Build a New City: At My Last First College Class Ever

Last updated on: December 8, 2016 at 11:52 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Build a New City: At My Last First College Class Ever 2016-12-08T11:52:29-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Let’s build a new city for the remnant of the people of God! That’s a good, big, and honorable call and it can be done. People have gone to new lands and built something out of almost nothing. How much easier to create a community in this land! If you are building a new business, ministry, or school the lessons of the community builder apply to you.

Somewhere in the DNA of any Western culture, there are the founding lessons of old Rome and the saving lessons of the founding of new Rome. Today I teach the last first term class of The Saint Constantine School just as I had the honor of teaching the first first term class! Naturally, there will be next term, a term after that term, terms without end until death or retirement (!) intervenes, but there will never be another first term of The Saint Constantine School. So it is fitting that the first term of Saint Constantine’s school, the first k-college program, ends with Virgil and his Aeneid.

Our patron Emperor Constantine built the New Rome that saved the Empire while Virgil celebrates the creation of the old Rome that created the Empire. We are looking forward by looking back!

Virgil lived when another old system was dying and a new one was being born. Imperial Rome would unite the Mediterranean world and bring law, peace, and philosophy to regions where such benefits had been little known. The blessing of Roman rule was mixed, ask the the Jewish people, but when it began to falter or left the results were devastating, ask the Britons.

When systems are dying, sometimes the best thing to do is to start anew. Take the best of the old and entrust it to the care of something new. Education in the United States is good, but also broken.

We are trying to imitate Constantine and build a new community. Constantine, like Saint Paul, accepted a call from God that came directly, not from man, and created a new reigning city. As a result, Roman civilization was saved for centuries into a great commonwealth was created of common Greco-Roman culture in enough nations that much that might have been lost was not lost.

Virgil created the founding mythology for old Rome, the one Constantine replaced. He presents old Rome as a rebuilt Troy. The Greeks defeat the Trojans, but Aeneas, a Trojan hero, escapes with his family and a few followers and becomes the founding father of what would become the Roman Empire. Of course, by the time of Virgil the Trojans, in the form of Augustus and Rome, had returned to conquer the Greeks.

Both founding stories, old Rome and new Rome, influence the American founding, Virgil in particular. One reason the United States of America avoided the problems of so many new orders built out of revolutions is that it looked back to look forward. We adopted many classical lessons, symbols, and ideas.

If we are building something new, we must save what can be saved from the older order. The mistake of many futurists is to assume everything will change. Disney put us in plastic houses as if humankind would not still love the feel of wood, leather, and cotton.

Education is broken, technology gives us new tools, but the process of discovery is still the same. People still learn from people, online or onsite, and schools that try to cheat on that equation are worse than the old and ruin the reputation of the new. Instead, a person who loves the old must bury it, because that person will save all he can. Classical education has changed many times for the better and must change again, but only where it must or should change.

Secondly, a new city, community, or business must be unafraid of big change. While saving the old, the new must come. The physical location of Rome went from being an asset at the time of Virgil to a liability in the time of Constantine. As important as the geography had been, the idea of Rome was more important than the location.

The structure of k-12 and college education served us well for the last seventy-five years, but it has become unaffordable. While retaining the human things, the time has come to get rid of the systems that no longer serve people well.

Too often ministries and people cling to the place where God did a thing and not to God who did it! We might repeat the way God acted as if the method was the key and not the God who acted. People, created in the image of God, do not fundamentally change, but tools, techniques, and methods do. Truth is eternal, but we learn new truths. A great book is forever great, but new great books are written.

A new city is always born in battle.

Aeneas fought to build the foundations of old Rome. Constantine had to push off rivals and barbarians to create New Rome. While most do not battle flesh and blood, no new community is formed without struggle. The old order will resent the new. Outsiders will feel like . . .outsiders.

The new can only come after a struggle from brave founders.

Or so it seems to me after reading Virgil, meditating on the life of Constantine, and watching a courageous founding family and Board create a new vision for education.

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