William H. Willimon - "The Transformed Mind" (August 22, 1993)
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| Male Speaker | This week this campus is transformed. | 0:09 |
| One morning we realize that overloaded Broncos | 0:16 | |
| and BMWs and Toyotas have been again clustering on campus, | 0:20 | |
| sweating fathers are seen dragging trunks | 0:26 | |
| up the steps of Pegram, | 0:30 | |
| and some prehistoric professor is heard remark, | 0:33 | |
| "Oh, they're back again." | 0:36 | |
| School has begun and Duke's world is transmogrified. | 0:40 | |
| And why do they gather here? | 0:46 | |
| What would cause them to desert their parents | 0:49 | |
| and come live among us strangers? | 0:51 | |
| Well they're here, | 0:57 | |
| as St. Paul might put it, | 0:58 | |
| for intellectual transformation, | 1:00 | |
| the renewal of your minds. | 1:04 | |
| That's what Paul tells the Christian freshmen at Rome, | 1:06 | |
| here in our text, | 1:11 | |
| "Do not be conformed to this world, | 1:13 | |
| but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." | 1:17 | |
| How are minds renewed? | 1:25 | |
| How are minds transformed? | 1:28 | |
| That's what I want to discuss with you today. | 1:33 | |
| How are minds transformed? | 1:37 | |
| Here is the modern university's answer. | 1:39 | |
| Intellectual transformation involves freedom. | 1:42 | |
| Detachment from conformity. | 1:48 | |
| Freedom from conformity, | 1:51 | |
| that sounds sort of like today's text from Paul. | 1:53 | |
| The wise person is that one who by his or her senior year | 1:56 | |
| is able to stand alone, | 2:01 | |
| intellectually speaking. | 2:03 | |
| To think for herself. | 2:05 | |
| Doesn't Paul say, | 2:06 | |
| "Do not be conformed?" | 2:07 | |
| Here's how the president of Yale welcomed freshmen | 2:11 | |
| to that institution a few years ago. | 2:14 | |
| He said, | 2:17 | |
| "Yale's faculty can guide you, | 2:19 | |
| we can take you to the frontiers of knowledge, | 2:21 | |
| but we cannot supply you with a philosophy of education | 2:24 | |
| any more than we can supply you with a philosophy of life. | 2:27 | |
| This has to come from your own active learning. | 2:31 | |
| Yale expects you to take yourself seriously." | 2:35 | |
| Translated this means the university hasn't a clue | 2:40 | |
| about what you're doing here. | 2:43 | |
| (crowd laughing) | 2:45 | |
| But after all that's okay. | 2:47 | |
| Because the purpose of the university | 2:48 | |
| is enable you to be on your own, | 2:51 | |
| intellectually speaking, | 2:53 | |
| to think for yourself. | 2:54 | |
| Oh we've got this curriculum, | 2:56 | |
| we've got this smorgasbord of professors, | 2:57 | |
| but it's really up to you to think for yourself, | 3:00 | |
| to liberate yourself from parental expectations | 3:02 | |
| and thereby transform your mind, | 3:05 | |
| and I'm sure the students loved it. | 3:09 | |
| Because this is always a message that they love. | 3:11 | |
| Don't be conformed, | 3:14 | |
| cut yourself loose. | 3:15 | |
| And so a popular Duke professor always begins | 3:17 | |
| his semester of classes by writing on the blackboard, | 3:20 | |
| "Question everything." | 3:24 | |
| That's what we do here, | 3:28 | |
| we detach you from Mama, | 3:29 | |
| make you abandon your hometown, | 3:31 | |
| your church, | 3:33 | |
| your tradition, | 3:33 | |
| your neighborhood, | 3:34 | |
| give you over to strangers, | 3:35 | |
| and once we get you completely detached | 3:36 | |
| from everything they told you in high school, | 3:39 | |
| we give you a degree, | 3:41 | |
| a funny hat, | 3:42 | |
| and we call you educated. | 3:43 | |
| Your mind has been transformed, | 3:45 | |
| American-style. | 3:47 | |
| Do not be conformed! | 3:52 | |
| I remember the story back in the 60's | 3:55 | |
| of a college president who was confronted | 3:57 | |
| by a group of angry students outside | 3:59 | |
