What John Calvin and Osama Bin Laden Had in Common

I enter the 19th-century castle that houses France’s largest Protestant Christian school. Immediately, I see a large student-made map of France and its surroundings with more than 2,000 dots scattered across it. Intrigued, I read that they represent the Christian schools and eight universities that John Calvin’s followers founded in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The schools closed during the persecutions that followed. But recently several dozen have started up again.

I had accepted an invitation to speak at the annual Mathurin Cordier Seminars for French-speaking Christian school teachers. But who was Mathurin Cordier? Why would a program to promote a Christian view of education be named after him? I found out that, 450 years after his death, Switzerland still honors Cordier for providing the basis of its present-day schools.

But I learned something more significant: Cordier was John Calvin’s instructor at the Collège de la Marche in Paris.

Cordier had left the priesthood to follow God’s calling to teach. He and Calvin soon formed a close relationship. They spent many evenings together, exploring the richness of God’s creation in history, ethics, theology, and astronomy.

One evening Cordier and Calvin, scanning the constellations, met a hermit. He told them that his wealth consisted not in the merits of good works but in the salvation of Jesus Christ as a free gift of grace. As dutiful Catholics, Cordier and Calvin said that was a heretical attack on the church. However, a seed had been planted. Gradually Cordier and Calvin began considering Martin Luther’s ideas, which had spread even to Paris.

Several years later both Calvin and Cordier joined the Protestants. Just when Calvin wrote his first Institutes, Cordier fled Paris to escape execution for his beliefs. Soon Calvin asked Cordier to teach with him in Geneva. Calvin wrote, “O Master Mathurin, O man of gifted learning and great fear of God! It was God’s will that I should have you as a teacher, in order that I might be directed in the true path and right mode of learning, so that I can now in some way profit the Church of God.”

Cordiers’ Christian Schools

Calvin believed the church would flourish only with supportive schools. So when Calvin returned to Geneva a second time, Cordier became his right-hand man to found schools and develop their programs. Cordier was an innovative educator whose programs and ways of teaching were far ahead of his time.

A gentle pedagogy replaced the then-common severe discipline and beating. Learning began with the simple and moved to the more advanced. Bible reading and study took place every day. But both boys and girls had a broad education that included languages, the sciences, and music. Some of the textbooks Cordier wrote were still used 300 years after his death, including in North America.

A well-known historian has written that Calvinist schools led to “an astonishing familiarity of Scripture, even among the lowest classes, a readiness to sacrifice for education, and a progressive spirit of inquiry and investigation.” That, in no small measure, was due to Cordier mentoring Calvin and later guiding his views about education.

Bin Laden’s Education

Now flip forward to today. Osama bin Laden, like John Calvin, was a shy, respectful student, brought up in the traditional faith of his family. Like John Calvin, as a teenager he had a charismatic and brilliant instructor, Abdallah Azzam, who influenced his life’s direction and passion.

Just as Calvin studied the Bible, bin Laden read and interpreted the Quran. His faith deepened, and he became an outcast in his own community. His relationship with his radical Islam professor led him to conclude that Islam needed to launch jihad against those hostile to his Islamic views.

And just as Calvin’s faith and emphasis on biblically based education for all helped shape Western civilization, so bin Laden was instrumental in altering our world, as became clear after Sept. 11, 2001.

Calvin and bin Laden radically differ, of course. Calvin became rooted in God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Bin Laden’s starting point became a god who sought vengeance. But Calvin and bin Laden have two things in common. First, masterful and passionate instructors shaped the direction of their lives. Second, as a result they both affected the course of history.    

Teachers and professors make a difference. They may not teach students who will significantly alter culture or history. Yet Christian instructors can and do help students become a faithful presence in the world for God, and to contribute to society and culture in positive—even if small—ways.

James Davison Hunter in his book To Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2010), questions whether today’s Christians, individually or communally, can change the direction of culture. Yet, he says, we can be faithfully present to others through sacrificial love. We can be faithfully present in our tasks as parents, workers, and volunteers. We can be faithfully present in our spheres of influence. We can encourage harmony, beauty, joy, security, and well-being while resisting oppression, injustice, and corruption.

In Culture Making (IVP Books, 2008), Andy Crouch goes a step further. He shows that as Christians we often copy or consume culture around us: music, advertising, iPad technology, and so on. At other times we justly critique and even withdraw from culture. But, he adds, God also calls us to be artists and gardeners who make culture, people who think and do things that make the world more welcoming, more beautiful, more thrilling.

That means, I believe, that Christian instructors have a crucial role in making students more discerning about how culture shapes us and how we respond to culture. Teachers and professors can nurture students to be a faithful and loving presence wherever God places them. They can also help them make something of their world: preparing wholesome meals within a context of positive family life or understanding the roots of poverty and helping people address it in their local communities.

Like Cordier, passionate teachers and professors can help students use the richness of God’s world to enable human life to flourish, even in a society marred by sin.

Christian schools and universities can do this explicitly based on a biblical framework. Last year I was involved in interviewing 75 grade-12 Christian school students and their teachers in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. We asked about their views of and involvement in culture, and how their school had shaped their attitudes and dreams.

In many of the schools I said to myself, “I hope my grandchildren will attend a school like this!” Why? Because many students deeply cared about the issues facing our world and our communities. Many had linked their classroom learning with hands-on experiences in shelters for the homeless or support for single teenage mothers. Many realized that their overseas mission trips benefited mainly themselves, teaching them appreciation for other cultures and how people with few material goods live with more gratitude than North Americans. Many planned to enter vocations where they can make a difference for God, for instance, developing more wholesome marketing approaches in advertising or fighting child labor and human trafficking in the developing world.

Their Christian schools, the students said, helped them identify with cultural needs and issues. In the future they intended to make constructive and significant differences.

I am thankful for Christian schools and universities that develop a mind-set for Christian service in business, in medicine, and in political life, even if the ideals surpass eventual outcomes. But the many Christian teachers and professors teaching in public institutions can also help students ask basic questions about life and culture. And at times they may be the only Christian influence on their students.  

I work for an organization that places Christian professors in secular settings with little or no Christian influence. A professor in China teaches the history and philosophy of science within the framework of a Christian worldview. Professors in Cambodia teach ethical medical practices and sustainable ecological practices. A professor in the Czech Republic teaches courses on popular culture and how that relates to a biblical worldview. Professors in Nigeria have published a widely used handbook for teaching about HIV and AIDS, as well as student textbooks about Christian faith.

God uses these professors to lead some of their students to Christ. “My life has been totally changed,” said one Chinese student. “I have completely changed the way I think,” said a Russian student in the Czech Republic. This happens through work in classrooms, in discussions in professors’ homes, and in personal mentoring. It happens by teaching and demonstrating the implications of the Cultural Mandate and the Great Commandment, and by teaching students what Christ commanded us, both explicitly and implicitly.

Christian teachers and professors have a crucial God-given calling, no matter where they teach. Their influence makes a difference for students in classrooms throughout North America and the world. They may even be teaching the next John Calvin or turn around the life of a potential Osama bin Laden. As another school year begins, let’s give them the support they need.