• Pages

    • Archive for November, 2009

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »

    WHAT IS AN EVANGELICAL TO DO

    Monday, November 16th, 2009

    What is an evangelical to do? An evangelical makes 1550 on the SAT and is invited to apply to Princeton or Rice or Stanford or Duke. Should he? And, if he is accepted, how does he survive—even thrive—in a secular prestigious/competitive college. Should you attend competitive secular colleges? Or do you attend Christian schools alone? I give an overview of how a Christian can prosper in an environment that is ipso facto hostile.

    Under what circumstances would you perhaps decide to attend a secular college?

    If you are a Daniel, or can exist and thrive in Babylon without being an Babylonian, you might choose to attend a secular college. Daniel was part of the elite culture in this hostile land. He was honored and respected, but he remained a worshiper of Yahweh (Almighty God). Even though he lived in a hostile, risky, dangerous land, Daniel was able to maintain his identity in the Lord. Remember: you can make bad choices in a Christian university as easily as in a secular University. The fact is, a better choice is merely to make Godly choices regardless of where you are!

    When I entered Vanderbilt University as an evangelical freshman, before I began, I had decided to be obedient to Scripture. I decided that before I began my studies! And I am glad I did!

    Over the next four years of undergraduate school, and then two years of graduate school, I was sorely tested. For example, I had decided to remain morally pure and chaste. That was no easy thing since I lived in co-ed dorms both at Vanderbilt and then at Harvard! But I persevered. Success was rooted, however, at the moment I committed myself to a discipline, before the actual temptation began. It wasn’t that the temptation was mitigated; it was simply that the desire to be Christ-like was greater than the temptation. Again, though, it began before I went to college.

    If you are a Daniel, you may be called to an academic discipline no Christian college offers. In that case you might choose a secular university.

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Conviction, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, Fundamentalism, Goals, Students, Teaching, Tolerance, Truth, University, World View | Comments Off on WHAT IS AN EVANGELICAL TO DO

    THINGS ARE CHANGING

    Friday, November 13th, 2009

    That is all changing—and partly due to the popularity of the American home schooling movement. In massive numbers the American home school movement—initially and presently primarily an evangelical Christian movement—is depositing some of the brightest, capable students in our country into the old, august institutions like Harvard. And, what is more exciting, the flash-point of cultural change is changing from Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Stanford to Wheaton, Grove City, Calvin, and Liberty (all evangelical universities). Before long the new wave of elite culture creators will be graduating from American secular universities and Christian universities and they shall be a great deal different from the elite of which I was a part in the middle 1970s. I am not saying the secular university will change quickly—intellectual naturalistic reductionism makes that extremely difficult. However, I do see the whole complexion of university graduates to change significantly in the next twenty years. Never in the history of the world has such a thing happened.

    Something similar occurred at the end of Augustine’s life in the middle of the first millennium. Augustine lived in a time when the Roman Empire was collapsing. However, while the barbarians conquered Rome, the Church of Jesus Christ conquered the barbarians. Augustine and his elite Christian generation was used by the Lord to assure the future of the European church and European civilization.

    Again, in the 1600s a new generation of evangelicals arose—the Puritans. Likewise this new generation of elites settled the New World and established the United States of America.

    Young people, if you are part of this new evangelical elite, you have immense opportunities ahead of you. A new Godly generation is arising. Are they called for such a time as this to guide this nation into another unprecedented revival? We shall see.

    Now, though, it is important that we look at more practical considerations. For instance, how is one accepted and able to thrive in the most competitive universities—secular or Christian? What does it mean to be a “Christian” university?

    As this author argues, however one may feel about it, most of the culture creators of America graduate from 10 or 12 prestigious, competitive, mostly secular schools. That will change slowly as Christian universities become more competitive in attracting the best students (this author observed recently that the Christian evangelical university Grove City had the same acceptance rate as Princeton University!). In fact, many of the world’s decision makers are graduates of these schools. And, praise God, evangelicals have more opportunities than ever to attend these schools. We have already discussed what the liberal 21st century university looks like.

