate you.

And again if you step back and just try to treat this with a fair, non-ideological open mindedness that appreciates all of the history of the west, you have to say that this is impressive and you have to say in the long sweep of human history, consolidation and centralization does have its moments when it is necessary. When Aquinas speaks for all of Christendom, that is impressive. The Constitution which creates a federal government in a union of states was definitely more consolidated than the loose confederation created by the Articles of Confederation and certainly was necessary in order to pay off the war debt and the continue to survive in light of ongoing threats from both England and France and that government, in that context, was a form of consolidation and centralization.

Consolidation and centralization brings efficiency through uniformity, resources become less duplicated, and people can start using a standard wheel instead of continually reinventing wheels of various shapes and sizes. And how many times do e choose centralization in our daily lives. Every time you go to Wal Mart you are casting a vote for centralization in that context.

But, as we know through history, through our lives in business, in our families, really everything, the gains in centralization if they are not slowed, pretty soon bring in a culture of status, of Stagnation, death, corruption and maintenance of power and position.

And that’s exactly the history of the middle ages and by say 1300, the church has such a strong control over everything, including the flow of information, stagnation is basically institutionalized and there is really no possibility of change or refreshing or innovation. And certainly by 1300, though the outer trappings of the Church are becoming as impressive as the Roman Empire of old, their understanding of the Gospel is rapidly diminishing.

By 1300, Information is guarded by authority...documents are controlled by a scribal class, held under lock and key, this scribal class painstakingly encode documents onto processed animal skins in a language that only a small number of people can read, they store these precious and beautiful documents in archives, behind lock and key, controlling access ....literacy is around 5%, and the church shows little interest in spreading literacy.

All learning becomes confined to monasteries, nunneries and universities, and of course the Bible is just another text, one of these carefully guarded texts that cannot be accessed by hardly anyone, except as carefully doled out by the church, and this is all done by design.

That is sort of a high level look at the institutions of the middle ages. That’s the historian’s view.

But in Witherspoon we always try to drill down into the lives of people like us, you know, what would life have been like for people like us, in this particular historical setting?

This is – just reaching way back – that is why Euripides is so important and why Donna’s sculpture the Trojan Women is so important, it helps us to reflect on the plight of those that are forgotten in history because, let’s face it, we are more like them, and less like the emperors and celebrities of history, and this is good practice, it helps us to be more human...but as a normal person, living in this time period, in the middle ages, an illiterate subsistence farmer, living off what you can produce on land you don’t even own, the nobility would own all the land, there is no concept of dreams or aspirations, let alone self- expression, Beethoven is not going to be born for like 400 years....There’s no opportunity to go onto social media and feel bad about yourself because everyone else is beautiful, wealthy and apparently having all kinds of fun all of the time...there’s no entrepreneurship, there’s no such thing as starting a Bible study or a church, let alone about applying for a job, or thinking about who you are going to vote for in the next election, like these are thoughts that just didn’t happen. You are working in the fields, hoping to survive, and that is what you think about and is very limited....

And so while in many respects the lives of us mere peasants have improved vastly since the middle ages, but think about the lives of the elite, the lives of our rulers and think about our lives and how

we relate to them.

In the high middle ages, you had an elite that credentialed each other, congratulated each other with prizes, titles and awards; they shared the same values and assumptions, and those values and assumptions were not challenged from the outside. They controlled education and the flow of information, and they had no appetite for debate or dissent or challenge.

And the elite in the world of the middle ages used wealth, power and access to information to tell the world how to think, and how to act, how to behave, what to do with their lives, and fear and superstition, ostracism and excommunication, was their main form of control.

They worked to keep us peasants isolated, illiterate and in their fields, working away, wearing our masks, away from the town square where we might get together and get big ideas and talk about topics which were politically incorrect.

Sound familiar?

It should sound familiar, because we are in, I believe, a shockingly, similar time period and I’d wager that if the Lord doesn’t return, in about another thousand years, it will look pretty much the same again.

So, we’ve been here before, broadly speaking. And we will be here again, broadly speaking. So how is it going to play out?

And as we look back, we know that the consolidations of the high middle ages gives way to the the Renaissance and the Reformation are coming, so, what changed?

I mean, the consolidated authorities had a good run, but eventually the world changed below them. So Humanly speaking, what sort of ushers in the next phase of history? Which was a great triumph for human liberty, for human flourishing and human dignity and for the Gospel itself in the Reformation. It wasn’t all fun and games, for sure, but what follows the High Middle Ages is something that we can affirm.

