Mind Your Faith

A Student's Guide to Thinking and Living Well

David A. Horner

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780830869350
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The university world can be a confusing place, filled with many competing worldviews and perspectives. Beliefs and values are challenged at every turn. But Christians need not slip into the morass of easy relativism. David Horner restores sanity to the collegiate experience with this guide to thinking and flourishing as a Christian. Carefully exploring how ideas work, he gives you essential tools for thinking contextually, thinking logically and thinking worldviewishly. Here Horner meets you where faith and reason intersect and explores how to handle doubts, with an eye toward not just thinking clearly but also living faithfully. This is the book every college freshman needs to read. Don't leave home without it.

1

Sanity in the University

Getting Started

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Proverbs 9:10

The beginning is the most important part of any work.

Plato, Republic

College can drive you crazy.

I learned this as I stepped on campus as a freshman at a secular state university. Beyond the standard challenges—navigating the trail of alcohol-induced vomit in the dormitory halls, trying to sleep amid the smells of marijuana and the sounds of sexual adventures in neighboring rooms—I had three experiences within my first year that largely motivate this book. First, my former high school locker partner, overwhelmed by the drug scene at our university, took his own life. Second, another friend from high school, an impressionable young Christian, was drawn into an anti-intellectual religious cult active on our campus. She dropped out of school, married someone in the group and disappeared. The next time I saw her, twenty years later, she had just escaped (with her children) from the cult—bitter at religion, wanting nothing to do with God and faced with going back to finish college as a single parent.

And, third, I almost lost my faith.

As a freshman I was far better prepared than most for college life. I was raised in a loving, devout Christian home. Our church was a vibrant community of Christ followers, where I heard the Scriptures taught faithfully and intelligently, and saw them lived out in practice. When I committed my life fully to Jesus in high school, during the 1970s Jesus movement, it was not a superficial or merely emotional matter, or just a phase: I was confident that Jesus was real and the gospel was true, and I knew that I needed to be forgiven and changed. I became heavily involved in church youth group leadership, and I was outspoken about my faith at school.

Because of my older brother’s involvement in campus ministry, I had been exposed to college students who were intelligent, vibrant and joyful believers. I arrived at the university already familiar with several of the campus-ministry organizations and their staff. Before my first class started, I was plugged into Christian community and sharing my faith with others on campus.

Despite these resources, during my first semester at the university I experienced a crisis of faith. In the classroom I was confronted with intellectual objections to belief in God I was not prepared to answer. I took these questions seriously and became plagued with doubts. Because of what I had already experienced in my own life and seen in the lives of others, I think I still believed, deep down, that the Christian faith must be true. But I did not know how it was true—how it could be true.

So I stepped back. Providentially, as I came to see later, I remained in community with Christian students. But I backed off from sharing my faith with others and publicly identifying as a follower of Christ. I sought answers to my questions and grounds for my faith, but didn’t find others who could address them adequately. I became discouraged and disheartened.

Later that year a group of Christian intellectuals came to my campus for a week of lectures—similar to what the Veritas Forum now does at secular universities. During the week they spoke in some ninety classrooms, dormitories and Greek houses, providing thoughtful Christian perspectives on various academic disciplines and a broad array of issues and questions.

Apologetics— Based on a Greek word found in 1 Peter 3:15, apologia, which means “rational defense.” Christian apologetics is the art and science of explaining and defending the truth claims of the Christian worldview (see chap. 11).

The Veritas Forum

Founded at Harvard University in 1992, Veritas sponsors public forums at secular universities to “engage students and faculty in discussions about life’s hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life” (www.veritas.org).

That week was dramatically life changing for me. In the speakers I saw individuals who loved Jesus and loved people, whose lives were committed to following Jesus and making a difference in the world, and who had fun and loved life. But they also took the life of the mind seriously as an expression of their commitment to Jesus and his call on their lives. They knew what they believed and why they believed it. They had thought through hard questions and objections to the faith, and were committed to a lifelong pursuit of understanding all of life and intellectual endeavor from a Christian perspective.

