In his resurrection, God says "Yes" to Christ, and all those in him.
Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," and perhaps he was right. However, the writer of Ecclesiastes, who lived just such a life, also found, "To increase knowledge is to increase sorrow." That's because there is a sort of unfairness to the whole "knowing" project of human inquiry: the more you know, the less you deeply understand. Many feel knowledge doesn't really live up to its assumed promise: instead of giving us a clear, uncontested view of truth, it often feels like someone has just turned the lights on in a supermarket of ideas. In this supermarket, the shelves are full, and there's no actual crime in choosing to eat any cuisine. When thrust into this grocery store of ideas, it becomes difficult to say that one cuisine is inherently better than the rest. Instead, you can say one is better or worse for you.
College and university are, for most people, the time those lights are turned on brightly for the first time. Students are dazzled. Many are separated from their parents, friends, and traditions and thrust into a bonanza of ideas that all have some plausibility. There is often excitement to the unveiling, as if one has been given a ticket to the greatest theme park of ideas and told explicitly that one's job over the next four years is to try out all the rides. "Really? That's why I'm here?" "Yup. You get to try them all."
This is also a great time for opportunity and empowerment. It's a crash course in the responsibilities of adulthood. However, it can also be a source of great fear for both students and their parents. A lot is on the line: money, career, scholarships, life goals, parental expectations, and finally, a student's faith.
If there is a villain for students of faith entering university, I would argue it's not college professors nor the marketplace of ideas, but instead a student's unpreparedness. I admit this is a negative image since it implies a defensive posture towards the university, implicitly saying that college is dangerous to those of faith. While I don't think this is necessarily true, it's hard to argue with the statistics. In David Kinnaman's book Faith for Exiles, sixty-four percent of students who say they are Christians in high school will leave the faith or have their faith significantly shaken by the time they leave college. Some studies are even worse, finding that 70-80% of Christians will lose their faith during college. Since the loss of faith is often a practical problem, I'd like to offer a few practical ways that students of faith can maintain their faith throughout their university years.
Own your faith:
What is the gospel? Why are you a Christian? How does Jesus give you hope? What is the importance of the cross for your life and the life of the world? If you can't answer these questions in your own words, without resorting to patented answers or "Christianese", you might find that you already have an unexamined faith life. Poor Socrates would be upset—but so will you. Inherited faith can become a co-dependency. And like all co-dependencies, when you are with the person who inspired your faith, it feels good, but when that relationship is threatened, your own sense of self is, too. Children are codependents, but as adults, we break free and transform into our own selves. Parenting really is just the task of making co-dependents independent. Your faith must make this leap, too. And, I'm not talking about denominations or doctrines—that's a fine thing to inherit, but I'm speaking of the subjective "for you" sense of understanding Christ's death and resurrection. I mean really understanding how Christ's death on the cross changed everything. Everything. For you.
Plausibility is not certainty:
In the marketplace of ideas, ideas worth studying have plausibility. If they didn't, people wouldn't believe in them, advocate for them, and inspire others to follow. One common problem about growing up in the faith is the misapplication of the idea of Christianity's exclusivity. Christianity claims to be the Truth. It makes cosmic, historical, and theological claims that it unashamedly declares true and without error. Growing up in the church, around church people, many students trust the general premise of all this and assume that they are living with and in the ultimate truth. They have certainty.
But when many students get to college, the exclusive claims of Christianity are often undermined by savvy professors who deconstruct religious claims to unique and exclusive revelation. Teachers may point out supposed contradictions that students had never heard of growing up in the faith, or they might show that other faiths or philosophers that predate Bible authors hold similar views, demonstrating that there is nothing special about Christian revelation.
The joys of learning, critical thinking, and going deeper into your faith tradition require honest and unbashful engagement with other - even contradictory - ideas. Christians should not be intimidated by the reality that other views, contrary to their own, are plausible. To say they are plausible simply means they meet the expectations, experiences, and logic of a certain group of people. But Christians should also remember that plausibility is not certainty.
The certainty of the Christian faith does not rest on its plausibility. St. Paul teaches this in the first two chapters of I Corinthians. Rather, the certainty of the Christian rests on the work of Christ that is believed in the heart by faith through grace via God's Word. In some sense, that means that Christianity is playing a different game from the Academy because the certainty and truth of our claims rests upon God's own claims about himself.
A misapplication of Christian exclusivity can come when either Christians arrogantly (and naively) think their faith is beyond complexity (and therefore beyond scrutiny) or when they attempt to make the claims of Christianity universally demonstrative in such a way that it can be "proven" in an academic context. Christianity is plausible but not provable. But, then again, few things are. The power of the Christian in a classroom is not in defeating their professor in a public spar but in the slow, often awkward ambassadorship that comes with being a witness to the Gospel of our Lord.