But in 1325 or so, probably no one could have predicted this, so looking backwards, what changed?

Well, humanly speaking at least, speaking from the perspective of a Witherspoon student, we know if a few things.

First...Dante....Dante’s Divine Comedy is THE transitional work of culture. It consolidates the learning and thinking of the church and in particular its Thomistic philosophy and does so with elegance and beauty, and so could on one hand be seen as a work of the high middle ages because it sets forth a unified worldview and of course TS Eliot says the Commedia is the last classic, because it sets forth something that a culture held in common. And I think we have to agree with that.

On the other hand, it blows everything apart, or perhaps it creates a massive fault line that will eventually cause an earth quake....whatever metaphor you want to use, but Dante, exposes the corrupt institutions and practices of the church and does so in the Tuscan dialect and not in Latin, and by doing this, he exalts a non-ecclesiastical, non-controlled language, spoken vernacular language of the people, not of the church, and that language soon becomes the written standard throughout Italy – and of course some 200 years later, Martin Luther does the same thing for vernacular German when he scandalously translates the Bible into a German dialect, a language which then becomes and still is, standard German.

So Dante by exposing the church’s corruption, the church wants to shut him down, of course, he gets kicked of twitter and facebook and even Tik Tok, they shadow ban him on youtube and he goes to live in exile...but, that genie is not going back into the bottle.

Dante did what he did and there’s no turning back. Italy and soon even Germany and then the rest of Europe and the British Isles is soon enough going to be changed forever.

Now, I don’t know who our Dante is today. I don’t know if our Dante has even been born, but she will be, pretty sure the person who exposes the corruption of the elites will be a woman, and not just a

woman but a mom, and probably a grandma, but she’s coming, she’s coming round the mountain, she will get here when she gets here, and it will be awesome, exhilarating and probably hilarious when she writes her long poem or whatever its going to be. And it will expose the corruption of the elites and it will be decisive. But story is definitely yet to be written.

But there’s two other things that we have to think about which helped to bring an end to the tyrannical consolidation of power and control in the middle ages, and they are technological in nature and what is really fascinating here is that these two technological developments actually have corresponding and identifiable technologies that exist today and I do think history is repeating itself, as it were.

The parallels between then and today

The first is a financial technology, if you will, a way of thinking and documenting capital and value, and a means for facilitating transactions and that is double entry bookkeeping. Just bear with me, I know you didn’t come here today to hear an accounting lecture, and I can guarantee I didn’t come here today to give one.

BUT...double entry bookkeeping, rediscovered in Italy, really in Florence, is really almost a form of metaphysics, in that it sees beyond the merely physical and sensory, it allows business people, buyers, sellers, lenders and borrowers to see things, costs, expenses, debits, credits and to see them abstractly and therefore to keep track of them in a way which causes and explosion of wealth creation and gives rise to huge industries which are not agriculture.

That’s making a long story short, but that’s the truth. That’s the financial and banking history of the Italian Renaissance.

Double entry bookkeeping, when it gets into the hands of the Medicis, turbo charges the economic status of countless people who were then not beholden to the church or other status quo powers, and in fact, the Medicis not only took control of Italy, and Europe, but they took control of the church, as Pope Leo X was a Medici! And it is certainly one of the great ironies of history that this great innovator and outsider, was the one who was on the receiving of a far greater outsider, Martin Luther, when he nailed his 95 theses to that door in Wittenberg.

So the Medicis grow indeed all of Florence, all of Italy, grows rapidly into this modern, capitalistic, entrepreneurial, fast moving society that we can start to recognize, and then, what did they do, once they had their money, and this is a real soft spot for this particular Witherspoon class, because what did they do?

They turned their attention to art. And what sort of art did they do? Well, they did new art. Well, technically, the revived old, very old art, but in comparison to what ame right before them, what they did was new and it was shocking and it was amazing. And it kind of looked like magic. They quickly rose above the 2D art of the middle ages, people in paintings no longer looked flat, because they learned perspective, the magic of making something look 3D but on a flat surface.

And this was, if you will, the virtual reality of their day, the augmented reality of their day....but then, they went a step further, and what did the do Donna?

