Studying Great Books for the Sake of the Great Commission

I have been asked to put together two parts of the program description for Bethlehem College: We study the Great Books in light of the Greatest Book, for the sake of the Great Commission. How does the study of great books relate to the great commission? As the professor for Global Studies, it is my task to help aspiring missionaries who have spent three years in our Omnia Core (the Great Books) prepare to take the next step toward vocational ministry. How do these things work together?

Since Rick Segal has called on me, then, to defend my job, I’d better have a response:

While reading Elizabeth Elliot’s spiritual biography of Jim in our course on Missionary Biography, I noted Jim’s class schedule during his senior year at Wheaton College (Sept. 1948): “my courses are eight hours of Greek (Church Fathers, Xenophon, Advanced Grammar…), elementary Hebrew, and two hours of textual criticism.”^[1] Despite Jim’s ambiguous relationship to formal theology because of his Plymouth Brethren tradition, his undergraduate years demonstrate a love for deep learning, challenging liberal arts courses, and a passion to expand his mind.^[2]

Was Jim’s liberal arts degree applicable to his work in Ecuador? He later tells about grabbing a wooden bowl by the teeth and flinging it over his head so that the milk inside did not douse him, a common game in the Quichua village. He also relates the need to lie down on the floor to demonstrate what crucifixion looked like. Was his time spent parsing optatives in extra-biblical Greek and completing philosophy courses truly beneficial?

That is our first question: Should aspiring missionaries spend their undergraduate years in a study course on the Great Books?

A second question challenges Bethlehem College in particular. We claim to “read the Great Books in light of the Greatest Book for the sake of the Great Commission.” How do we do that?

Reading great books in light of the greatest book has characterized the best Christian scholarship. We begin with a conviction that the Bible alone is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of God. We expect our belief and practice to be grounded in the Bible as the supreme norm or rule. We respond with obedience to God speaking in the Scriptures.

But we do not stop there. We read other books in the light of the Bible. That is, we expect to learn from these other books. And we expect that this practice in “assiduous attention” will make us better readers of the Bible.

What does the phrase “for the sake of the Great Commission” add? Bethlehem College could have chosen another end or goal. We could have said “for the sake of forming mature adults who can think and speak clearly.” We could have said “for the sake of transforming society through faithful influence”, or “for the sake of cultivating problem-solvers who can address the pressing needs of our time.”

Why must our study of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin lead to or be motivated by the Great Commission? And does such a rubric have relevance for studying texts such as those by William Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Fyodor Dostoevsky?

I would answer in the following way: The Great Commission clarifies a Christian’s calling in this age.

In other words, the Great Commission tells us what it’s all about for Christian people living between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ.

How then do we go about studying the great books for the sake of the great commission? We read great books to understand people—because people are the proper object of a Christian’s efforts in the age before Christ’s second coming.

Two parts: Why should aspiring missionaries study the great books? And, How does the Great Commission shape our study of great books?

Why should aspiring missionaries study the Great Books?

I will make one point on this question and then turn to the second.

The Great Books prepare us for Great Commission Moments. Deep study of the greatest texts on the greatest questions prepares students who are resourceful, or ready for new situations.

One of the classes I teach outside the Global Studies emphasis is The Greek and Roman World. This history class includes a close reading of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. That book seems to have little to do with missions since it comes from the pre-Christian world, details a war involving barbarity and suffering, and gives such long descriptions that you may be tempted to respond as did the Spartan Sthenislaidas, “The long speech of the Athenians I don’t even claim to understand!”

Why, then, is Thucydides part of our study as men and women exploring whether God would have us pursue cross-cultural ministry? (I have specific students who just finished their first year in mind here.)

We do so because Thucydides confronts us with difficult decisions and makes us agonize together with the ancient Greeks as they balanced strategy, ethics, finances, and pride. We ask together with Thucydides questions such as: Should we go to war without a clear idea of whether we can win? Can we persevere with our strategy even when we encounter major obstacles such as invasion and plague? Should we undertake a new adventure that could gain great honor, yet costs a fortune and does not accomplish our strategic goals?

Christian witness is not total war like the Athenians and Spartans faced. But it does invite us into new situations in which there are no obvious, easy answers, and in which previous experience only helps us so much. We may have a special love for the Apostle Paul at Athens (Acts 17), but when we wake up in the middle of a civil war in Shanghai in the 1850s as did Hudson Taylor, or today in a mid-size city of 20 million people in China, the shape of ministry will look and feel different.