| his administration building. | 4:01 | |
| He went out to speak to them, | 4:02 | |
| and they had a list of demands. | 4:04 | |
| They wanted this, | 4:05 | |
| they wanted that. | 4:06 | |
| And he said that he thought some of this | 4:07 | |
| could be worked out, | 4:09 | |
| and then they talked a little bit, | 4:10 | |
| and then he said, | 4:12 | |
| "Alright, | 4:13 | |
| don't just stand around here like a bunch of sheep, | 4:14 | |
| get on with whatever you got to do." | 4:15 | |
| Well with that, | 4:18 | |
| don't just stand here like a bunch of sheep, | 4:19 | |
| they dismantled that administration building | 4:23 | |
| brick by brick, | 4:26 | |
| they drove the president off campus, | 4:27 | |
| everything was cut loose. | 4:29 | |
| That was the worst thing you could say, | 4:32 | |
| "Don't be like a bunch of conformist sheep. | 4:34 | |
| Be on your own, | 4:38 | |
| think for yourself." | 4:40 | |
| Now why is that our path, | 4:42 | |
| the conventional American path | 4:46 | |
| to intellectual transformation? | 4:48 | |
| Why do we always think of growing up | 4:51 | |
| in terms of detachment and separation, | 4:53 | |
| and independent nonconformity, | 4:57 | |
| freedom? | 5:00 | |
| Well IBM needs mobile workers. | 5:03 | |
| The modern corporation can't use people | 5:06 | |
| who've got a neighborhood or a family | 5:08 | |
| and refuse to leave it. | 5:10 | |
| Friends, | 5:12 | |
| home. | 5:13 | |
| The modern industrial state has learned | 5:15 | |
| that one of the best ways to make | 5:18 | |
| modern people malleable and manageable | 5:21 | |
| is to transform them into individuals. | 5:24 | |
| Individuals who are alone and detached and ruthless. | 5:29 | |
| Because the modern state has found that individuals | 5:34 | |
| standing alone are much easier for the bureaucratic state | 5:38 | |
| to manage than people who've got a tribe, | 5:42 | |
| or a family, | 5:46 | |
| or a home, | 5:47 | |
| and refuse to leave. | 5:48 | |
| And yet there really isn't any such thing as the free, | 5:53 | |
| free thinking, | 5:58 | |
| standing alone individual. | 5:59 | |
| Because everybody thinks from some point of view. | 6:02 | |
| Everybody is standing somewhere when he thinks. | 6:06 | |
| Each of us thinks from a world, | 6:10 | |
| and a worldview. | 6:13 | |
| The president of Yale, | 6:15 | |
| in telling young Yalies to "take themselves seriously," | 6:16 | |
| to locate all truth within the range | 6:20 | |
| of their personal experience, | 6:23 | |
| is not thereby making them free. | 6:25 | |
| 'Cause nobody's free that way. | 6:29 | |
| He's merely urged them to exchange | 6:33 | |
| one form of conformity for another. | 6:35 | |
| He's urged them to abandon conformity | 6:40 | |
| to their parents or their neighborhood | 6:42 | |
| or to Plato or to Jesus, | 6:44 | |
| somebody who's been here before, | 6:46 | |
| for another form of conformity, | 6:48 | |
| namely conformity to what has personally happened to them. | 6:50 | |
| They thus become the willing victims of a mode of education | 6:55 | |
| which urges students always to seek the normative answer | 6:59 | |
| solely within their own experience. | 7:03 | |
| That professor who declares first day of class, | 7:07 | |
| "Question everything," | 7:10 | |
| hasn't thereby freed students from cowering conformity. | 7:13 | |
| He's deceived them into thinking | 7:18 | |
| that by questioning tradition and community | 7:20 | |
| and the wisdom of the ages, | 7:23 | |
| they're free. | 7:24 | |
| My point, | 7:27 | |
| they're not free. | 7:29 | |
| They've merely exchanged one set of masters for another. | 7:31 | |
| Now their God is what seems personally right to me. | 7:37 | |
| And I can think of no more socially conformist, | 7:44 | |
| parochially American idea than "question everything," | 7:47 | |
| or "take yourself seriously." | 7:53 | |
