Professor God

The way God is depicted by conservative Christians, he would have been the worst professor ever.

Suppose I, before I retired from professoring, had taught a class the way God supposedly teaches. According to conservative Christians, nearly everyone who has ever lived has been or is damned on account of disagreeing with one of numerous essential doctrines. This, of course, includes the people who never had a chance to even hear about these doctrines. Suppose I taught a course in which I locked the door and kept most of the students from attending the class. Then, I would give exams so hard that most of the class that got in the door failed the exams. What would my supervisor have said if 99% or more of the grades in my class were F? This would have been justification for corrective, and probably disciplinary, action on the part of the administration. Professor God could say, I taught the truth to pre-selected (predestined) students and if I didn’t like their answers, I flunked them, and that’s that.

It gets worse. I recently watched The Ten Commandments, the Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Charleton Heston and some inspiring sidekicks like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, and, of course, Yul Brynner. I know it is fashionable today to spurn the “sand and sandals” epics of the mid-twentieth century. Those movies, of which The Ten Commandments was the most prominent, are easy to ridicule, especially when Heston (as Moses) seemed to be, after he became holy, nearly a log with a mask, speaking in Biblical phrases, and the narration, in faux King James English, were nearly intolerable. In this movie as in movies such as The Robe, the good characters seemed like robots. At least in The Robe, Jay Robinson played a really wickedly funny Emperor.

 

But I admit a secret admiration for sand and sandals movies. If only the line between good and evil were as clear as it appears in The Ten Commandments, and if only God’s presence were as easy to see as the red light on top of Mount Sinai!

In The Ten Commandments, God taught through proclamation. It would seem that Professor God was like the old-fashioned professor, one whom everyone would now hate, wearing his academic gown and proclaiming truths for students to write down. Almost no professor does this anymore.

Today, the ideal of education is to reveal the facts of the world and let the students explore them, figuring it out for themselves. In reality, they need some framework, some guidance for their explorations, but not rote memorization. It is amazing how long it took for academics to figure this out. One of the few academics before Thomas Henry Huxley (inventor of the modern biology teaching laboratory) who made the students explore the world for themselves was Aristotle. He invented the field trip. He had his students (in Asia Minor, not Athens) go to the seashore and the mountains, find things, and try to figure them out. They collected beetles (as Darwin did two millennia later) and birds’ nests. They dissected snakes. There was not yet any textbook to tell the students what they were supposed to find.

But Professor God would not have allowed this. If we see something in the world that puzzles us, we are not supposed to wonder about it, but simply accept what the ecclesiastical authorities, posing as God’s representatives, tell us. If you draw your own conclusions, you flunk. If you even ask inconvenient questions (how could a God of Love create an eternal Hell?) you flunk. Which means you burn in Hell forever.

Many of us believe that God, if there is one, invites us to look at all the facts of the world, explore them, draw our own conclusions from them, in discussion with one another. But this is not Professor God in the conservative Christian universe.