Scotch College

A city on a hill

This is a transcript of an address by the Chaplain at the service of installation of Mr I Tom Batty as the ninth Principal of Scotch College in the Littlejohn Memorial Chapel on 14 July 2008.

We are today engaging in this service of installation on what is proving to be a rare and auspicious occasion for Scotch College: the installation of a new Principal.

Very few here today were present at the last such event in 1983. Tom Batty is only the ninth Principal since 1851, when the Reverend James Forbes, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, founded Scotch.

In the 20 years from 1843, the Free Church of Scotland established over 600 schools worldwide. This educational tsunami with its epicentre in Scottish Presbyterianism reached the distant shores of Port Phillip in the person of James Forbes. Forbes actually established several primary schools in Melbourne, but recognised Victoria needed further education to equip leaders, so he worked hard to establish an Academy.

Forbes did not live to see the installation of the first Principal, but died at the age of 38, two months before Robert Lawson arrived from Scotland in 1851 to commence the Melbourne Academy, soon to be known as ‘the Scotch College’.

Unsurprisingly, the foundations of such Christian education go back to Jesus and beyond to the ‘Shema’ and Jewish education. Like all Jewish boys, Jesus was educated in Israel’s Torah. The Gospels reveal that Jesus quoted very widely from the Old Testament, and especially from the psalms. He was familiar with the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5) and the ‘Shema’, which we heard read from Deuteronomy 6.

This ‘Shema’, with its invitation to ‘love the Lord’, the God of Israel, was the source of Jewish identity, and the daily repetition of the invitation to teach, discuss, demonstrate and celebrate the good purposes of God was the foundation of Jewish education. Although a carpenter, Jesus was commonly called ‘Rabbi’, or teacher. His favoured methodology was parable. Some of his parables are among the most beautiful short stories in the world.

One thinks readily of such challenging stories as the Good Samaritan, the Loving Father and the Friend at Midnight. His sayings and dialogues, recorded in the Gospels, are rightly renowned; there is more than first impressions suggest. Shortly I’ll allude to the Sermon on the Mount, the start of which we heard briefly as the Beatitudes were read to us.

Most of what we know of Jesus comes from a brief three-year period between his baptism and his execution. Astonishingly, shortly thereafter he was proclaimed as the Saviour of the world. The rest, as we say, is His story.

The Christian drive to educate is based on the instruction of Jesus to teach the loving purposes of Israel’s God. This calls us to love God and neighbour, and is justified by Jesus’ own life, death and resurrection.

Matthew records his final command: ‘Make disciples of all the nations ... teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you...’

The simplest Christian confession is contained in the New Testament itself - ‘Jesus is Lord’. All branches of the Christian Church – Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant – hold to the teaching of great Creeds of the first centuries, which elaborate the place of Jesus and his teaching. The short and concise document we call ‘The Apostles Creed’ is perhaps best known. Can such ancient and universally Christian statements serve us as we move deeper into the twenty-first century? Not all think so.

There is a contemporary appeal for a secular Australia.

A week ago the Sydney Morning Herald published an essay by Keith Austin, a senior journalist, entitled ‘In God’s Name’. It was a plea for a truly secular Australia. He writes ‘… If Australia is to make any significant progress as a multicultural and multi-religious society, then it’s time we got serious about the separation of church and state and moved towards becoming a secular 21st century society’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5–6 July 2008). He sees the education agenda in particular as critical to the creation of a more secular Australia.

Austin’s comments reflect a discussion that is common in the media and are part of an ongoing Australian debate. However, we need to note that his secular perspective is a faith position. Just as people with religious faith have personal emotional and social reasons for their views, so too do people with a secular orientation.

Tim Keller is the minister at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. In his book The Reason for God, he writes, ‘You can’t say “All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now.” If you insist that no one can determine which beliefs are right and wrong why should we believe what you are saying. The reality is that we all make truth claims of some sort and it is very hard to weigh them responsibly, but we have no alternative to try to do so.’

As Keith Austin’s essay was published, Sydney was hosting its Biennale of Modern Art on the theme of ‘Revolutions’. In the disused shipbuilding sheds of Cockatoo Island, there echoed with a forlorn and elegiac beauty the voice of Scottish artist Susan Philipsz. She was singing the ‘Communist Internationale’. Softly she sang her solitary rendition of this once rousing anthem in the vast space of the Turbine Hall, ‘Reason in revolt now thunders’. The irony was stark; all confidence in this secular creed had evaporated. The muting of this anthem suggests that the world has moved on from the revolutions that espoused it. Reason has seen through the secular and atheist illusion of religious neutrality.