They went off the canvas and picked up the tools of stonemasons, of common laborers, they went to the marble quarries and they turned blocks of marble into something other than mere ornamentation,

they elevate masonry into sculpture, an they brought real 3D art into the world and in fact some of the greatest art the world has ever known or ever will know...if you think there is an obviously greater work of art in the world then Michelanglo’s David, you know, it may not be your personal favorite, but to point to something and say that is obviously greater than David, that’s gonna be a hard case to make.

So we have an explosion in the art world, a Renaissance, if you will, and it is traceable to a financial technology, a new way of doing accounting, a new form of ledger, if you will and here’s a punch line....we have that today.

Now I said I didn’t want to deliver a lecture on accounting today, and I don’t, but I would absolutely LOVE to deliver a lecture on blockchain and crypto currency and bitcoin and non-fungible tokens secured by and transferred on the Ethereum blockchain and I would very much like to talk about that, but I won’t. At least not much.

But I will say this. Bitcoin represents an opportunity to store and transfer value outside of governmental interference, outside of the dollar pumping actions of the Federal Reserve which is completely out of control, and it cannot and will not be stopped and in time, it may take a hundred years, I don’t know, but, it will create wealth where wealth previously did not exist, perhaps that will happen first in third world countries. It will do for the world what double entry bookkeeping did.

And then you have NFT’s, non-fungible tokens, that is digital assets, it can be digital art, music, video, anything that can be produced digitally, and they can be bought and sold, not copied, but actually conveyed irrevocably to a buyer, and all of this happens on a blockchain, it has already created a huge art market and huge opportunities for artists and some musicians, and it hasn’t even really begun.

But here’s what is revolutionary. None of these artists creating, buying and selling digital assets have to ask permission from art dealers, production studios or anyone else. It’s a new, radically decentralized world and the elites can’t control it.

No one can control it, and I find that awesomely exciting and encouraging. It doesn’t matter what Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey and Mark what’s his name, Mark Facebook. It doesn’t matter what they want us to consume. There’s going to be options out there which they cannot control.

So as the Renaissance way of doing art spilled over into Reformation Germany, and with the theology of the Reformation, we see profound and beautiful developments there, as well, we see the faces, the realistic faces of just normal people become considered for portraiture, and they are rendered in realistic settings, and as monasteries are both literally and metaphorically dissolved and the awareness that God’s work is not done cloistered up somewhere away from the world, but God’s work is done by the normal Christian believer, day in and day out, human dignity and worth skyrockets, and every gift of God is now seen more clearly and more Biblically for what it is, that is, God’s mercy and benevolence and now even a humble bowl of fruit – even a bowl of fruit on a peasants table – is now proper subject matter for art.

The second technology that we have to consider and many of you have done this before in the context of your studies of the Reformation but it is the printing press. Now remember....Gutenberg’s press rolls out in about 1430, basically a hundred years before the Reformation. And make no mistake, the powers

that be, they weren’t stupid, they immediately saw that, hey, if we just allow normal people out there to must print stuff and distribute writing, my goodness, that’s going to result in anarchy.

So to make a long story short, for a long time, they kept a pretty tight lid on it. The RCC tried and was for a time successful in licensing printing presses, and so long as they controlled the printing, they continued to control the flow of information. But it was ALWAYS a dangerous technology, and all it took was a few rogue printers, to say, I’m running my machine, I don’t care what the church has to say about this, they have no right whatsoever to tell me I can’t run my printing press and those that defied this authority were morally right, and they did so, and the rest is history. And by the time that Martin Luther had something to say, paper was already flying around Europe and then when HIS stuff got printed, Katie bar the door. We now have a Reformation.

So what is the analog of the printing press today? Well, it’s the internet itself. Think back to the beginnings say thirty years ago, and think about how it enhanced your freedom, because you had access to any information. Incredible, a click here and there, and you could read, look at anything.

Fast forward to today, and what do we have NOW?

We do not have non-ideological retrievers of data from the worldwide web, we have the all-knowing, all-powerful Google algorithm, which not only censors information, it tracks you down, invades your privacy and uses your data to empower the authorities. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok are all heavily censored platforms and isn’t it funny how they all agree about what should be promoted and what should be censored and isn’t it funny how it seems to be the views of us peasants here in this room, which are always on the censored list. But this censorship has only risen in about the last 7 years or so. Yes, it’s getting worse by the day and they will not relent, so we are going to have to go around them.