| We are not liberated, | 7:59 | |
| thereby, | 8:01 | |
| but rather we have enslaved our students | 8:03 | |
| to the most conventional of modern conformity. | 8:05 | |
| Slavery to the self. | 8:09 | |
| And that message all of us believe. | 8:13 | |
| We all believe that, | 8:17 | |
| even before we come here to the university. | 8:18 | |
| We all believe, | 8:21 | |
| I am the center of the world. | 8:22 | |
| Truth is a matter of personal opinion. | 8:25 | |
| Ethics is what seems personally right to me. | 8:28 | |
| You don't need to pay high Duke tuition for that, | 8:32 | |
| 'cause you already believe that | 8:35 | |
| just by being born in Bunnlevel, | 8:37 | |
| or Boston. | 8:38 | |
| Everybody believes that. | 8:40 | |
| And so that could hardly have been what Paul had in mind | 8:44 | |
| when he said "don't be conformed." | 8:49 | |
| No, | 8:55 | |
| the more honest question is to who's view of the world | 8:56 | |
| has my mind been conformed? | 9:03 | |
| Paul says, | 9:08 | |
| "I appeal to you, | 9:10 | |
| do not be conformed to this world, | 9:12 | |
| but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." | 9:15 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world, | 9:22 | |
| this world, | 9:24 | |
| a world no larger than what is personally happened to me. | 9:25 | |
| This world, | 9:30 | |
| where the longest journey I ever take | 9:32 | |
| is a short trip deeper, | 9:34 | |
| deeper into my own ego. | 9:36 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world, | 9:39 | |
| Paul says, | 9:42 | |
| which suggests to me that the only way to be transformed, | 9:45 | |
| the only way to get a new mind | 9:51 | |
| is to be in some other world. | 9:53 | |
| This is how we think. | 9:58 | |
| We all think on the basis of the world in which we live. | 10:01 | |
| My mind is never any bigger than my world. | 10:07 | |
| For instance when I walk out of here today | 10:13 | |
| I'm not going to think about Toyotas flying off into space, | 10:15 | |
| or birds beating up on squirrels, | 10:19 | |
| or trees growing with their roots up in the air. | 10:21 | |
| That's not my world. | 10:24 | |
| I wasn't born yesterday. | 10:26 | |
| I've learned a few things about this world, | 10:28 | |
| the way this world works. | 10:31 | |
| That's the way I think. | 10:32 | |
| In this world there's some things that happen, | 10:34 | |
| there're other things that don't happen. | 10:36 | |
| Therefore there's some things I think about | 10:39 | |
| and there're other things that never cross my mind. | 10:41 | |
| This is the world to which my mind is conformed. | 10:45 | |
| My thought fits this world and its parameters. | 10:50 | |
| If it didn't call me crazy. | 10:54 | |
| So there is not much way for my mind to be utterly renewed, | 10:57 | |
| tremendously transformed while I'm still in this world. | 11:05 | |
| Let's say now, | 11:11 | |
| move me to say, | 11:12 | |
| the moon, | 11:13 | |
| or somewhere where gravity is not | 11:15 | |
| or barbecue is unavailable, | 11:17 | |
| and I might think things through all over again. | 11:18 | |
| My logic would not work. | 11:21 | |
| My logic would have to be transformed because | 11:24 | |
| what was permissible and possible here | 11:26 | |
| would not be so in that world. | 11:29 | |
| Do not be conformed to this world, | 11:33 | |
| but be transformed by the renewal of your mind | 11:34 | |
| so that you may discern what is the will of God. | 11:37 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world, | 11:43 | |
| Paul says, | 11:45 | |
| be transformed. | 11:46 | |
| And the Greek word here is metamorphical. | 11:48 | |
| Metamorphical. | 11:53 | |
| Transformed. | 11:54 | |
| Metamorphasis. | 11:56 | |
| Be metamorphasized. | 11:58 | |
| That's what Paul is talking about. | 12:01 | |
| When a butterfly emerges from a cocoon | 12:06 | |