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Conviction, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, History, homeschooling, Students, Teaching, Truth, University, World View | Comments Off on THINGS ARE CHANGING

    Genuine Peace (by Peter Stobaugh)

    Friday, November 13th, 2009

    I’ve been living in Boston, working from home, for this intensely colorful fall season. Boston is a new city to me, offering a perpetual strand of new sites and experiences, literally around every corner. One of my favorite places is called the Commons.

    The common is a miniature forgery of NYC’s Central Park. A special little plot of land with trees and grass and squirrels set as stark contrast to the backdrop of an obnoxious downtown. Periodically, I’ll find a pull to visit the Commons to relax and enjoy this postage stamp to an envelope carrying me far away from what I find are my current dilemmas. Trust me, I’m not the only one struggling.

    To the left is lady sitting meditating, humming herself gently into her “safety cave”, in efforts to find her chi. Behind her rummages a bum through a 27/7 restaurant which I would label: trash. Over to my right lazes a couple in a snarky conversation as they inspect a group of twenty or so people being lead into a synchronized rhythmic dance. We all came her for the same reason, peace of mind, to be reconciled with our external sensory input.

    Reconciliation can come in many ways. For me it is a good author, presently Ayn Rand, others, well, they may take more charismatic measures. Not matter the path; chief ends are always the same: a genuine peace.

    Why does our culture place such a great value on peace of mind? Is it, mental health? Physical heath? Pleasure? From Ayn Rand’s perspective, as an atheist, perhaps waiting till heaven for peace is ridiculous when you should have it now.

    I consider myself a follower of Christ, which is a fancy way of saying I don’t put up with religious baggage and consider myself reconciled with God. Any peace of mind should come from the recognition of being at peace with God.

    However, I continually place the importance of peace with my mind as my chief end, and simply forget or am distracted from the truth. The result is I robotically planning my life around snippets of living to construct a scrapbook that in my old age I can flip through the pages trying to prove meaning. Church and religiosity become my new commons, my own park in the chaotic world. Songs of worship are meditative exercises only to locate my “holy chi” in order to attain a check mark on my godly list and attain peace of mind.

    Africans have an adage; “the devil in America wears a suit, to make your life easy”. Perhaps, being a fellow laborer in the gospel of Christ (1 Thessalonians 3:2) won’t always bring me to a gimcrack nirvana, but implicit trust in God will bring everlasting peace and hope. As Oswald Chambers writes:

    “As long as you have a personal interest in your own character, or any set ambition, you cannot get through into identification with God’s interests. You can only get there by losing forever any idea of yourself and by letting God take you right out into His purpose for the world.”

    Those who are reconciled with God are falling short if they rely on serene moments as stepping-stones to get through life. Leave the common ground and allow the complete and amazing alteration that comes through Christ.

    Posted in Christianity, Culture, Meditations | Comments Off on Genuine Peace (by Peter Stobaugh)

    Leaving Mecca – Part 2

    Thursday, November 12th, 2009

    Readers should not presume that I am arguing for a return to this parochial purpose of higher education, nor are readers to suppose that I would like to live in a country where everyone is forced to embrace a particular religious world view. Nonetheless, by and large, the marriage of American education and religion was assured for about the first 150 years of our existence. Its demise in the 20th century had disastrous results.

    In fact, this author argues that a primary cause of the present unnatural American embrace of narcissistic, naturalistic secularism can be traced to the evangelical loss of the university. When American elitism was separated from its evangelical moorings, the cultural decline of American culture was assured. The divorce of the American university–the breeding ground of American elite culture—and Christian evangelicalism has created some of the cultural woes we presently are facing as a nation. Its reclamation – the evangelical campaign to reclaim the elite leadership of this nation—bodes well for the future cultural health of the United States.

    Recalling again my time in Harvard Chapel in the middle of the 1970s and hearing the bold—but accurate I fear—assertion that the next generation of of culture creators were attending this institution and institutions like it. We were told that we were the select few, the elite. That probably was true—evidenced by the cultural mess we find ourselves at the beginning of the next century.

