Recapturing True Values in an Age That Has Forgotten the Question
In my conversation with Miroslav Volf, one point came through with unusual clarity: universities have largely stopped asking the biggest question.
Not, How do you make a living?
But, What makes a life worth living?
That landed hard for me because it took me back to Ambassador College, whose vision statement was “Recapturing True Values.” It was often followed by a line that has stayed with me for decades: teaching students not just how to make a living, but how to live.
That was not a marketing slogan. It was a civilizational claim.
And whatever else may be said about my formation, that claim shaped me profoundly. As I recount in People of the Sign, my education there was part of the transformation that launched me into a successful life—not because it taught me to worship success, but because it forced me to ask first what success was for. That is a very different question, and it yields a very different kind of human being.
Volf’s argument is that this used to be central to the university itself. For centuries, the great traditions—religious and philosophical alike—understood that education was incomplete if it did not address the meaning, purpose, and direction of human life. Theology did it. Philosophy did it. Even the early modern university, as it secularized, still retained some memory that the examined life mattered.
Then, somewhere along the line, that changed.
The university increasingly became a place not of wisdom, but of technique. Not of formation, but of specialization. Not of asking what human beings are for, but of training them to perform functions inside an already given system.
That system, of course, is not neutral.
When you stop asking what life is for, you do not free people. You simply hand them over to whatever the dominant culture already worships: success, status, wealth, influence, visibility, competition, autonomy, appetite.
In biblical language, you hand them over to vanity.
That is why Volf’s work resonates so deeply with themes I have been tracing in People of the Sign and in my recent premium series. We are not merely living through institutional drift. We are living through a moral inversion.
The old vices have not disappeared. They have been rebranded.
- Pride becomes confidence.
- Greed becomes ambition.
- Envy becomes motivation.
- Gluttony becomes lifestyle.
- Sloth becomes a kind of numbed self-protection.
- Lust becomes authenticity.
- And rivalry becomes excellence.
We rename these things, celebrate them, monetize them, and then act surprised when our society becomes more anxious, more fragmented, and less capable of answering the most basic human questions.
Volf has a new book on ambition—The Cost of Ambition: Why Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse—and the title alone tells you how sharply he sees the problem. Our culture treats ambition as an unquestioned good. Children are trained into it. Parents reward it. Schools sort by it. Universities credential it. Economies monetize it. Politics weaponizes it.
But Christian faith—and, I would argue, any serious moral tradition—has to distinguish between excellence and comparison, between calling and competition, between fruitfulness and the restless need to outrun, outperform, and outshine everyone else.
There is a difference between wanting to do good work and wanting to be superior.
Modern culture increasingly does not know that difference.
And when that difference is lost, the result is not greatness. The result is distortion. You can become highly effective at the wrong things. You can become successful in ways that slowly hollow you out. You can win the race the system set up for you and still lose your life.
That is why Socrates still matters.
Volf referenced the old line that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and I’ve long loved that quote myself. I used it in the preface to my first book. But the point is not simply introspection for its own sake. Examination is not the end. It is the beginning of honesty.
What am I pursuing?
Why am I pursuing it?
Whose standard of success am I serving?
What have I assumed without examining?
What do I call “good” because my culture calls it good?
What if my ambitions are simply baptized appetites?
Those are dangerous questions. They destabilize the scripts we inherit.
And that is one reason they have largely disappeared from our institutions.
Volf noted that even parents often reinforce the problem. They send children to university not primarily to become wise, but to become employable. Not to be formed as whole persons, but to be made competitive. Not to learn how to live, but to secure a place in the marketplace.
Again, this is not neutral.
A civilization that teaches young people to maximize earning power without asking what money is for will produce cleverness without wisdom. A society that teaches them to chase “impact” without asking what kind of human being they are becoming will produce scale without soul. A university that helps students manage reality but not interpret it will leave them materially armed and morally unformed.
This is where Volf’s use of Scripture becomes so important. He moved naturally from Socrates to Ecclesiastes to Jesus.
And that is exactly right.
Ecclesiastes sees through the glamour of accumulation. The eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. More does not solve the emptiness problem. The machine of appetite does not terminate in fulfillment. It terminates in repetition.
Socrates sees something similar in a different register: the life of pleasure does not fill because the self organized around pleasure is like a sieve. Everything passes through. Nothing finally holds.
Then Jesus tells the parable of the pearl of great price.
A merchant finds something of such surpassing worth that he sells everything else to obtain it.
That is not a parable about moderation. It is a parable about ultimacy.
The kingdom does not simply add one more value to an already crowded portfolio of values. It reorders the whole structure. It reveals that much of what we spend our lives chasing was never ultimate in the first place.
And that, I think, is the point modern culture cannot tolerate.
We can tolerate spirituality as therapy.
We can tolerate religion as identity.
We can tolerate morality as branding.
We can even tolerate “purpose” as a productivity tool.
But the pearl of great price is not a productivity tool. It is a summons to reorder everything.
It asks whether what we call success is actually worth wanting.
That is why the old Ambassador language still matters to me. Recapturing True Values is not a sentimental throwback. It is an urgent task. We do, in fact, need institutions that recover the courage to ask first questions again. We need homes that teach children not just how to get ahead, but how to discern what is worth pursuing. We need churches that are not embarrassed to talk about ends, not just means. We need educators who remember that to shape a human mind without helping shape a human life is not enough.
And we need, frankly, a rebellion against vanity.
Not vanity in the shallow sense only, though that too. Vanity in the deeper biblical sense: the endless chase after what looks substantial but proves weightless. The endless substitution of motion for meaning, acquisition for wisdom, comparison for vocation.
A person can be very accomplished and still be profoundly lost.
A culture can be very advanced and still be spiritually childish.
A university can be very prestigious and still fail to ask the only questions that finally matter.
Miroslav Volf is trying, in his own way, to recover those questions.
And I find that deeply encouraging.
Because if the question is still being asked—What kind of life is worthy of our humanity?—then not all is lost. If there are still places where people are willing to challenge borrowed definitions of success, then the leaven is still at work. If there are still teachers willing to tell students that the goal is not merely a résumé, but a rightly ordered life, then there is still hope for the university, and perhaps for the culture that surrounds it.
That, in the end, is why this conversation mattered to me.
It reminded me that the deepest educational question is also the deepest spiritual question:
Not merely, What can I do?
But, What am I for?
And if we do not answer that well, no amount of success will save us from failure.
Sneak Peek
This same search continues in next week’s conversations—first with Steve Chalke on faith, justice, and public life, and then with Gary Rendsburg on the language, history, and literary design of scripture. Different subjects, same deeper pursuit: learning again not just how to make a living, but how to live.
