As most of you know I have spent two-thirds of my life as a college teacher. Throughout most of that time I have tried to operate according to an educational philosophy that emphasizes the process of learning rather than simply learning an on facts and about ideas as ends in themselves. Often, I called this process “learning to learn.” My teaching emphasis has been on helping students discover ideas and explore their consequences and implications on a first-hand basis. We did this together as a process in classroom discussions and by writing “thesis papers.”
Over the years my own sense of the value of approaching learning by doing, through class discussions and writing short papers, has been consistently rewarded, both by your own evaluations and my own sense of fulfilment. We did this by writing short thesis papers, discussing your ideas with the class as a whole, and my writing comments on your papers. We broadened our scope by writing “integrative papers” at the end of each course unit. The emphasis was always on the process of thinking and learning together. In short, we focused on “learning to learn”, rather than on exposing ourselves to and remembering certain pieces of information.
It was always my chief joy to see this process at work, and to see you and your classmates actually enjoy the learning process for yourselves. This joy is focused and exemplified in the Peanuts cartoon where Linus expresses his pleasure at having discovered that one can put one block on top of the other. He found that the realization that there are connections and relationships between and amongst ideas, represented here by respective blocks, exhilarated and pleased him.
I like to think that the years of seeing students express this same joy about the work we were doing together clearly indicated that real learning was taking place in the classrooms where we worked together. Indeed, I’ll readily admit that over these 60 years of being in the classroom with the likes of you folks has been the chief joy of my life! Although I have managed to publish a good many books and scholarly papers down through the years, the original calling I felt to become a teacher back in the 1950s has been fulfilled in the classroom with you folks, not in the scholarly accomplishments. (CF. my book Learning to Learn)
I’ll readily admit that I did not start out in my teaching career with a desire to help students “learn to learn”. It took several years before I realized that leaning is really about “learning to learn.” The process is far more important than the outcome. Another way to put this is to say that if the process is done correctly, the outcome will take care of itself. As Linus puts it, “It is magnificent” His smile says it all. I should also readily admit that I myself was anything but a stellar student all the way from first grade through college.
I did not realize until long afterwards that my own school education, from the third grade through the nineth, was directed by a group of teachers who had been taught according to the goals and methods of one John Dewey, the founder of what is called “progressive” education. Dewey’s motto was “We learn by doing.” Perhaps more of Dewey’s philosophy of education seeped into me than I ever realized. Be that as it may, I am proud to be able to say that many, if not most, of my students caught on to the idea that the key to real education is to “learn how to learn.” As Linus says: “It’s a very special thing.”

Years ago, an acquaintance of mine, one Thomas Sheehan, wrote a book entitled The First Coming in which he argued that the life and death of Jesus constituted the first, only, and real coming of the Christ to earth. He argued that there was and will be no second coming because Christ accomplished his task in the first one. The tricky thing here was that Tom was a well-known Catholic scholar at that time teaching at Stanford University. He upset many in the Church.
In essence what Sheehan was claiming is that the entire history of Christianity in the world as we know it was a colossal mistake. I do not know whether he was ever sanctioned by the Catholic Church, of which he was a member, or what became of his academic career after the publication of his book. I do know that his book created quite a storm, both within the Catholic Church and throughout the entire field of Biblical scholarship.
The story began on this wise. Back around 321 CE, when the Christian Church was just getting under way and was being strenuously persecuted by the Roman Empire, the new Emperor Constantine decided that the way he read the situation of the future, at least his future, as well as that of the Roman Empire, lay with these strange people who called themselves “Christians”. So, when he won a battle under their banner, he claimed that he had had a vision in which he was directed to fight under the sign of the Cross, the chief Christian symbol.
Thus it was that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire during Constantine’s reign. Thomas Sheehan’s claim was that this shift from being a strongly persecuted group of refugees on the very edge of the Empire to being the favored group of the Roman Emperor signaled the end of Jesus’ “First Coming” and thus the end authentic Christianity. All that was left for real Christians to do was to wait for the coming of the Kingdom of God.
In other words, according to Sheehan’s reading everything that has transpired in Western and world history since the death of Jesus had nothing to do with Christianity. Rather, it had all been a classic and cosmic confusion. What Christians should have done, and what they should now do, is wait faithfully for the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. Sheehan’s claim was simply that the whole history of Christianity had been predicated on a huge mistake about just what the Christian faith was and is all about. Needless to say, making these extraordinary claims got Professor Sheehan in a lot of trouble.

In the midst of our own perennial squabbles and accusations over when, or if, Christ will return to reign in his kingdom over the world, this idea about the First Coming being the ONLY official visit of Christ to earth constitutes a genuine bombshell. Catholic believers tend to remain faithful to the original idea of Christ returning to earth in order to set up the Kingdom of God when the right time arrives. This was Sheehan’s point, that so far there has been only one coming of Christ to earth, and that is all that was intended.
Very conservative Protestants, on the other hand, have been arguing and even fighting over the nature and timing of the Second Coming for centuries. As far as I know no one has claimed that Christ has already come, but there are those who, mostly on the basis of certain difficult passages in Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, argue over whether it will come in two phases separated by seven years of tribulation. There also have been folks who expected to meet Christ in the air aboard his space ship (Heaven’s Gate?).
After two thousand years it seems to me unlikely that any of the Biblical passages were ever meant to be read as a secret coded message. I like Tom Sheehan’s idea. Perhaps there will be no “second coming.” As Jesus put it: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”, and Jesus’ teachings should be sufficient for the present.