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, History, Students, Teaching, The Stobaugh’s, Truth, University, World View | Comments Off on Leaving Mecca – Part 2

    LEAVING MECCA

    Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

    One Harvard professor, the great evangelical author Fred Buechner resigned from Harvard Divinity School because he felt embarrassed to mention God in his classes. “The mere mention of God-an omniscient God, God as a transcendent being– when I was there . . . would be guaranteed to produce snickers,” Ari Goldman wrote (Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1990).

    By 1920, with its reductionism mentality, the American secular university had become an inhospitable place for evangelicals. The mother turned and ate her young. The place that was founded by evangelicals, to prepare Evangelicals to be the elite of American culture is now a place of danger, risk, and struggle for its progeny.

    Worse than that: Evangelicals seemed to accept willingly their own demise. Evangelical Christians in positions of formal power passively yielded to each stage in the advance of secularism. And, when they did resist, they failed.

    Why? Douglas Sloan, in Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox) argues that the university looked to liberal Protestant Christianity to replace Evangelical Christianity. What no one understood, including Evangelical Christians, was that science, as understood in the late 19th century, was fundamentally at odds with Evangelical thought. The university was firmly in the camp of positivistic philosophy that basically had discarded the notion of supernatural from American intellectualism. Evangelicals tried accommodation, but, after the Scopes Trial, they abandoned ship, so to speak. So, if the secular university rejected evangelicalism, by 1920, evangelicalism abandoned the secular university.

    In the end the university pulled back from affirming the real possibility of knowing God and of the existence of a spiritual world. What evangelicals learned, or thought that they learned, was that the secular American university was too dangerous a place to be. So they formed their own universities. It is unfortunate that there was no fight to the finish in the 1920s. If the issue had been forced who knows if we would live in a society dominated by secular-minded people. In the initial stages, though, Evangelicals did not muster the intellectual resources necessary to challenge the cultural assumption that knowledge comes only from natural sources (see Phillip E. Johnson , “How the Universities Were Lost,” in First Things 51 (March 1995) 51-56). They never have–even until today.

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, History, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Students, Teaching, Tolerance, Truth, University, World View | Comments Off on LEAVING MECCA

    SUMMARY (University Series)

    Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

    In summary, until 1800 the intellectual elite of the United States emerged largely from evangelical seminaries. Policy, programs, and culture were created from an educated evangelical base. This slowly changed as the American university implemented its own version of the Enlightenment. Toleration became the lodestone that drew the American university forward. Evangelicals were relegated to graduate schools, seminaries, and courses. They no longer were welcome in the core undergraduate secular university. At the same time, in response, evangelicals abandoned the American university. That decision was bittersweet.

    The effect of that decision was brought vividly to this author’s life when he entered graduate school.

    I had looked forward to this day all my life.

    Since I was 12 years old I had been told that I was going to Harvard. I had finally arrived.

    It was late September and I was on my way to convocation. Now, keep in mind, convocation at Harvard University in the middle 1970s was convened by a homosexual Unitarian, so you can imagine how inspiring it was! But it was the only convocation that I had and I meant to make the most of it.

    I lived outside Harvard Yard so I had to plan my trip over carefully. After referencing several Harvard maps, I had planned a perfect strategy to reach my destination. I set out.

    However, along the way, I could not help noticing that several Harvard professors, the leaders in their fields, were going in a different direction. They were dressed in all their academic regalia. I tell you, they were impressive! I wanted those crows’ feet on my robes! I wanted to be like these fellows!

    Now, I had a choice to make. I could follow my own path–a path that I had carefully laid out. Or I could follow these robust paradigms of academia! One would think that these professors knew a better way than I. They lived here. They had Ph.D.s—I could trust these people.

    Wrong! They were lost and we all were late.

    What is remarkable to me, too, is that I decided to follow these men without any prayer–indeed, as I realized that afternoon, I was attending Harvard without praying about my decision! No prayer at all. I was a believer for 5 years, still young, true, but it never occurred to me to ask God where He wanted me to go to graduate school! I was the perfect candidate for the American secular university: I was making decisions from an existential base and not from a confessional base. I was drawing my information from circumstances and my own scenario generating equipment. I was not walking with God! Yet, the allure of the secular university is quite substantial!

