Written by Perry L. Glanzer |
Monday, July 29, 2024
In the old modern university, the ideal was that in the search for knowledge, the researcher should be objective. This approach to scholarship is a Deistic corruption of the Judeo-Christian God. It treats the ideal of the scholar as the Marvel character known as the Watcher. The impassive but accurate observer of events does not interfere but just chronicles the narratives occurring in their area of study. The triune God is not an object and there is not an English translation of the Bible that speaks of God as being objective. This quality is not an approach to scholarship that ever should have been imitated by Christians.

One virtue that briefly made headlines a few months ago is rarely discussed today. At least, I rarely hear of it talked about as a virtue or placed on lists of Christian or public virtues. Indeed, one of the intriguing things about moral language in the academy, whether in Christian or secular circles, is the virtues that are emphasized and omitted from discussions. One of the virtues that one always hears about is justice. Yet, one rarely hears about a virtue that is necessary for justice to occur: impartiality.1
We heard in the news a few months ago that the lawyers in the Trump trial would have difficulty finding twelve impartial jurors. They should have been able to pick from any mature Christian. After all, the basics of a Christian theory of virtue is that we, as image bearers of God, are to acquire God’s virtues. In other words, we need to pay attention to God’s virtues to know what character qualities will help us flourish as human beings. The Bible is clear that one of God’s qualities is that God avoids partiality and that we should imitate this virtue.
The Biblical Basis
Specifically, God is described or revealed as one who is not partial (Deut. 10:17; 2 Chron. 19:7; Job 34:19; Rom. 2:11; Eph. 6:9; Col. 3:25; James 3:7). In older translations, such as the KJV, it is phrased “regardeth not persons.” Interestingly, I cannot recall reading a recent essay on the topic or seeing it discussed in Christian ethics texts as a virtue. When I looked up the topic of impartiality in my library, I found only two books that focused on God’s impartiality—one from 2007 and the other from 1982.2 I also could not find one study that attempted to measure the practice of impartiality and only found three theological articles on partiality.3 Indeed, the words impartial and impartiality have been in decline for some time.
Why is that?
The Reasons for the Neglect of Impartiality
Some of these problems can be explained by our own partiality toward certain virtues. We tend to gravitate more to popular virtues such as being just or fair. Yet, there is an important difference between these concepts. After all, in both Hebrew and Greek scriptures the term is given a unique set of words4 that are different than justice or fairness. The difference is that impartiality is the prior virtue necessary for the practice of justice to occur. That is why we look for impartial jurors in a trial before we determine justice.
It is important to note that impartiality is not something God simply practices in every context and situation. After all, God chooses specific people groups or people for specific callings. As the verses cited above indicate, it is a virtue God uses when evaluating particular groups or individuals under a law or moral principle. Impartiality deals with God’s judgments of human action within God’s moral order.
That same virtue, or more accurately, avoidance of vice, is required of Israel (Lev. 19:15; Deut. 1:17; 16:19; Mal. 2:9), the wise person in general (Ps. 82:2; Prov. 24:23; 28:21) and Christians (James 2:1; 3:7).5 The context for the exercise of impartiality in these cases almost always involves moral or legal judgments that deal with people of different economic, social, or ethnic identities (Greek/Jew; poor/rich; slave/master).
Impartiality is also the quality that I continually find that students appreciate in their teachers. 
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Written by Perry L. Glanzer |
Friday, May 3, 2024
We must teach our students to work hard to empathize with and understand others. Students need many prior Christian virtues, such as humility, self-control, and gentleness, before learning and applying these skills. Yet, at the same time, we must not shy away from teaching our students to identify fools, offer reasons for their foolishness, and yes be willing to avoid or exclude them when appropriate. 

