The Ivory Tower

Not too long ago I read a passage of writing about the state of modern academia. It was a short narrative that followed a man as he wound his way through a war torn-city, destroyed by bombs and littered with the corpses of the city’s inhabitants. At one point he rounds a pile of rubble which was once a church and finds himself at the base of a tall, lean, and beautiful ivory tower. As he surveys the world around him, he finds the lure of the gleaming white building standing tall among the surrounding rubble to be irresistable.

He enters the tower and begins climbing the stairs. He climbs and climbs and climbs. As he does, he begins to look down through the windows at the landscape of destruction around the tower; he finds within himself a desire to make it to the top, learn the secret of this place, and return with the knowledge necessary to bring the city below him up to the level of this tower. 

He continues climbing until he reaches the top floor, and he finds a long dark hallway leading to a brightly lit room. As he begins to move down the hallway, he hears the sound of a man’s voice. The voice seems to be excited. He continues on as he realizes the man in this room is congratulating and praising someone. As he reaches the door, the wanderer can barely contain his excitement, assuming the men in this room must have found a cure to the woes of those dying in the streets below.

When the wanderer opens the room, he finds himself in a bathroom. And to his great surprise, he finds a lone man sitting on the ground with a fishing pole whose line is leading to the bathtub. The wanderer walks up to the bathtub and sees the line leading to a hook sitting on the bottom of an empty tub. The wanderer turns to the man and asks “what are you doing?”

“Fishing,” the man excitedly replied. “And I have almost found something of true value so many times! It just barely keeps avoiding me.”

This story is meant to parallel the status of modern academia and the students who enter it. I have embellished parts of it from its original form, but my purpose in sharing this is not to bash the modern university. As a seminary student, I sometimes wonder if this is not an accurate portrayal of what happens to the average Christian who enters the hallowed halls of religious academia. I have seen far too many men enter the seminary with plans to change the world only to take up their own pole and forget the dying world left behind.

If you are one of the few who enter into the fold of religious education in order to help the dying world around you, do not forget those people. Their need for salvation from certain destruction should be what is driving you, not an empty and vain intellectual exercise.