We cannot deny or downplay our awareness that the most horrific shameful power struggles have been committed in the name of God, and of Christ. But, tragically, the secular world too has its crusades. The Soviet Gulags, China’s Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia have all revealed that secular and atheist perspectives are just a different kind of faith; faith whose adherents can be as fundamentalist as religious people, and who may be as prone to acts of bigotry, terror and aggression as any religious fundamentalist.

So, how do reasonable people responsibly weigh which of the competing truth claims will serve us in the future?

A baffled Mark Lilla, Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, tells of a bright young student who wanted to commit his life to Christ. Lilla writes:

‘I wanted to cast doubt on the step he was about to take, to help him see there are other ways to life, other ways to seek knowledge, love ... even self-transformation. I wanted to convince him his dignity depended on maintaining a free, sceptical attitude towards doctrine. I wanted ... to save him.’

In observing this evangelical and proselytising drive of his own scepticism, Lilla adds:

‘… The curious thing about scepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytisers. In reading them, I’ve often wanted to ask: “Why do you care?” Their scepticism offers no good answer to that question. And I don’t have one for myself.’

Lilla calls this the ‘leap of doubt’ that is necessary for secular people.

C S Lewis exposes the fallacy at the base of this sceptical approach. In his book The Abolition of Man, he writes: ‘The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or the garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? ... A wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.’

So, all faith positions, religious or secular, can morph along a familiar continuum from belief to self-righteousness, to exclusion, then bigotry and hatred. Jesus exposes this danger very clearly in the Sermon on the Mount, where he conducts a major critique of religion.

What is it that Jesus the Saviour invites his disciples to see? He does not criticise irreligious people, but the religious ones. He criticises people who fast, who pray, give to the poor and seek to live according to the Bible, but they do so in order to acquire power for themselves.

Jesus was not against any of the things they were doing, but strongly opposed them because the spiritual leverage they were pursuing was without regard to issues of injustice and oppression. For example, the fasting Jesus had in mind was informed by what he had learned as a boy from reading Isaiah, who wrote:

Is not this the kind of fasting that I have chosen?
To loose the chains of injustice
And untie the cords of the yoke;
To set the oppressed free and break every yoke.
Is it not to share your food with the hungry,
And to provide the poor wanderer with shelter –
When you see the naked to clothe him,
And not to turn away from your own flesh and blood.
Then your light will break forth like the dawn
And your healing will quickly appear.

The God of Israel cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance. So, Jesus says to the respectable and upright, ‘the tax collectors and prostitutes enter the Kingdom before you’.

We should find it reassuring that rightly understood, orthodox Christianity carries within itself the seeds of its own critique.

This is as true at the social as well as a personal level. As for instance in the Christian critique of its own practice of slavery in the 18th century and of the Christian appeal for Civil Rights in the USA last century.

Jesus said ‘the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many’. The Christian should mirror this servant Christ. God can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. He saves completely by grace.

Today a new Principal will hold high the torch of learning at Scotch. Let us remember as he does so that the School motto begins with ‘Deo’, without whom the flame would not have been lit. God comes first at Scotch.

Julius Nyerere of Tanzania embraced communist ideals to try to transform his country. Eventually, remarkably by African standards, he retired and sadly declared that he has failed. Thirty years ago I heard him lament that it was the rich nations that used the language of poverty. In this he was right. The poor have no voice. We still use the language of poverty. We are fixated with our own economic problems. We feel the pinch of fuel costs and our concerns are voiced in the G8, but we falter in our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, and the environment.

Israel’s God reveals through his Son, the Lord Jesus, that our concern must be not just with ourselves, but with all the world’s people. As long as we seek selfish goals we will hurt ourselves and repeat the mistakes the prophets addressed. We will be making for ourselves purses that are full of holes; we will labour for that which does not satisfy.

Jesus’ educational vision is to be primarily concerned to love God, and our neighbour. This fuelled the Scottish educational tsunami, and it will change our world.

The Christian faith invites others, religious or secular, to contribute their gifts for this service to the human family. We believe it is an increasingly attainable educational goal. The game is not over till all God’s children are safely home.

The world needs reflectors of Jesus’ bright light. We need the salty preservative effect of Jesus’ benign teachings. We need the forgiveness he offers and the hope of his resurrection. We do need to be saved.

In the Australia of the 21st century the school that builds on this Christian foundation will occupy a striking position. Prominent and unable to be hidden, it will be, as Jesus said, like ‘a city on a hill’. GS