Twenty years ago, the Wheaton Alumni magazine began a series of articles, titled “On My Mind”, in which Wheaton faculty told about their thinking, their research, or their favorite books and people. Professor of German Emerita Carol Joyce Kraft (who taught at Wheaton from 1960-1996) was featured in the Autumn 1995 issue.

There are two clocks in my office. One hangs on my wall and is powered by a battery. The other stands on my desk and needs winding every day.

Even though I sit between the two, when my mind is on course work, that mound of detailed mental activity calling loudly for attention, I hear the small clock. Ticktickticktick.

During those times when someone has come to the office to speak of personal matters, the pace is slower and more relaxed. We listen to each other, and somewhere in the midst of that discussion I have noticed that I always hear the slower clock. Tick…tick…tick…tick…. The other clock, the one that suggests a frantic pace, seems to have disappeared.

Two clocks. Why do I mention them? For the past few years in our twentieth century German literature course we have read and discussed some themes in the recent work, Momo, by Michael Ende. This is a modern fairy tail for adults, one which remained on Germany’s best-seller list for many months in 1983.

What was it that drew so many readers? Could it be that they saw themselves in that skillfully drawn reflection of modern life?

Momo is the story of a young orphan girl who listens to people. She is one who gives all who will come that valuable gift of rapt attention.

We soon notice, however, that there are gray figures who have appeared in the city. They are everywhere and they all look alike: gray coats, gray hats, gray briefcases, gray cars, ashen gray faces, As we listen in on one, we discover that he is trying to persuade a barber that it would really be to his advantage to save more time. He begins to list all the things that Herr Fusi, the barber, does when he is away from his shop. He eats, he sleeps, he visits his deaf mother daily, he cleans his house, he reads, he spends time with friends, he sings in a choir, he visits a crippled young girl, and he even spends 15 minutes at the end of his day meditating over what has transpired since the morning began.

All this time is lost, misspent, useless, says der Graue. Why it’s about half of your life, Herr Fusi! The solution? Zeitsparen. You have to save time. How do you do that? Work faster, Herr Fusi! Omit the “extras.” The time that you save, we’ll put in the savings bank, with interest. The amount you save will double every five years! We don’t force anyone, mind you, but it’s really to your advantage. Think about it. Time is money.

Herr Fusi thinks about it. He decides. It is as though he is compelled to speed up his work. And we watch him very gradually become less than a Mensch, less than a human being. He becomes a machine. And so do his friends. And most everyone else in the city. They become hardly recognizable anymore. They have no time to think. No time to listen. No time for the heart. No time for the family. No time to be. Robots are what they have become. The tragedy is that they don’t know it; they don’t recognize what they have become; or if they begin to realize what has happened, they see no way out. They find themselves trapped in their frenzy. The more time they save, the less they have. They have been trapped by a lie.

What an image!

It is the children in the story who see clearly that something is amiss in the world of grown-ups. It is the children, through Momo, who bring sanity back to the city. It is the children who restore a healthy sense of time. They recognize that time is not money. They know that time is a matter of the heart. (The remainder of the story I will leave for your reading.)

Although I don’t agree with one of the main thoughts, that time is everything, I do agree with the author’s main thrust, that time cannot be “saved” for later. Time is for now. It is precious and it is only used once. The more time we save, the less we really have.

So, ours also is a world of clocks. Which one is it that we hear? The one with the frantic pace or the one that allows us pauses to live?

I chose this topic of time because there are moments in the classroom when I am reminded that James (3:1) was right when he reminds us that not many should become teachers. It is an overwhelmingly humbling experience when you sense that someone has acted on the suggestions you have made. So what is it that we are reflecting, by our words, by our lives, by the way we make use of our time?

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The following statement was included at the time of publication: Carol J. Kraft ’57 received the B. A. from Wheaton, an M A. in the Teaching of Foreign Languages front Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and an M .A. in Germanic Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. She took additional graduate study at Middlebury College and has participated in several summer programs in the Goethe Institute in Germany. She has served as a member of the Foreign Language Department since 1960. Another strong area of interest is that of Spiritual Direction, which is a part of her responsibilities as ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, Diocese of Chicago, serving at St. Barnabas’ in Glen Ellyn.