We want to become Christians who can make fresh, new efforts toward the salvation of men and women around the world for God’s glory, and time spent forming us in right thinking will prepare us best for that task.

The great fun of gospel ministry is that we don’t know what question will be asked of us tomorrow. When I finished preaching in Vietnam, someone asked whether the “image of God” meant that our bodies were like God’s body. That question made me re-address something I had assumed.

How will we prepare for unexpected situations? One way is to invite questions and answers from other times and places to shape our minds. Great Books help an aspiring missionary to be ready for new situations.

Why should aspiring missionaries study the great books? They help us become resourceful and ready for whatever situation we encounter.

Studying the Great Books…For the Great Commission

“Second, how does the study of the Great Commission shape our study of great books?”

How does a passion for the Great Commission affect the rest of the Great Books curriculum? Does the third part of our slogan make an actual difference in class time? If in the first question I addressed aspiring missionaries wondering why they need to read Thucydides, here I address those students who love their study of literature and philosophy and wonder what it has to do with the Great Commission.

I said at the beginning that The Great Commission clarifies a Christian’s calling in this age.

Three ways that the Great Commission focuses our studies: Worship, People, and Deep Discipleship.

First, God’s Goal is Worship

The great crisis in education concerns its end or goal. If the goal of education is primarily technical skills for acquiring certain careers in the late-modern world, then the value of perspectives from the past or from unfamiliar eras of history appears negligible.

If the end of education is social acceptance within a global elite of the well-educated, then far more time spent on contemporary language and issues that mark that elite would be time well spent.

Even within our circle of similar schools, the end of classical, great books education may be the cultivation of civic virtue, or of creating a truly “free” person who is self-aware and self-directed, or of transforming our national culture by ambitious steps toward leadership and accomplishment. These may all provide higher ends than the purely utilitarian goal of a technical education.^[3]

But the Bethlehem statement forces us to look beyond those earthly goals, to the spiritual and eschatological goals of the Great Commission. Disciple-making among all nations places the task of education in the realm of the eternal.

God has many purposes for our lives as human creatures, and many of these fall under the “cultural mandate”—the commission to work and keep the garden and to subdue the earth. But human life as expressed in education ought to move beyond the cultural mandate to the “gospel mandate,” that clarification of the purposes for God’s people in the world today.

This points us to the end of all things and asks us to discern our place in light of that end.

“Behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)

What unites this diverse group of saints? It is their worship of God (and, in the marvelous ambiguity of Revelation, the Lamb!). The Great Commission is directed toward this final scene. In making disciples, we are preparing worshipers for that day.

And this is distinctive to our age. Making disciples and incorporating those disciples into church communities where they witness to that final day is the primary purpose of God in this age.

In Ephesians 3:9-10, for instance, Paul believes his ministry is “to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

The “plan of the mystery” is that men and women would be united under Jesus Christ as Lord in the church. Restoring men and women to fellowship with God through the death of Jesus serves as the center of all God’s purposes in the New Covenant era.

Certainly God is doing many good things through people in every day and age: whether caring for children, curing diseases, building physical infrastructure for fruitful life, and for establishing forms of society that allow for human flourishing. But the Great Commission points us firmly to eternal salvation as the ultimate end of human life, and the ultimate plan of God. God aims to glorify himself through the praises of fully-satisfied worshipers. As John Piper has so memorably said for us: “Missions exists because worship does not.”

“For the sake of the Great Commission” reminds us that God’s purpose in this age is to form a people for himself. Although we wish to see culture transformed, we especially want to see a culture of repentance and faith modeled today as Christ’s disciples gather in worship.

First, then, God’s goal is worship.

We want to become Christians who can make fresh, new efforts toward the salvation of men and women around the world for God’s glory, and time spent forming us in right thinking will prepare us best for that task.

Second, God’s goal includes real people.

The Great Commission reminds us that people, both living and dead, are worth understanding or “exegeting.” How can we learn to better understand and interact with real people with all their particularity?

We do so by meeting people and engaging thoughtfully with their ideas. One way we could accomplish this would be to focus on living, breathing people who are alive today. This is part of the missionary task and is extremely valuable. Most long-term missionaries plan for an extended season of language learning through cultural interaction. The most valuable work in language learning occurs as the missionary listens to the life stories of people in that culture. What do they value? How do they put together the most important moments in their life? How do they relate to one another as family and friends? This type of “ethnography” gives insights into a particular culture and exemplifies what Paul Hiebert called “exegeting humans.”

