The Bible never instructs believers to emulate God in His greatness. God’s metaphysical attributes are exclusive to Him. Self-preservation would invite us to believe that divine greatness is only safe in the hands of a being with divine goodness. Our ersatz C.S. Lewis would argue that the same relationship of goodness and greatness should apply to the students we educate. If we want to train them to be great, we must also train them to be good. The greater level of moral goodness we can inculcate in our students, the safer it will be for them to achieve the greatness we have promised them.

It is the time of year when those of us who serve as teachers, from college to Kindergarten, are ramping up our preparation for the upcoming term. In my home university, new faculty are arriving on campus this week for onboarding, next week will be devoted to faculty meetings at the university and college level, and then the students arrive.

University faculty need this time to prepare. In pursuit of efficiency and cost control we have reduced the number of hours students spend in the classroom to the minimum required by our various accreditors. At the same time, in an attempt to improve the competitive value of our programs we have upgraded the learning outcomes promised to our students. Faculty need to prepare every lecture, assignment, experiment, exam, discussion, and exercise if they are going to meet all their course objectives in the limited time available.

Student expectations are also high. We have promised them greatness. We have assured them our classes can transform them into great writers, great speakers, great problem solvers, and great thinkers. We have touted to them the success of some of their select forebearers who achieved prestigious graduate school acceptances or cool jobs with high starting salaries as a result of our training. Those kinds of commitments, although usually moral rather than contractual, drive our need for preparation. Greatness is not easy, and it will take all our skill and energy as educators to prepare our students to achieve it.

Unfortunately, this swirl of well-meaning activity may mask a common failing of the university, particularly for Christian faculty and institutions. Is our frenzy of planning at this time of year preparing students to be great, while ignoring training them to be good? It invites the old saying mistakenly attributed to C.S. Lewis, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”1

At the same time, most of us are not trained in theology or moral philosophy. As Christian instructors, should we not be concentrating on being good stewards of the students before us by imparting the expertise of our particular disciplines? We may well prefer to stay within our realm of proficiency and rely on others within the university to focus on the students’ Christian worldview. If moral education must happen in the classroom, we would often rather demure on integrating faith into our subject matter and merely allow our students to experience Christian values through the way we conduct ourselves and engage with them. Is that sufficient? What is our responsibility as Christians in higher education?

When my brother and I were children, our parents taught us a simple prayer to say at mealtimes. “God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food.” The simplicity of this prayer conceals some profound theology. When theologians describe the properties of God, they often divide them into His communicable characteristics and incommunicable characteristics.2 Communicable characteristics are the moral attributes of God and include qualities like God’s love, compassion, forgiveness, patience, and kindness – the qualities of God’s goodness. God’s incommunicable characteristics refer to His unique metaphysical attributes such as His qualities of omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternality – His qualities of greatness.

The Bible is replete with instructions to emulate God in His moral attributes. Saint Paul admonishes the Christians in Rome to “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer”3 capturing three of God’s moral attributes and applying them to the Romans’ contemporary issues.

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