Billy Graham, ’43 graduate of Wheaton College, emerges from an honorable heritage of “crusade” evangelists like D.L. Moody, Wilbur Chapman and Billy Sunday, preachers renowned for conducting massive citywide campaigns. Laying the groundwork for all such ministries, however, was Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), the first great evangelist of the Second Great Awakening, who established such familiar patterns as offering the public invitation (now known as the “alter call”) to sinners to accept Christ’s free gift of grace, encouraging them to walk forward and deal with God at an “anxious bench;” and praying extemporaneously from the pulpit, rather than reading from a book. Finney’s innovations, now common practice, were groundbreaking for American Protestantism. As such his influence deeply colored the spirit of Wheaton College, though he never visited its campus.

Initially practicing law in New York, Finney dramatically converted to Christ through the counsels of Presbyterian theologian George Washington Gale. Studying for the ministry under Gale, Finney acquired his preaching license and served as pastor for several years in New York City before commencing his extraordinarily successful itinerant preaching. Eventually he served from 1851-65 as professor and president of Oberlin College in Ohio. Finney, an ex-Mason, was fiercely anti-Lodge and unshakably abolitionist. These qualities were most appealing to a young pastor named Jonathan Blanchard, visiting the Oberlin campus to deliver a speech, in addition to investigating the work of the Holy Spirit among the students and staff. Blanchard would serve as president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, a work community named after the man who converted Finney, George W. Gale. In the late 1860s, after Blanchard had assumed the presidency of Wheaton College, Finney fully supported his efforts in founding The Christian Cynosure, the printing agency of the National Christian Association, dedicated to thwarting the Masonic Lodge.

Jonathan’s son, Charles Blanchard, second president of Wheaton College, remembers Finney from a visit to Oberlin:

President Finney of Oberlin was another of the great souls whom God permitted me to meet in my early public life. Lecturing in his city he invited me to dinner and gave me the privilege of an hour or so of delightful conversation. Among other things he said: “You frequently meet with opposition, do you not, in your work against the lodges?” I replied that this was true. He said: “That is always true when you are doing good. It used to be true of us here in Oberlin. When I came to this place there was not a church between Boston and Buffalo which wanted to see me. Associations, conferences and presbyteries refused to ordain our young men because they had studied here. Now,” he said, “We are really too popular. The world does not hate us anymore. Our great danger is our popularity.” He continued, “You need not be worried while you find that the world hates you, but if ever the world should come to love you and speak well of you and make your path easy, then,” he said, “you must beware for you are in mortal danger.”

Blanchard paints a vivid word picture of the magisterial preacher:

He was the most remarkable man to look at. Perhaps all great men are…His eyes were deep set, his brows beetling over them. His eyebrows were gray and large, intensifying the effect of the brows themselves. His eyes glowed under excitement and inspiration. He seemed like an old prophet. It was easy to imagine that he resembled Ezekiel. I think in the temper of his mind he did resemble him. Not so much a mourning prophet as Jeremiah, not so much a prophet of the court as Isaiah, rather like Ezekiel who saw visions of eternal things and who saw all temporal things in things in the light of the eternal….President Finney was another of those men who did not confer with flesh and blood. He took his orders from Heaven and I do not think it would have made the slightest difference to him if the rich and wise and powerful of the world could have been gathered in one company to denounce and threaten him. God was so real that the voices of men sounded dim and uncertain in his ears.

Finney’s abiding influence on Wheaton College is also evidenced in the ministry of its fourth president, V. Raymond Edman, who was deeply concerned about revival. In 1951 Edman published Finney Lives On: The Secret of Revival in Our Time, of which Billy Graham remarks, “To read, study and pray over this book is an imperative for every Christian worker in such an hour as this.” Edman summarizes his subject in the epilogue:

Thus was Charles Grandison Finney, the lad who grew up in the backwoods of America without any knowledge of the gospel, the young lawyer who met the Lord Jesus in true penitence and prayer, the man who was devoted to the Scriptures and the Savior, the revivalist whose tireless labors shook America and Britain in decades that were dark with human greed and godlessness, the pastor and college president whose ministry led multitudes to the Master and sent them to the ends of the earth in His glad service, the servent of Christ who still lives in Christian hearts the world over as he thunders to us in his Memoirs, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, and Lectures to Professing Christians. Finney lives on in hearts that need revival. Pray for revival, and learn from him the open secrets of revival.

Charles Blanchard, second president of Wheaton College, recalls in his autobiography (1915) crossing paths with two Presidents of the United States and other notables.

