In the beginning was the Word.
What a remarkable way to begin an account of the revelation of Jesus Christ! John’s gospel emphasizes the identity of Christ as the narrating Word of Creation. For John, Christ is identified with God’s holy, animating speech: the power and wisdom of intelligent communication and creation. The Gospel, in turn, spread through the written word, and it was the Gospel of a God Who spoke — a Christ Who was somehow Word itself.
The act of speaking and writing — the word — remains fundamental to the educational endeavor. In a world of noise and of words that mislead or control or manipulate, our mission as Christians remains bound to the word and to Christ, the Word. Our words must not only be true, but they must also be life-giving, clear and filled with grace. To learn to speak and write with quality and fidelity isn’t simply a ticket to job security and advancement; it’s essential to fulfilling our purpose as co-creators in God’s redemptive act in the world.
My wife and I were reminded of this on a recent trip. During breakfast we met two young women traveling with college friends. For the moment, both were living in New York City, where one of them worked as a software manager. I asked whether she had studied IT. “No,” she explained. “I started as an IT major but eventually switched to English.” She smiled. “Because, of course, you can do anything with an English major.” It turned out she had specialized in technical writing, started at her company writing grants and was very quickly moved into a managerial position.
My takeaway from this conversation was not simply that liberal arts majors like English are still centrally relevant in today’s job market — though they are. But as any Olivet student will tell you, writing and speaking are central to the general education experience across all fields of study, from engineering to English to business administration. The importance of the word goes beyond job preparation alone.
Education at the college level is more than simply learning information. The real point is learning what to do with that information: learning how to think. Knowledge is like bricks, but critical and creative thinking is building things with those bricks. But how does one learn to build with knowledge? How does one learn to think? It’s not by passively absorbing information or sitting in an ivory tower somewhere thinking lofty thoughts. Instead, as the history of education since the ancient Greeks has shown, one learns to think primarily by speaking and writing.
This is a paradigm shift that students encounter at college. For years many have been conditioned to consider writing as the thing that comes after thought, as though the ideas for a paper or essay are fully formed in one’s head and then simply transferred to paper. We often feel the same way about speaking — and with some wisdom: think first, then speak. But in the safety of the classroom, we realize that writing and speaking are ways of thinking. I can’t count how many times I’ve worked out a thought — or been surprised by a revelation — only discovered in the act of writing itself. And, likewise, some of the greatest moments in teaching are those during a class discussion when a student has that “aha” moment in the midst of voicing a question or trying to verbally articulate an idea. Writing and speaking aren’t simply signs of intelligence; they’re intelligence at work.
We want our students to have the skills to create with the knowledge they have — to build steadily, diligently, but also creatively and daringly — for the Kingdom of God. At Olivet we cultivate the Christian labor of writing and speaking. What’s at stake is our very ability to fulfill our God-given purpose in the world. In every essay, every response prompt, every sermon or speech, we are invited to commune with a God Whose nature is Word.
And the Word was with God.
And the Word was God.
From Olivet The Magazine, The Parent Issue – Autumn 2024. Read the full issue here.