| we say that that little caterpillar has gone through | 12:09 | |
| metamorphasis. | 12:13 | |
| Imagine what happens to the mind of a | 12:16 | |
| creepy-crawling caterpillar who crawls out on some limb, | 12:18 | |
| hangs upside down, | 12:22 | |
| zips up his sleeping bag over his head, | 12:23 | |
| hangs there for a fortnight, | 12:25 | |
| and then emerges as a butterfly. | 12:28 | |
| I suppose the brain of a butterfly, | 12:30 | |
| I presume, | 12:33 | |
| is similar to that of a caterpillar. | 12:34 | |
| I don't know, | 12:36 | |
| I didn't take zoology, | 12:37 | |
| but I know this. | 12:38 | |
| The mind of a butterfly couldn't be at all | 12:39 | |
| like a caterpillar because now | 12:41 | |
| on the day he comes out of the cocoon | 12:44 | |
| he's not looking at the world from the bottom up anymore. | 12:47 | |
| He's been metamorphosized. | 12:51 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world, | 12:55 | |
| be metamorphosized, | 12:57 | |
| Paul says, | 12:58 | |
| by the renewal of your mind. | 13:00 | |
| Be metamorphosized. | 13:03 | |
| And Paul had lived that which he urged. | 13:05 | |
| Paul, | 13:09 | |
| faithful Jew, | 13:09 | |
| been brought up to believe that God's promises | 13:11 | |
| are only for Israel and not for the gentiles. | 13:14 | |
| But here in Romans Paul has been spending his entire letter | 13:20 | |
| arguing that even the gentiles | 13:24 | |
| have a place in God's promises. | 13:26 | |
| Now how did Paul get to that point? | 13:30 | |
| How was his mind metamorphosized? | 13:34 | |
| Paul explains in Second Corinthians, | 13:39 | |
| "If anyone is in Christ, | 13:43 | |
| he is a new creation." | 13:46 | |
| New creation, | 13:49 | |
| fresh. | 13:50 | |
| Just like the first day of the world. | 13:51 | |
| Recreated. | 13:54 | |
| Metamorphosized. | 13:56 | |
| Christ had not just led Paul to a change of mind, | 13:59 | |
| anybody can do that. | 14:02 | |
| It was more. | 14:05 | |
| Christ had moved Paul to a whole new world. | 14:06 | |
| After he met Christ, | 14:10 | |
| Paul got up the next morning, | 14:12 | |
| looked out the window, | 14:14 | |
| it wasn't the same world. | 14:15 | |
| Now the old distinctions which he had learned | 14:17 | |
| from childhood, | 14:19 | |
| Jew, | 14:20 | |
| Greek, | 14:21 | |
| righteous, | 14:22 | |
| unrighteous, | 14:22 | |
| saved, | 14:23 | |
| damned, | 14:24 | |
| those labels just didn't work anymore. | 14:25 | |
| The old divisions didn't apply. | 14:27 | |
| He had a new mind. | 14:30 | |
| He'd been metamorphosized. | 14:31 | |
| Any of you ever been metamorphosized? | 14:37 | |
| Renovated in the brain? | 14:41 | |
| I bet that metamorphosis, | 14:47 | |
| that renewal, | 14:49 | |
| was occasioned by a move from one world to another. | 14:51 | |
| When she got out of the hospital, | 15:03 | |
| after successful cancer surgery, | 15:05 | |
| she said that on the way back home | 15:10 | |
| she noticed grass growing. | 15:12 | |
| "Look!" | 15:16 | |
| she said. | 15:17 | |
| "There're trees. | 15:18 | |
| Tall trees blowing in the wind." | 15:19 | |
| They had never been there before, | 15:24 | |
| for her. | 15:26 | |
| And when she looked into the faces of her grandchildren, | 15:29 | |
| she was moved to tears at the miracle. | 15:34 | |
| See, | 15:40 | |
| she didn't just go back home. | 15:41 | |
| She couldn't go back home. | 15:44 | |
| 'Cause you can't go back home | 15:47 | |
| after you've been where she's been. | 15:49 | |
| She had been moved. | 15:52 | |
| Now, | 15:55 | |
| metamorphosized, | 15:56 | |
| she had to go back and think everything over again. | 15:58 | |
| It was like fresh, | 16:02 | |
| it was just like she was present | 16:03 | |
| on the very first day of creation, | 16:05 | |
| it was a new world. | 16:07 | |
| 'Cause a new world makes a new mind. | 16:11 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world, | 16:16 | |
