TWU: battleground for your faith
When the welcoming ends and the goodbye hugs are gone, settle down right here with me and let’s address one issue that may have been overlooked during registration and student orientation.
When I drove up from Oregon to attend Trinity Western University in 2006–and yes I am still getting my first degree here at TWU–I spent several hours in my small ford truck with my father who took the inescapable opportunity to impart words of wisdom. We talked academics, expectations, girls, etc.; and, while his advice was sound, I’m sure, to be perfectly honest, my anticipation of university drowned out his fatherly exhortation. In fact, only one part of the conversation stands out to me now. But Iím thankful it did. It is a conversation I will not forget.
I had told my dad that I had been entertaining the idea of pursing a degree in philosophy (something no father truly hopes to hear – primarily due to the lack of readily available careers awaiting graduation in the field). I did my best to explain that it seemed to foster in students strong critical thinking skills and general writing skills; and more simply, because I had developed a personal interest in the topic through high school. I wanted to know God. I wanted to step past the seemingly youthful relational metaphors of knowing God as my heavenly ìfatherî and me being his beloved ìson.î I wanted to get to the philosophical root of the idea-to tease out the meaning from the metaphor. Little did I know that such an act would kill the meaning and leave the ìsonî orphaned.
It was a pure, innocent, and, I believe, holy desire. And as I recollect, I think that my father saw and respected this; however, I also think that he anticipated or perhaps foresaw the dangers lurking for the eager and passionate soul of his son. He predicted the discouragement and darkness that the search would bring. And while I would wager that he foresaw neither the depth nor the way that darkness would play out in my mind, I know that in that car ride north, he wanted nothing more than to save his only son from that struggle, or at the very least, offer me a warning of what lay ahead.
The warning that I’m giving you here is something like the one my father gave me. Mine will be more direct.
If you dig deep enough and reason far enough, your faith will unravel. God will not be there to catch you and he will not answer your call at 3 a.m. as you walk the campus begging him to give you a sign. You will not meet God on intellectual grounds. He will very likely become nothing knowable and in fact, the passion with which you embark upon this pursuit will feel as though it is met by an equally apathetic God. If you make God a pursuit of the mind, you will at one point break. Not that I am not discouraging learning. I am not discouraging the pursuit of God, nor am I discouraging an academic understanding of who God is. I am giving you my warning. Interestingly enough, a personal connection to an eternal being is not something easily or pleasantly calculable and you may find yourself in tears one night when the God you have pursued with your entire being feels further and further away with every passing moment.
You may take your journey so far as to disavow your faith, disown God and Christianity, and refuse to clutch on to any belief, merely in hopes that you will not be disappointed again. But I pray to the God that I have come to know, that you donít. Both the R.A. who mentored me in my first year and my roommate in my 2nd year left Christianity entirely. My former R.A. even describes himself as an atheist—to be honest, he is the only person I know who is unequivocal on the matter. If you care to hear my full story, I would happily sit down and discuss it with you, but what I want you to hear is that you are not safe. Your mind is about to be better equipped to reason than it has ever been before and it will flourish in the coming years but it also has the power to do great damage and as you dig into your faith with your newfound power, you will wreak havoc. Christianity does not stand to reason. It simply doesnít. You can scream your Christian apologetic arguments, but in the end they bow to analytic reason. Granted, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne could take me to school on this point and I imagine I will hear something from Myron Penner on the matter; however, my point is that a young mind equipped to reason will more readily bend towards the destruction of faith rather than to the defense of it.
I donít want this for you. I want you to grow. And while in some sense, that growth necessitates a stripping away of uncultivated or simplistic ways of thinking, and that in itself may be painful, I want to see the “Why?” questions of life answered for you through Christianity. It has those answers. What I hope for you during your time at Trinity Western University is that you see that Christianity is a means through which you are able to understand your place in this world, your relation to others, and your relation to God. What you believe matters. We are on the earth with the opportunity to love and to learn, so take full advantage of that in the next four years and build a foundation you can grow from.
Michael Biornstad
Two quick thoughts.
1. While I cannot fully endorse your position, I certainly agree with the sentiment. Many a friend (from TWU and otherwise) has gone down the dark path you describe, with no return in sight. I wonder how things would have turned out for them if they received your warning before starting at TWU.
2. RELS 160 should be mandatory for all TWU in their first year.
fides quaerens intellectum
This might not be the proper forum for a direct address, but…
Mike, if you ever stumble across the comments on your articles and read this, I would encourage you to check out Theomag.com. A group of friends recently started the website and I think you might find some of the articles, and subsequent discussions, to be of interest.
To start, you could waste a few minutes reading this post and the comments that followed. The post generates some worthwhile thoughts on the challenges faced by Christians in the Academy. http://www.theomag.com/2011/04/donald-miller-time/
Also, you might appreciate the website design/format.
Hey DR,
Thanks for the comments. I’ll be doing my best to keep up on responses but I don’t personally get an e-mail alert notifying me, so I might occasionally be late to the forum.
Theomag looks awesome (GREAT layout…) and I’ll be sure to look through it further.
Regarding the linked article, while I have personally had issues with some of Don Miller’s writings, I would be very tentative to call him “anti-intellectual.” And that’s mostly because I read a lot of his influences which would feel like a shot at myself. So to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Baker’s (the writer) tone as it is harsh and attacking, but I think he also makes good points in defending the value of academically studying Christ’s teachings.
My personal thoughts will probably be outlined more in later articles, but that’s about as much as I’ll say for now. I think Miller is drawing in a group of young believers that had been, until recently, bored–for lack of a better word. Which is why I’m usually pretty tentative to rag on the guy.
Mike,
Thank you for your openness and honesty. Your personal story is a sobering reminder of the dangers inherent in pursuing a knowledge of God through philosophy and reason alone. I applaud you for having the courage and humility to acknowledge how this pursuit has led you further away from a love for God.
However, I am not sure that we agree as to why this pursuit is dangerous in the first place. You posit that “Christianity does not stand to reason.” But maybe you could dig a little deeper to uncover why it does not.
Here are some of my thoughts as to why a philosophical pursuit of God is dangerous. I would welcome any interaction:
1) Original sin has corrupted not only our wills but our minds. Any attempt to come to an understanding of God on purely intellectual grounds will fail because it does not take into account the reality that our minds have been hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 1 Corinthians 1:18 reminds us that the “message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” Romans 1 also reminds us that God has revealed himself clearly by what he has made, but it is our rebellion that has diminished our ability to perceive it.
2) If the first point is true, it follows that any pursuit of knowledge of God which attempts to elevate reason above revealed truth will faith because it is revelation which is needed to show us how to think rightly again.
3) God will not honor a purely intellectual pursuit of Him, because that pursuit does not start with a humble dependance on God for this knowledge. In other words, as long as we are our own authority, we will not be able to bow before any other authority. As long as we attempt to judge God and his Word, we will be frustrated by the reality that it is we who ought to be judged. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. But he has chosen to reveal some of himself so that we can those certain things about him truly.
4) God’s Word states that Jesus Christ is the final revelation of himself (Heb. 1:1). Luther acknowledged this in his “theology of the cross,” and reminded us that it is in Christ that God has chosen to ultimately reveal himself to humanity. If we attempt to know God philosophically, we deny the fact that it is in Jesus that we can most fully see the light of God’s face.
5) Knowledge of God always involves the heart. As John Piper has said, “Until a scholar becomes a lover, he does not know God.”