But the internet, that is our printing press, and we are right on the cusp of the revolution where a bunch of people are soon, I believe, not son enough, but soon, I believe, a bunch of printing presses are about to be turned on and we are going to be able to share information, thought, opinion non-stop and I assume via the internet and I believe that most of the solution that coming is going to be based on blockchain technology.

There are already blockchain technologies which create decentralized servers where anything can be stored and retrieved, and it is all written in the code, you don’t have to ask the Facebook fact checkers if you can see that article. You don’t have to ask the CDC if this article that you want to post is consistent with their messaging. We are not there yet but this day is coming, and again, Katie bar the door, because the push back against the authorities is going to be brutal.

By way of historical reference again, we know Luther was a brilliant theologian, an incredible Bible scholar, a translator and an amazing sermon deliverer. About his profound intelligence and his love for the Gospel, there can be no question whatsoever.

But he also had, shall we say, an earthier side and one of the things he did was he routinely printed and distribute hilarious pictures – you know, basically internet memes - that put the authority of the Pope into, shall we say, proper perspective.

One of the best was of a peasant who was, you know, there’s no way to put this politely, but a peasant defecating into the Pope’s hat.

I’m proud and ashamed to say that I looked at it last night. I used duck duck go, btw, not google, and I snickered out loud because it’s very funny, its utterly irreverent and it drives home the important point, even to an illiterate peasant, perhaps ESPECIALLY to an illiterate peasant, that the pope has absolutely zero authority over you. Zero. And you should not fear him. This was just one more way for him to indirectly but graphically drive home the five soles of the Reformation.

And forgive me for saying this, but we need some of that today. We need to brutally take down those who continually violate our fundamental human rights. And I believe that day is coming. I believe our best internet memes are coming. Yes, if you were to post a Tik Tok today just hilariously savaging a democrat politician, you are going to get shut down. But the day is coming, when we are going to turn on our blockchain-powered printing presses and with savage humor, satire, brutal images and perhaps even a few memes that we would in normal times consider impolite, we will take down these authorities and we will elevate normal people. And when that happens, we will be emulating the great Martin Luther, and I can’t wait.

So all that is to say, I believe we have good reason to believe that a Renaissance and the Reformation can happen again, and that we might be within a few years of this beginning in earnest. In the shorter term, I think things could get tougher, in the medium term, I think results will be mixed, we are going to savor some victories but also suffer some, persecution might get real. But about the ultimate long term, we have no worries whatsoever, we know how it all ends.

Action Items

So in the spirit of John Witherspoon and his educational philosophy, we do try to stress practical application and I hope and believe that these graduates have felt and have internalized that spirit and that calling to put learning to work, and to actively love out there in the world. Yes, it’s great to learn, but as Paul says, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. So what can we think together about doing, practically, doing love in action, with our lives, given the lessons of history and given what we know and don’t know?

Well, here’s a few thoughts, non-dogmatically submitted for our consideration together.

Reach out to younger people who are struggling and who don’t feel that they have a place in the world yet, and try to communicate with them and to them and let them know that they world is not stagnant, and there is opportunity and while it’s not easy – and when has it ever been easy – help them to not only not rely on big, famous and foreboding institutions, but encourage them to break from institutions, create your own, find those who are creating their own and cooperate with them, and to pursue a life that is freer and more independent from big institutions.

Second, consider, like our graduates today, engaging more deeply in art, and education, and especially consider investing time, sweat and money in the incredible decentralized opportunities in the world today. There’s more art in the world today and it is more accessible than ever, and there are more high quality free educational resources in the world today than there has ever been. Consider engaging in that by creation, consumption, collaboration, leading, following, whatever interests you the most. And as you do that, know that while political and cultural upheavals come our way, you are doing something that really does transcend the frenzy of today. Consider teaching in some capacity, just teaching something that you know, to anyone you can find, who knows less than you do, creating those relationships, those little communities of learning and common interest.

And on the point of education, consider read the Great Books and encourage others to do the same. There are plenty of people in this room right now who can generate lists – and I mean lengthy lists – of the great books for you to consider. Consider doing this by yourself, or even better, with friends, ideally in person, or perhaps in some online community...again, taking advantage of the wonder of technology in the age in which we live.

Our graduates today are obviously exemplary in this regard, and understood, it’s a bit challenging to point to them as role models, because honestly, they are incredible. And I’ll tell you, if you say, I want to read and think and produce as much as Jo Beth, Donna and Shannon, that’s a tall order. They have read thousand and thousand of pages of sometimes pretty boring but really important stuff, and thought about it deeply and let these important words and ideas penetrate their lives. But don’t be intimidated by their example, be inspired by it and go down this road with them, as best you can.