To study the great books for the sake of the Great Commission is to recognize the value of understanding another human’s thoughts and goals.

For instance, when we read Plato’s dialogues, or Cicero’s On Laws, or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, we have to come to grips with a non-Christian worldview. We must understand it from the inside first. We must allow its categories to become our own for a season. This is not a simple apologetic refutation of non-Christian worldviews, but an attempt to instantiate Pastor John’s habits of mind and heart: observation, understanding, and only then evaluation.

With these ancient texts, we have the added advantage that other Christians have already evangelized those cultures. Justin Martyr’s Apology, Boethius’s Consolation, and Augustine’s City of God, each gives us Christian categories for understanding, appropriating, and ultimately superseding those non-Christian texts.

When the Great Commission is our goal, we read the greatest books as practice fields for gospel proclamation, for “exegeting people.”

The Great Commission focuses our study by first providing its goal, the worship of Jesus Christ, and second by elevating the value of people and their ideas. Third, it stimulates deep discipleship.

IMG_20250614_150842533_HDR — Dr. Hoglund and seminarian Alan Behnam on a cross-cultural teaching trip.

Third, God’s plan leads to deep discipleship.

“For the sake of the Great Commission” is big enough to give purpose to all our studies.

Someone might hear the focus on the “Great Commission” and think that Bethlehem College seeks only to equip students for street evangelism and missions prayer walks. Someone might ask, “Does this focus move us at all beyond the missionary practice of the Latter-Day Saints? They are quite good at equipping young men for two years of proselytizing.”

Yes, the Great Commission moves us far beyond mere proselytizing because of its focus on deep discipleship. Doing all for the sake of the Great Commission encompasses the whole world.

We see this in two places in the text. “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them….and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

First, “disciples” are learners or students. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus constantly refers to his followers as “disciples” (Matthew 10:24-25 for the disciple-teacher relationship). The disciples have much to learn, and they are still learning. So, when Jesus uses the verb “make disciples,” he is inviting others into a similar relation to himself that the disciples had in the gospels.^[4] That is, he invites us to learn and grow with him over time. Discipleship does not end with conversion or baptism, but is an ongoing activity.

Jesus could have said “converts” (proselytes, Matthew 23:15), someone who changes their religion. I believe that coming to Jesus is a conversion or a change of one’s religion. But, as a matter of goals in the Great Commission, Jesus commissions us to make disciples—that is, learners.

Second, how much should we teach? Jesus says to teach them to “observe all that I have commanded you.” This phrase opens up the whole world both of practice in godliness and of equipping ourselves for godliness.

Deep discipleship includes wisdom for all areas of life. The Great Commission narrows its focus to making disciples, but then widens its effects.

For Bethlehem College, this means all forms of study are part of our individual discipleship. Through these exercises, this writing process, this problem-solving situation, we are growing in wisdom and skill as a fruit of the Great Commission, and so that we might participate faithfully as God’s commissioned messengers to the world.

“For the sake of the Great Commission” announces that we want to see change in our world. But we believe this happens primarily through the witness of God’s people to the glory of Jesus Christ, resulting in mature disciples.

We will rejoice when those disciples form churches, and when those churches create communities that display a fresh culture of the gospel. And we will rejoice when that culture of the church permeates broader society so that it influences ethical standards, and standards of decency, and even of just laws. But those fruits remain fruits, whereas the root is courageous gospel witness to salvation from sin found in Jesus Christ.

It means to take the Great Commission as the center of the Bible’s story in this age.

Conclusion

What does it mean to study “for the sake of the great commission”? It means to take the Great Commission as the center of the Bible’s story in this age. It tells us that God’s goal is to create worshipers, that this work consists in studying real people, and that his plan is for deep discipleship.

By maintaining our focus on the Great Commission as God’s primary goal for the church age, we provide our students with an anchor, a fixed point, a rock on which to stand, that will both keep them from distraction to temporary, this-worldly ends, and will open up wide vistas for exploration, creativity, and expression.

Many of our students will go on to provide for themselves and their families through vocations that do not have an exclusive ministry focus. But they will do so as men and women who know how their work and life participate in God’s greater purpose to make disciples of all nations.

And if, in decades to come, our students persevere in creative gospel proclamation among unreached people groups, I trust they will attribute their longevity to a focused time of studying the Great Books, in light of the Greatest Book, and for the sake of the Great Commission.