Obviously, this could not have come at a better time for me. Beyond merely getting many of my questions answered, a great thing in itself, I caught a vision of what my life could become. It was my first glimpse of what is possible for Christian thinking and life within a university context. Even at that point I knew that this is the way it’s supposed to be—and it’s what I want to devote my life to.

At the end of the week the speakers held an apologetics conference. There I was introduced to some tools—books, concepts, perspectives and skills—that helped me begin to understand and engage the ideas and perspectives that make up the university experience. Some of those tools, subsequently hammered out on the anvil of years of experience and refined and combined with other insights, have made their way onto these pages. My hope is that Mind Your Faith plays a similar role in your story.

Going to College

Although my siblings and I all went to college, as have our children, neither of our parents completed a university education. My mother did not attend college (it wasn’t something many women did in those days), and my father had to drop out during the Great Depression in order to work in the family business. Historically the pattern of our family is pretty typical of Americans.

Going to college is far more common than it used to be. With the rise of wealth and opportunity in recent decades, some Americans view a university education as a right they are entitled to—or an experience they are destined to endure, like it or not. Still, going to college remains out of reach for many Americans, especially in stressful economic times. And from a global perspective it’s clearly the opportunity of a blessed few. A university education is a significant privilege.

In 2010, 6.7 percent of the world’s population held college degrees—up from 5.9 percent in 2000. As of 2007, 40.4 percent of American adults aged 25 to 34 held an associate degree or higher, putting the United States in eleventh place, globally, in post-secondary education. (Canada is first, at 55.8 percent.)1

It also represents an important accomplishment. Your college degree shows employers and others that you have a measure of initiative, discipline and intelligence that bodes well for your future progress and productivity. It opens doors for vocational paths, increases your earning potential and boosts your confidence and self-esteem.

Going to college also shapes who you are and how you view the world. It opens up a new world of learning and life in ways that are unique and transformational. College is a time for broadening your horizons, choosing your career path, (often) finding a spouse—and for deciding what you, and not just your parents, believe about the most important issues of life. There may well be no period in your life that is more influential and life defining. The stakes are high. So it makes sense to approach the time you spend in college as intelligently as possible.

College preparation

College is not for everyone. But I assume you’re reading this book because it is, or may be, for you. You and your parents have probably been thinking about your college education, about where to go and how to get in, for years. If you’re not yet a university student, chances are you’re actively preparing to be one.

The college preparation industry is big business these days, far more than in the past. Yet in the most important areas of the university experience, few students are adequately prepared. As a result, their college experience is often difficult at best, and sometimes it’s disastrous. This may or may not be reflected in academic struggles, because the issues go far deeper. Even those students who excel in their academic performance frequently find college a disaster in terms of life—spiritually, morally and intellectually.

“More than 52 percent of incoming freshmen who identify themselves as born-again upon entering a public university will either no longer identify themselves as born-again four years later or, even if they do still claim that identification, will not have attended any religious service in over a year.”

Steve Henderson

The spiritual struggles that university students encounter are well documented. Despite the presence of vital campus ministries at secular universities, Christian students often struggle with their faith in college. Many end up abandoning it altogether. Some adopt atheism or agnosticism, while others embrace alternative religions or join one of the cult groups that proliferate on campus.

Secular universities can be moral minefields. Away from the constraints of their parents for the first extended period in their lives, students are confronted with what is often a no-holds-barred party scene, with drugs, binge drinking and casual sex as the norm. In the classroom as well as the university ethos more generally, traditional moral beliefs, values and practices are frequently called into question, critiqued, even ridiculed.[3] At the same time, academic cheating, plagiarism and other forms of fraud are widely practiced and often seen as necessary to academic success. The moral fallout from many students’ university years—sexually, psychologically, physically, relationally—can be devastating.

These spiritual and moral struggles are related, of course. Moral “experimentation” in college is often prompted by spiritual doubts. And acting against your conscience and moral principles can’t help but erode your spiritual convictions. In the face of moral temptation and pressure, battered and weakened beliefs about what is morally and spiritually real are not much protection.

