Life exam
In a culture that finds repentance unintelligible, impractical, or unnecessary, we are called to witness to its intelligibility, beauty, and importance.
This academic semester we’ve been teaching a course at Yale College titled Life Worth Living. Like other observers of contemporary higher education, we have noted that American colleges and universities have let consideration of great questions about the meaning of life fade out of their curricula. If students want to ask these questions, they must do so outside of the classroom. (Some Christian colleges, but not all, may be an exception to this trend.) These developments in higher education echo a movement in American culture at large. We have become increasingly dedicated to and adept at identifying and deploying the means to achieve our ends, but we get uncomfortable and disoriented if we are forced to ask about the ends of our lives—their goals and meaning. Life Worth Living is part of an initiative to revive and strengthen critical discussion about what, for Christians, is the most important question of our lives: What is a life worth living?
Over the course of the semester we are engaging with certain core texts and the lives of key founding figures from six highly influential traditions: Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, utilitarianism, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. We encourage students to treat these traditions not as objects of mere historical curiosity but as living visions of what makes life worth living. We ask the students to regard these texts as making claims on their lives and then to wrestle with those claims.
We assigned the Gospel of Luke for the class session introducing a Christian vision of a life worth living. The class discussion focused in great part on questions of repentance and forgiveness. (It is always interesting to see what strikes students who have never read the Gospel before.) Are you really supposed to forgive someone over and over again as long as they say, “I repent” (Luke 17:3–4)? Does God really forgive like that? Isn’t that just license to sin and sin and repent at the last minute with no consequences? What would it take for repentance to be genuine?