I have never known any of them in an intimate way. They were either before my time or had homes in distant parts of our country, but I have had the privilege of seeing a number of them and I count this also among the privileges of my life. The great Lincoln I saw when I was a boy of ten years. I heard him at that time in the Lincoln-Douglas debate. It has never passed from my mind. I do not suppose it ever will. The tall, angular loose-jointed, benevolent man, rather inexpensively clothed, the short, well-dressed, polished-looking opponent, the seething crowds, the bands of music and the storm of flags! As I remember there were twenty music organizations in the procession that day at Galesburg. The number may have been greater or less, I do not pretend to know. Twenty is the number which remains within my mind. The evident appeal to conscience and humanity in the speeches of the great President and the deft, cunning, clever twisting and turning of his opponent, these came to me even as a child and remained. After he had passed away I met in the White House at a reception General President Grant, who also was a great man of totally different type but one of the real men of our nation and time. I have always thought better of him since I read the story of his own life. He was injured by his friends. He was too loyal to his friends, that is, his loyalty made him true to them when he ought to have placed the country before them. In purpose no doubt he did; he was of Scotch parentage and it is hard for a Scotchman to give up his friend.

Twenty years ago, the Wheaton Alumni magazine began a series of articles, titled “On My Mind”, in which Wheaton faculty told about their thinking, their research, or their favorite books and people. Professor of Old Testament Paul House (who worked at Wheaton from 2001-2004) was featured in the Summer 2002 issue.

When I was a senior in college, I once sat in my favorite professor’s office and thought that it must be a wonderful thing to be a teacher. Like most kids from rural Missouri, I never met a college professor while growing up. Thus, it never occurred to me to think about Christian higher education as a vocation.

By the time I had finished my B.A. at Southwest Baptist College, however, my teachers had instilled in me a sense of the importance of the ministry of instructing others for, as we say at Wheaton, Christ and His Kingdom. Since I entered the teaching life I have not wanted to do anything else, at least not in place of it. Teaching students, writing books, and learning from colleagues continue to confirm what I thought as an undergraduate–the teaching life is a wonderful calling. I think this is especially true because I get to teach the Bible, God’s inerrant written Word.

Teaching the Bible to today’s students is an interesting, sometimes frustrating, task. They often know little beyond the basic Bible stories they learned as children, since biblical content is often left out of youth-group meetings. So students know that they should wait to have sex and should tell others about Jesus, but often little else. The result can be a dangerous division between worship on Sunday or in chapel and decisions made during the rest of the week. Thus, my task is to help them learn the Bible’s contents so they can have some chance of applying the whole of Scripture to their increasingly complex lives. As they learn, many of them grow rapidly. Their Christian worldview blossoms as they apply the Bible to life.

Writing books is one way to teach the Bible to people I will never meet in person. I am not alone in this conviction. Think of how many readers Scott Hafemann, John Walton, Andrew Hill, and my other colleagues have helped understand the Bible. For that matter, consider how many people beyond the Wheaton College community have learned about history from Mark Noll, Kathryn Long, and Edith Blumhofer. Or how many readers know more about literature because of Leland Ryken’s books. Writing is teaching; it is not just a way of getting promoted or becoming famous, or infamous for that matter.

Learning from colleagues is a great benefit of the teaching life. Through the years I have not only learned more about the Bible from other teachers, I have also absorbed knowledge about literature, history, current events, music, and athletics. Sadly, I fear that no matter how hard anyone tries, my brain rejects scientific knowledge. Despite my deficiencies, being taught by other teachers is a marvelous experience that helps me integrate the Bible more fully into the lives of my students.

I recommend the teaching life to young people all the time. I also recommend that donors and prayer warriors do all they can to support it. The teaching life is one committed to helping people learn what matters and how to act accordingly. More importantly, at Wheaton it is a life committed to the Lord, the sufficiency of His Word, and the growth of His people.

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Paul R. House is a graduate of Southwest Baptist College (B.A.), the University of Missouri (M.A.), and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.). He has been a professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School since 2004 and served for six years as associate dean. Previously, he taught at Taylor University, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, and Wheaton College. Dr. House is the author or editor of 15 books, including The Unity of the Twelve, Old Testament Survey, Old Testament Theology, and Lamentations. He has been pastor of churches in Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky. He and his wife, Heather, have one adult daughter.