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.— Dietrich Bonhoeffer1
Like snow in summer or rain in harvest,honor is not fitting for a fool.Prov. 26:1 (NIV)
This post will demonstrate that I do not believe the last sentence of Bonhoeffer’s quote above. I contend we are not defenseless against stupidity or what the Bible calls fools and foolishness. I think our defense can start by identifying fools and foolish ideas and offering clear reasons why they are foolish. Ideally, Christians in universities should help with this process.
Yet, I must confess that I don’t help my students identify fools and foolishness as well as I should. The likely reason is that I’ve absorbed the cultural pressure to be nice that I described recently. I don’t think I’m alone. According to the Google N-gram, we have talked less about “fool,” “fools” “foolish,” and “foolishness” ever since the 1930s.
I would hypothesize that the declining use of these words stems from the dominance in our culture of sentimentality, by which I mean excessive tenderness and niceness. For Christians, it may involve the erroneous assumption that we need to be “nicer” than both God and Scripture or perhaps an erroneous view that we should avoid that kind of “demeaning” language.2 That sort of foolish niceness is a vice and a way our culture has deformed us.
After all, biblical wisdom literature is quite clear that the path to wisdom entails learning to identify fools and foolish ideas. Yet, we often avoid this part. For example, how many times have you heard Proverbs 1:7a in Christian discussions about education, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,” but you never hear the second part quoted, “but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Indeed, I cannot recall a time I have heard the second part quoted in these contexts.
The wise and diligent know how to identify fools, help others identify them, and avoid them (Prov. 14:7, “Stay away from a fool, for you will not find knowledge on their lips”). Indeed, Jesus and Paul freely identified fools and foolish ideas (Mt. 7:24-26; Mt. 25; Luke 10; Gal. 3:1, 3, etc.). Christian education should help with these tasks. I was reminded of this important endeavor when rereading the philosophy of education by one of the greatest Christian educators, John Amos Comenius:
We do not choose parasites, fools, or buffoons, but serious, wise, and pious men as tutors for the sons of our kings and princes. Should we not blush, therefore, when we confide the education of the sons of the King of kings, of the brothers of Christ and heirs of eternity, to the jesting Plautus, the lascivious Catullus, the impure Ovid, that impious mocker at God, Lucian, the obscene Martial, and the rest of the writers who are ignorant of the true God?3
Comenius is simply applying and expanding upon Proverbs 14:7 in his day. We should make sure our young students are equipped with the Christian critical thinking they need to identify fools before having them read fools.
To help students identify and critically analyze fools we must dig deeper than surface level impressions to expose foolishness.
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Written by Perry L. Glanzer |
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4 where Paul states, “for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty….I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” As more mature believers will often note for young believers who throw around the last verse, Paul is talking about leaning upon God’s strength to be content. We desperately need God to do it.

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found that “between one-half to two-thirds of young, emerging adults (18-23) said that their well-being can be measured by what they own, that buying more things would make them happier.”1 Perhaps one has guessed, but I am talking about the virtue of contentment.
According to Google n-gram, the use of the word “contented” has been in continual decline since 1791, and “contentment” has been waning since 1925. Due to Christian writers, there are still recent books written about it,2 but the virtue has received surprisingly little attention from the wider scholarly world. It has been especially neglected in positive psychology. I found less than a dozen studies in this field examining contentment, and all of these were written within the last decade and associated with two key authors.3
Thus, it is not surprising that one of these studies, a 2021 proposal for how to measure contentment empirically, had to plow new ground by creating one of the first-ever measures of contentment.4 In this post, I will evaluate the definition behind the measure and the measurement itself by comparing it to the Christian understanding of contentment. I find that there is nothing more helpful in seeing the limits of common grace/natural law than examining positive psychological measures of various virtues and comparing them to a conception of the virtue defined by the Biblical tradition.
Measuring Contentment
To begin, it is interesting to see how the scholars define contentment. They describe it as “an emotion that arises from the perception of completeness in life.”5 Thus, although this definition acknowledges a cognitive aspect (“the perception of completeness in life”) as a trigger for the emotion, contentment is seen primarily as an emotion. The scholars do not mention how this habitual perception might be transformed into a habitual affection that then transforms one’s behavior—a habit that would be the essence of the virtue of contentment.
Thus, the scale they developed, the PEACE Scale, is not so much a measure of the virtue of contentment, but “a stable and reliable, one-factor measure of the emotion of contentment.” Below are fifteen items “that generally captured the construct of contentment” as they defined it.6

I am satisfied with everything that life has to offer each and every moment.
I feel contentment in my daily life.
I feel content with who I am.
I feel contentment and peace no matter what is going on in my external environment.
I often feel an unshakable sense of peace and contentment.
I feel a deep sense of contentment even during difficult situations in life.
Even though I may work throughout the day, I feel content with everything I do.
I feel content with my life regardless of whether others accept me or not.
Everything is exactly as it should be.
I am content with what I have.
I feel balanced in my relationships with others.
Overall, my relationships with others are easy to manage.
I do not desire anything more in my relationships with others.
I would be content with my life even if I lost all of my status, wealth, and achievements.
When I feel stressed, I stop what I am doing and take care of myself.7

Does this scale measure the Christian virtue of contentment? Not really.
We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4:11b–13 where Paul states:
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