| Paul says. | 16:19 | |
| Let God blow your mind, | 16:20 | |
| change your citizenship, | 16:22 | |
| move you somewhere else. | 16:23 | |
| My world, | 16:29 | |
| growing up, | 16:30 | |
| was South Carolina. | 16:31 | |
| White patrons sit from the front, | 16:35 | |
| colored patrons sit from the rear. | 16:39 | |
| That was the sign on every city bus in Greenville. | 16:42 | |
| And I never heard anybody question those signs. | 16:47 | |
| They were law. | 16:51 | |
| This was the way the world was meant to be, | 16:54 | |
| it was all fixed at Creation. | 16:56 | |
| I never heard anybody say, | 16:59 | |
| now why, | 17:01 | |
| or no one ever said, | 17:02 | |
| hey, | 17:03 | |
| we need to think about this. | 17:04 | |
| When I looked out the window of | 17:06 | |
| those city buses with those signs, | 17:07 | |
| the world looked alright to me. | 17:10 | |
| It looked all white to me. | 17:12 | |
| My freshman year of college I went to a student conference | 17:17 | |
| sponsored by the church. | 17:21 | |
| My roommate was a guy from another college | 17:24 | |
| and he was black. | 17:29 | |
| And the second night we were there, | 17:32 | |
| he sat down and explained to me | 17:33 | |
| what it was like to grow up in his world. | 17:35 | |
| And that night, | 17:42 | |
| my citizenship got transferred. | 17:44 | |
| I was moved to a new world. | 17:47 | |
| I noticed on the next morning when I went to breakfast | 17:51 | |
| I couldn't find my way, | 17:53 | |
| I was living in a different world. | 17:55 | |
| I never could think of black-white again, | 18:00 | |
| I had been metamorphosized. | 18:03 | |
| How does that happen? | 18:11 | |
| In Second Corinthians Paul says, | 18:14 | |
| "All of us with unveiled faces seeing the glory of God | 18:16 | |
| are being metamorphosized." | 18:23 | |
| It's the same Greek word. | 18:26 | |
| Being metamorphosized into God's image. | 18:28 | |
| It's an astounding claim. | 18:34 | |
| It's a huge intellectual move. | 18:37 | |
| And it's not something we do, | 18:40 | |
| it is not some intellectual achievement, | 18:42 | |
| it's something God does, | 18:45 | |
| it's a byproduct of being encountered | 18:47 | |
| by the face of the living God. | 18:49 | |
| By being moved to a new country, | 18:53 | |
| new citizenship. | 18:55 | |
| Don't be conformed to this world | 18:57 | |
| when you could be in Christ enjoying | 19:00 | |
| a world metamorphosized. | 19:02 | |
| Thursday, | 19:11 | |
| we're gonna gather here in this chapel | 19:13 | |
| and we're going to welcome the Duke first-year students. | 19:14 | |
| It's our freshmen orientation convocation. | 19:18 | |
| And I like sitting up here | 19:21 | |
| after I've given the opening prayer | 19:23 | |
| and I like to look at them. | 19:24 | |
| And they look fresh and eager and expectant, | 19:27 | |
| and most of them won't ask that much out of us here, | 19:33 | |
| they'll ask for a B average | 19:37 | |
| and perhaps admission to law school. | 19:39 | |
| And the thing that impresses me is that | 19:45 | |
| when I sit up here and look at them | 19:46 | |
| when they come in here for baccalaureate four years later, | 19:48 | |
| most of them look the same. | 19:52 | |
| Senior class photographs look a lot like | 19:55 | |
| the first-year student photos in the directory. | 19:58 | |
| Oh their parents may be worried about them, | 20:02 | |
| what we'll do to them here. | 20:04 | |
| I say to their parents, | 20:06 | |
| relax. | 20:06 | |
| After four years here they're gonna look a lot like you. | 20:08 | |
| Don't worry. | 20:11 | |
| And yet, | 20:16 | |
| Paul promises. | 20:18 | |
| Some, | 20:21 | |
| some, | 20:22 | |
| might make a larger move. | 20:24 | |
| Meeting Christ, | 20:28 | |
| their mind might get blown. | 20:29 | |
| Their world might be transformed. | 20:32 | |
| Their mind metamorphosized into new creation. | 20:35 |