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, History, Society, Students, Teaching, The Stobaugh’s, Truth, University, World View | Comments Off on SUMMARY (University Series)

    TOLERANCE

    Monday, November 9th, 2009

    This author doubts, really, if a free, and open debate can occur in a community (i.e., the university) where there is no loyalty to a higher truth, where consensus is absent. The best the American secular university can generate is tolerance for the sake of tolerance. History is reduced to a “pleasure principle.” Reality is not based on truth but on the latest political agenda of the reigning department head.

    At the beginning of the 21st century there is truly an exciting phenomenon occurring in American society: a resurgence of evangelicalism. As sociologist Peter Berger accurately observes, evangelicals generally subscribe to two strongly held propositions: that a return to Christian values is necessary if the moral confusion of our time is to be overcome, and that the Enlightenment is to be blamed for much of the confusion of our time (Peter Berger, “At Stake in the Enlightenment,” First Things, March 1996, p. 18).

    In fact, 21st century evangelicalism is one of the most potent anti-Enlightenment movements in world history. The excesses of Enlightenment rationalism, exhibited so ably in the secular university, have sabotaged the certitude of classicism and Christian theism that so strongly influenced Western culture long before the formidable onslaught of the likes of David Hume.

    The Washington Post in 1993 coyly observed that evangelicals are “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” And, among our own, evangelical professor Mark Noll unkindly observed, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Indeed. Not any more. While conceding that faith is not a makeshift bridge to overcome some Kierkegaardian gap between beliefs and evidence, Evangelicalism posits that it still is important that people look beyond their experience for reality. Human needs and aspirations are greater than the world can satisfy, so it is reasonable to look elsewhere for that satisfaction. Worth is the highest and best reality (a decidedly anti-Enlightenment notion) and its genesis and maintenance come exclusively from relationship with God alone.

    Evangelicalism, then, moves backward in time, far back in time, when intellectualism was not separate from religion. It blows the claims of the Enlightenment to bits.

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Conviction, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, History, Philosophy, Society, Students, Teaching, Tolerance, University | Comments Off on TOLERANCE

    CONSISTENCY

    Friday, November 6th, 2009

    Recently my son, who is a student at a very strict Christian university, was forbidden to leave campus on the weekend to visit his brother who lived off campus. Now, in fact the reason my youngest son wanted to visit my oldest son was that they wanted to participate in a community mission outreach. My son was irritated, he was frustrated–but he was not confused. The decision of the university was exactly consistent with its world view.

    Relativistic toleration makes justice impossible. Both Plato and the Apostle Paul agree, justice requires both a moral and an epistemological base. One cannot do justice unless one knows the difference between right and wrong. The fact is, the American secular university in its headlong pursuit of toleration is victimized by both injustice and relativism that leads to intolerance!

    Most secular universities have concluded that abstract concepts like grace, hope, and especially faith are indefinable, immeasurable, and above all unreasonable. Not that God or the uniqueness of Jesus Christ can be proved, or disproved. There are certain issues which the order of the intellect simply cannot address, so we must rise above that to the order of the heart. Faith is our consent to receive the good that God would have for us. Evangelicals believe that God can and does act in our world and in our lives. Human needs are greater than this world can satisfy and therefore it is reasonable to look elsewhere. The university has forgotten or ignores this fact (Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1989).

    In the midst of so much uncertainty, it is good to serve a God who loves His creation. The American secular university would try to convince us that it is fun to be living in clashing relativities where the foundations and structures of thoughts are up for grabs. Every truth is negotiated. Truth emerges by virtue of persuasion and consent. Truth is democratized. Morality is based on objective truth from an inspired corpus of information (i.e., the Bible); morality is an outcome of human interchange (Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. p. 46).

    Posted in Choices, Christianity, Culture, Education, Fundamentalism, Relativism, Students, Teaching, The Stobaugh’s, University, World View | Comments Off on CONSISTENCY

    THE EFFICACIOUS UNIVERSITY

    Thursday, November 5th, 2009

    This author’s understanding of an efficacious university is a place that humbly admits that the Truth is already known. It is the job of humankind to be a good citizen by reflecting the glory of God. Many American secular universities see the university as a place for the advancement of knowledge; Newman sees the university as a place for the communication of knowledge and advancement of the Kingdom of God.

