by Christopher Jones
In front of my junior high class, I’m a teacher. In front of my high school class, I’m a teacher. When I walk through the door at John Adams College, I’m a professor.
I was thinking about that just a minute ago. This is one of those days where I taught junior high and high school, I already put five hours in as a teacher. And I will get on an airplane as soon as this is done and fly to another state, and tomorrow put in another five hours as a teacher. But for a few precious hours a week, I’m not the teacher. I am a professor.
And teaching is one thing, a good thing. One of the list of things I was never going to do in my life. To profess, however, is more than teaching. You can teach what you do not believe. You can teach what you aren’t particularly good at, and can teach what you don’t even really know. As long as you have the right scaffolding. That’s a term for help.
But you can’t do that as a professor. No doubt there are some somewhere who profess things that they do not actually believe. But I don’t think that you can do that at John Adams College. I don’t know that you can do it in any place where you’re going to be closed in a room with ten or 11 extraordinarily bright, frighteningly intelligent kids who come from a generation where they are so used to being lied to that they make the assumption that at some point you are going to do it and they’re ready and they’re waiting and they’re watching. And if you lie to them, they will hear it. They will know it.
And if you are going to profess at John Adams College, you may not lie. If you do not know, you must tell them that you do not know. And there are so many things that you do not know yet.
I profess logic, rhetoric, and poetics at John Adams College, which is a really fancy way of saying I concentrate our attention on how to accurately assess material, how to think clearly about the material, and then how to express what it is that we believe about it. One of my favorite things about logic, rhetoric, and poetics is what we call the wheel, the wheel of death, which every student is stretched upon.
We have a list of topics ranging from the expansion of nuclear arms to whether one can wear socks with sandals. And a list of venues, audiences to whom one is going to speak, ranging from the Democratic National Convention to a kindergarten. That was my very favorite speech, and that is a high bar. We have had students profess to the insane asylum. We have had students use tasers on Santa Claus. We have had students discuss feminist thought while on a lifeboat four days out from the shipwreck, with a number of very hungry and thirsty individuals.
You think that these topics are arcane and abstruse? Indeed, they are. They are meant to be. One of the reasons that we do this is because you never know when you will be called on to profess. You don’t know about what you will be moved to profess. You have to be ready. You have to be ready all the time. The Bible is very clear on being ready always to give a reason for the hope that is within you.
And yet, although I can tell you the reason for that hope, and I can tell you that I cling to it as I cling to my living breath, I know I’m not ready to give a reason for that. I would never be ready. The man who could give you that reason, and who gave it to me, would be sitting in that chair [referring to where his late father and JAC trustee Gordon Jones would have been sitting], no doubt trying hard not to glance at his watch and thinking what a useless frippery a graduation is. And could we not just mail the certificates to everyone? Would that not be sufficient? Because every moment that he’s sitting up here, he is not reading his 19 different translations of The Iliad, or browsing online to see if there was yet another used copy of The Ivory Door that popped up.
So I profess that you can always be ready. I profess that you can have a hope as deep as the bones underneath your skin. I profess that you can know, as surely as you know anything, that there’s a Christ and a resurrection.
And yet I did have some thoughts overmastered by the situation. There are some things on the wheel that are too powerful for those who are living. This is one of those things.
So, my last lesson for my freshman. What you do when you find yourself with a topic and a venue that you simply cannot fill? Say what you must and let the silence do the work for you. There is a God in His heaven. And one of the great purposes of His calling is to teach us to be fully here and to know Him, to see His hand even in the weirdest, most abstract, most impossible places.
If there is a nobler work, I don’t know it. And I profess, I will be forever grateful for this place and what it has given me, and what it has taken from me. I thank my God that I can stand here today in the place of a much better man, who would also say that’s complete nonsense.