Arguments aren't truthful just because they are good:
This may seem commonsensical, but bear with me for a moment. A good argument is not necessarily a truthful argument. There is an important distinction to be made between arguments that are valid and arguments that are "true." Properly speaking, an argument cannot be true or false. An argument is an exercise in logic: If this, then that. It is not necessarily a reflection on the real world. What makes an argument valid is that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true as well. For example, take this argument I just made up:
All readers of 1517 are classy readers
All classy readers are rich and successful
Therefore, all 1517 readers are classy, rich, and successful.
Wouldn't that be nice? Actually, this is a really good argument. Better put, it is a really valid argument. It is valid because if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. However, as readers can also see, the argument is silly because it is not true to real life. We would say the argument is valid but not sound. The soundness of an argument is based on whether it is true to real life.
When in college, either overtly or implicitly, students will be given a series of arguments. Good teachers will present valid arguments, but careless teachers will not. Unsound or invalid arguments can still be very convincing, often because we have some emotional stake in the conclusion—we want or need it to be true. If students find themselves really struggling with a particular teacher's narrative, they would do well to attempt to summarize the teacher's narrative into an argument. Is it valid? Is it sound?
At the end of the day, good arguments don't prove narratives. Powerful narratives are strings of arguments strung together to form a story that gives meaning. All arguments do is prove their conclusions true. So, practice the art of logical arguing, and you'll have the best defense against advertising—which is actually what most of us are really doing with the narratives we believe and want others to share. Advertising appeals to fears and wants. Formal arguing is about logic and deduction.
If you aren't attending church, you aren't playing fair:
Everything goes back to my first point: if you don't own your faith, why would you even want to go to church? If church is a pious obligation, a way to please mom and dad, or an experience to make you feel less guilty than not going, good luck keeping that commitment. Church isn't really fun, and I'm not sure it's supposed to be, although I think it shouldn't be boring because of the content of what is proclaimed there. But let's face it: Christians need to know why they go to church.
Church isn't really fun, and I'm not sure it's supposed to be.
First and foremost, the church is given to us because it is the place where we are given the preached gospel of Good News and where we receive the sacraments. Church is where we go to hear that God, in Christ, has died for us on the cross, defeated death and hell, and established his Kingdom. It is the place where we receive the Word, the forgiveness of sins, and the hope of the world to come. It is the place of revelation, of disclosure, from God to us via the Word. It is life-giving, soul-renewing, and it resets us from the distractions of both our interior life and lived experiences.
Secondly, the church is where my neighbor needs me. The Bible tells us that we are one body in Christ and need each other. To view "going to church" as a mostly individual choice is to ignore the moral responsibility to contribute to the lives of the saints. It is to deny your neighbor the right of your presence in worship. They need to see you and hear your voice as you sing and pray. They need your presence, your talents, your love. Going to church isn't just about you; it's about the community that God calls and gathers together so that everyone can benefit.
For students, finding a local church in their community is about all these things and more. It also means having a community to help you if tragedy or hard times strike. It's to have access to a pastor, to mentors, and to others. Church in college is about owning your faith responsibly, like an adult.
There are lots of answers to many things, but there is only one Savior:
All Christians, students, and non-students alike, should remember that Christianity is about Christ. Christ is the center, the hub from which all the spokes of doctrine emanate and find their unity. Christ is the center that holds all those things together, in which they find meaning and purpose. Christ is the revelation of God, the Word made flesh.
Christianity is most fundamentally about Christ and his work on the cross.
As such, students should have a healthy sense of priorities. Christians can disagree about the age of the earth, how predestination works, Christian ethics, or community life. That doesn't mean all views on these issues are equally valid, only that they cannot come to eclipse the revelation of God, that is, Jesus Christ, for the world.
The "attacks" against Christianity in universities often attempt to either deconstruct Christian assumptions or attempt to make Christianity look bigoted and naive. While good apologists can contend with these objections, students should remind themselves that the spokes are not the wheel. Christianity is most fundamentally about Christ and his work on the cross. It is about God's disclosure that he is on humanity's side, taken up humanity's cause, and sided with sinners. He has not sided with them because they are sinners but because he loves them. God's verdict towards humanity, in Christ, is "yes!" The gospel is good news to those who hear it because it reveals that God has taken upon himself the responsibility of salvation. He has not left the salvation of the world in the hands of clever men and women, nor has he set the destiny of people's souls in their intellects, their works, or their ability to be responsible people. There is no mold that people must conform to to "get" salvation. God has said "no!" to all such strivings on the cross when, for our sake, Christ became sin and died. In his death, God said "no" to humanity's attempts at self-righteousness and condemned sinners as hopelessly unable to meet his standards. But in his resurrection, God says "Yes" to Christ, and all those in him.
Therefore, we can ask the question most fundamental to human life in the face of death. It is a question that is not asked often, if at all, in universities but which is pertinent to every person: What, upon hearing that I will die, can make me say 'Amen!?' There is only one answer: "Jesus Christ, my savior."