    As previous explained, there are gods galore at the American secular university. The American secular university deified “toleration,” “scientific inquiry,” and “intellectual honesty.” Today, though, there is considerable confusion about how we ought to live with our differences. The modern appeal to toleration begs the question.

    In the modern secular university there is only one viewpoint that is deemed legitimate: that is the conviction of uniform toleration! The net result is that people are forced to choose between their epistemology and their cosmology. People are forced to give up convictions based on what they believe to be true and right if their views appear remotely intolerant. Thus, if an Evangelical believes that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle he is accused of intolerance. But he believes it because his world view framework demands that he believe it. He believes that the Word of God is truth and cannot be militated or compromised by circumstances or exigencies.

    The problem is, according to S.D. Gaede, When Tolerance is no Virtue (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 1993) is that the university asks a question it has no right to ask and then offers no satisfactory answer. What is truth? The American secular university does not have a clue. Many secular scholars know it and they conclude that there is no truth. They have lost confidence in truth searching and have come to the conclusion that truth is unattainable. Universities conclude that holding to a plurality of truths and tolerating them is virtuous. This author agrees, however, with G. K. Chesterton who argued, “Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction.”

    The evangelical commitment to toleration and intellectual honesty grows out of a commitment to truth and justice. This toleration is expressed through love, which is inevitably misunderstood by the secular university as intellectual dishonesty and parochialism.

    While attending a secular university, I remember discussing religion over lunch. Each person shared his faith position. There was much interest engendered among this enlightened university crowd! Compliments and affirmations flowed freely, until I, the token Evangelical, was asked about his faith. I stated, “Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

    “You mean, a way, don’t you?” a conciliatory classmate helpfully asked.

    “No, I mean Jesus Christ it the ONLY way to wholeness and life,” I gently responded.

    Well, the Evangelical ruined everyone’s lunch–again!

    False notions of toleration breed false notions of relativism. Relativism is defined loosely as “anything goes as long as it is embraced sincerely and injures no one else.” Evangelicals are ringing a fire bell and warning American culture that there are significant dangers in living in a relativistic world. The fact is, a relativistic world has no universally held view of truth and goodness. Inevitably the modern university is intolerant of intolerance which makes everyone confused and inconsistent.

    Posted in Apologetics, Choices, Christianity, Conviction, Culture, Education, Evangelicals, Memories, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Students, Teaching, The Stobaugh’s, University | Comments Off on THE EFFICACIOUS UNIVERSITY

    KING BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

    Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

    The modern, secular university is King Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 7). A university should be a time on Mt. Horeb, humbling bowing before Almighty God, freely admitting limits and extolling His omnipotence (Exodus 3). While American students might read John Milton’s Paradise Lost without knowing the outcome before they read it, Pelikan suggests that the excitement of discovery mitigates the sting of American spiritual paupery (p. 41). And, in spite of himself, Dr. Pelikan is indeed showing us the problem of the American secular university. Pelikan’s suggestions are merely another form of veiled Gnosticism dressed up in pretty language. Knowledge-its acquisition, its dissemination-even in a gentleman’s way-is the god of the modern American university. As the cognitive-moral formation specialist, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, Ed Fenton, and others have so convincingly shown us, there is no value free education. And we better be careful if we claim otherwise.

    Newman, a committed Christian, never embraced Hegelian notions of the dialectic. Truth to the born again, Catholic priest Newman was not to be found in the academic search. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. The American secular university, on the other hand, deifies the “search.” Both teachers and students are on the “hunt” because Truth is yet to be fully understood.

    The university, if it has any value, must be involved in the communication of immutable, metaphysical truth. The American secular university is not about to accept such limits. It recognizes no citadel of orthodoxy, no limits to its knowledge. Newman is the champion of orthodoxy. It was his whole life! Faith is Newman’s ultimate destination of knowledge. In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent Newman is comfortable having faith rise out of an epistemological base. But, like Jesus reminds Thomas in John 14, our hope lies not in what we know, but most assuredly whom we know.

    Posted in Culture, Education, History, Scripture, Students, Teaching, University | Comments Off on KING BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »

    For Such A Talk As This is proudly powered by WordPress - Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).