A further connection, between these spiritual and moral struggles and the intellectual dimension of a student’s life, extends far beyond academic matters. Our mind, our faith and our character are essentially bound together. Because of the role thinking plays in every area of life, the mind is particularly crucial. Ideas have consequences: what we believe will determine how we behave, and ultimately who we become.[4] It is no surprise that the spiritual struggles and moral confusion students encounter in college are often fueled by the intellectual challenges to faith and morality they encounter.

Worldview—

A worldview is the set of beliefs, attitudes and values that shapes the way we see the world and live our life (see chap. 7).

Your spiritual and moral well-being in the university and beyond, then, depends crucially upon how you think—especially how you think about what is real, about what is important and valuable, about how to live and why. That is: how you think about the most important things. Your beliefs about these things make up your worldview, your fundamental orientation toward the world. And they are the very beliefs that are most at stake in your university experience.

A Marketplace of Ideas

College, if nothing else, is about ideas. Ideally, a university is a “marketplace of ideas”: an arena in which different perspectives in areas such as science, philosophy, history, art and politics are honestly and freely considered and rationally evaluated. The beauty and power of a university education largely consist in the opportunities you have to be exposed to the greatest and most influential ideas, and to develop the skills and discernment needed to reflect well upon them and trace their implications for all of life. In reality, of course, universities seldom represent a completely free market, where all perspectives are allowed to stand or fall on their own merits. In particular, in many university contexts more traditional religious and moral views are ignored or subjected to a special level of criticism.[5]

This has led some to charge secular universities with engaging in a “secular humanist” conspiracy of discrimination against religious believers. My own experience in secular academia suggests that while this is true in some cases, the bigger picture is not so tidy. Most nonreligious faculty members in secular universities are fair-minded people who seek to represent diverse perspectives in a balanced way. When their class discussions lack a fair representation of an intelligent Christian perspective, the important question is why this is the case.

Typically secular academics ignore or dismiss Christian ideas because they are unaware of them. They’ve simply never been exposed to a thoughtful Christian perspective on these matters—largely because over the past century so many Christians, particularly American evangelicals, abandoned the university.[6] This exodus was often prompted by good motives, out of a desire to preserve and protect the church from liberal theology or bad ideas in general. But the tragic result is that, to a great extent, Christians have simply not been in the university’s marketplace of ideas to represent Jesus and his view of the world in a credible way. We can hardly blame secular folks for ignoring perspectives we were not there to provide them.

Our absence from the university disengages a thoughtful Christian presence from the give-and-take of the university’s marketplace of ideas, limiting the perspectives to which students and faculty are exposed and the possible impact that biblical truth can have on them. It also deprives the church of the regular challenges and intellectual sharpening that come from engaging the university. As a consequence believers have lost intellectual rigor and become increasingly comfortable with faulty, anti-intellectual views and values related to mind, faith and character. These perspectives further perpetuate the problem because they are inadequate to prepare the next generation of students and scholars to encounter the university effectively. Not only is this tragic, but it’s alien to the Christian worldview itself.

Thankfully, things are beginning to change. There is a growing movement of Jesus’ followers who are committed to thinking well, to engaging the marketplace of ideas intelligently and to contributing to the life of the university as representatives of the kingdom of God. My hope is that this book, by providing some very specific training in this area, will add fuel to that fire.

Thinking Well

With or without an intelligent Christian presence, the university remains a marketplace of ideas. Whether or not you experience a truly free and open exchange of ideas in your college classroom, you will certainly experience ideas—indeed, a veritable cascade of conflicting, challenging, important, trivial, compelling, captivating and sometimes absurd ideas. Ideas are not created equal; not all have earth-shattering consequences. But all have consequences of some sort. And some are far-reaching and deeply significant for all life and thought—for you, your family, your community, the church and the world. Encountering and engaging these ideas in all of their complexity is good; it’s what a university experience is all about. But to navigate these waters sanely, both in the university and beyond, you need to think well.

Few students are adequately prepared to do so. As a university professor I can attest that shrinking numbers of students can think and write adequately at the levels required for basic academic work in the university. Fewer still are prepared to think well at a yet more comprehensive level, both in their academic disciplines and beyond. To flourish intellectually in the fulles...