Liebe Eltern,

A hot day — too much like summer for San Francisco. I finally finished the thesis and turned it in last Friday, but they don’t get around to sending out the degrees until September, for some reason. For the time being I’m still involved in Chinese things, as I’m helping my former Chinese professor translate an article (from Chinese) on Chinese philosophy for a philosophical journal. The hypocrisy of the academic world is nowhere more evident than in his case. He knows more about Chinese philosophy than probably anyone else in the country, and studied with real Chinese philosophers and sages in China; but he can’t get a job in any college here because he doesn’t have degrees from American colleges, and because he isn’t a fast talker — he’s too honest, in short.

It’s true that I chose the academic life in the first place, because God gave me a mind to serve Him with, and the academic world is where the mind is supposed to be used. But after eight or nine years I know well enough what goes on in the universities. The mind is respected by only a few of the “old-fashioned” professors, who will soon have died out. For the rest, it’s a matter of making money, getting a secure place in life — and using the mind as a kind of toy, doing clever tricks with it and getting paid for it, like circus clowns. The love of truth has vanished from people today; those who have minds have to prostitute their talents to get along. I find this difficult to do, because I have too great a love of truth. The academic world for me is just another job; but I am not going to make myself a slave to it. I am not serving God in the academic world; I am just making a living. If I am going to serve God in this world, and so keep from making my life a total failure, I will have to do it outside the academic world. I have some money saved up, and the promise of some more by doing a little work, so I should be able to live frugally for a year doing what my conscience tells me I should do — to write a book on the spiritual condition of man today, about which, by God’s grace, I have some knowledge. The book will probably not sell, because people would rather forget about the things I am going to say; they would rather make money than worship God.

It is true that this is a mixed-up generation. The only thing wrong with me is that I am not mixed-up, I know only too well what the duty of man is: to worship God and His Son and to prepare for the life of the world to come, not to make ourselves happy and comfortable in this world by exploiting our fellow man and forgetting about God and His kingdom.

If Christ were to walk in this world today, do you know what would happen to Him? He would be placed in a mental institution and given psycho-therapy, just as would His Saints. The world would crucify Him today just as it did 2000 years ago, for the world has not learned a thing, except more devious forms of hypocrisy. And what would happen if, in one of my classes at the university, I would one day tell my students that all the learning of this world is of no importance beside the duty of worshipping God, accepting the God-man who died for our sins, and preparing for the life of the world to come? They would probably laugh at me, and the university officials, if they found out, would fire me — for it is against the law to preach the Truth in our universities. We say that we live in a Christian society, but we do not: we live in a society [text missing]