Related to that, you might consider buying these books and keeping them in a place that is safe and dry and out of reach of censoring authorities. I’m not advocating full on prepper status, but, I think it would be foolish for us to ignore the fact that physical copies of some really important books might be hard to come by, at any moment. A world where you can’t buy Dr Seuss books is a world that is going mad, and we just have to be sober and aware of that, and we need to work around that reality.

And sort of related to the point of keeping books around that you really aren’t supposed to have, I think we need to start thinking individually and collectively, we need to start having some hard but important conversations about when we draw lines and no longer cooperate with the authorities that rule over us.

Remember good ole John Witherspoon. He spent time in prison in Scotland because of his unwavering commitment to republican political ideals, and the Protestant cause and that time in prison actually harmed his health for the rest of his life. When we came to America to lead the College of New Jersey, he immediately embraced the cause of independence and he along with every signer of the Declaration of Independence defied the king and pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the cause of independence. I fear that we need to start developing a bit of that mindset. We need to start thinking about where, when and how we are not going to go along anymore with those that assert power over us, and we need to begin to anticipate penalties that may come and how we will cope. I hope I am wrong, but I fear like we are entering an era where this will be necessary.

So that’s just a few, really optional suggestions for your consideration. Those are just a few things to consider that flow naturally from the ethos of John Witherspoon Seminary. And again, these are non- dogmatically submitted and if they don’t resonate with you, no problem at all.

But here I want to shift and be a bit more dogmatic, not because I have any particular insight but because I know what is commanded in Scripture and so do you. And we are back to our theme for this graduation: love in action.

Not going to do a Bible study on what Jesus has told us to do.

We know we are to love God and love our neighbor, and that all of Moses and the prophets, basically everything, depend on this dual commandment.

Back to Brothers K

We are to actively love, we are to do love in action.

And for the Witherspoon community, this message of active love comes down to us continually, throughout the entire curriculum but culminates in the final work that we read in the Great Books program, Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Keep in mind, we read this novel, this 800 page monster, after Homer, after mountains of Greek tragedy and history, after Plato and Aristotle, after Virgil and still more mountains of Roman history; after Dante, Milton and so so so much Shakespeare; after a deep dive into Northern European and British history, Norse and Finnish mythology, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon history, after Geoffrey of Monmouth, after Augustine and Aquinas, after much Renaissance history and art history, after the Reformation, after the Enlightenment, after the awful Immanuel Kant, after the magnificent yet terrifying Friedrich Nietzsche, after the Founding of America, the Federalist Papers and Hamilton the Musical, after the French Revolution, after World War 1, after Kandinsky and a jaunt through modern art and modern poetry, after Wittgenstein, Solzhenitsyn, Elie Wiesel then we come to Brothers Karamazov.

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky comes after all of that because it is a perfect work of art indeed it is a perfect statement of all that is human and it artistically instructs us – no instructs is not the right word – because it’s almost anti-instruction. There is argumentation in the book and its utterly brilliant, but it’s a legitimate question as to who wins the arguments if you are just doing philosophy.

But by the end of the book, it doesn’t matter who has won the arguments because argumentation is not really love in action and love in action has no refutation. And this entire book is a living example of love in action, and at the end when Alyosha is just living, actively loving, we realize there can be no argument about anything because loving God and loving your neighbor is about living in, beholding, dispensing the love of Jesus Christ, which is, as Dante rightly says, the love that moves the sun and the stars, the most real thing that there is.

And this is what you finish with when you put down Brothers K.

So if I could finish with just reading the final page of this book, the final page of the Witherspoon curriculum, I think you will see what we mean, even without the 700 plus pages of introduction.

Now keep in mind, within the context of the massively long novel, this scene happens after all the sickening buffooneries of Fyodor Karamazov, after his murder; after a murder trial, a murder confession and a suicide; after the incredible teachings of Father Zossima, his death and the defamation and slander of Zossima after he dies; after the incredible philosophical back and forth between Alyosha and Ivan, after the awful love triangle of Fyodor, Dimitri and Grushenka, after Alyosha leaves the monastery and so much more, and of course, after the heartbreaking backstory and death of Ilyusha, at the age of nine.