No God, no truth, no big deal ... The hitch-hiker's guide to university

What is study like in Higher Education these days? What sort of values and opinions can you expect to be taught? In a recent straw poll, a group of 60 Christian Union leaders from around Britain, studying a variety of subjects, were asked to indicate whether they had faced open opposition in class from academics for being Christians. Around 50% had, mostly for contending that there is such a thing as truth.

Why would that happen? How should you be prepared if you meet the same pressures in your study? While the sample that was surveyed was small, it indicates fairly the challenge that many Christian students face — university and colleges are places where it is increasingly difficult to stand for truth. It may come as a shock to learn that theology and Religious Studies courses are often not exceptions.

A long time coming

In most universities two ideas about truth come across loud and clear:

It is relative — any truth is stated within the context of culture and is shaped by its culture and environment. Truth is personal, not transcendent or absolute.

It is plural — because truth is relative, all claims to truth are equally valid. Judging between competing truth claims becomes meaningless by this definition, and is replaced by a pick and mix approach to belief.

These two concepts, and their outworking across many disciplines, largely constitute the movement in thought known as Postmodernism. These ideas are powerfully at work in our day, refuting and attacking any claim to be able to know truth, or that God is capable of revealing himself.

This train of thought has been a long time coming. The end of WWII also saw the end of the philosophical project known as ‘modernism’ — the absolute belief in human progress and its ability to solve the problem of human need. Following the devastation of the first half of the 20th century, wholehearted moves were made to throw out anything that lay claim to such absolute priority or ultimate truth. Modernism gave way to Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a slippery term — but the three crucial factors in any definition are:

* A profound distrust of overarching schemes of meaning — famously called ‘metanarratives’ by Jean Francois Lyotard
* A deep commitment to relativism
* Philosophical pluralism

We can understand why nobody wanted anything to do with total solutions in the aftermath of totalitarianism and war; worldviews were junked simply on the grounds that they claimed to be true for everyone.

A crisis of knowledge

One hundred years after Nietzsche’s famous dictum ‘God is dead’, the effects of his nihilistic philosophy have come home to roost. Universities proclaim that we are experiencing a crisis of knowledge (or more technically ‘legitimation’).

The argument goes like this: if God doesn’t exist, if there is no revealer of truth, then I am the centre of everything. However, I have to decide on what grounds my knowledge is to be verified. How do I decide what is true and false? To do so I need further knowledge, which also must be verified … and so on, ad infinitum.

Nietzsche’s claim was as much about the collapse of knowledge as it was about God. He maintained that the objective world simply wasn’t knowable any more and that individuals are the only arbiter of meaning. The individual, however, cannot sustain the load either, leaving us with a profound inability to know anything, least of all what it means to be human. Hence for postmodernism it is no longer possible to talk about facts or truth, because even if they exist we cannot know things or people. The individual is left in a perpetual communications blackout.

‘I think I know a person then poof! I discover I only knew a cartoon version … knowable and just as lost as I am’ (Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet).

A world devoid of values

How are these powerful movements in thought affecting Christian students? In many ways, academic and personal, students are struggling to know how to live and to witness, what it is possible to believe, and how to choose between truth and falsehood. Even for those with a good head-knowledge of the basic truths of Christianity, the academic environment is often so toxic that they have little idea how their study and lifestyle should reflect their faith.

Academically, there is scarcely a university department where truth is valued. While the distrust is greatest in the humanities (especially literary theory — the nouveau-philosophy of our age), history, geography and the sciences have also succumbed. Even medics, who professionally should be the last bastion of objective modernism (whoever heard of a postmodern surgeon?!), are increasingly postmodern in their social and ethical values. In recent years many colleges have altered theology courses that had some kind of Judeo-Christian heritage and assumptions about God’s existence and knowability, to become Religious Studies courses; thus putting a much greater emphasis on comparative religions and religion as a philosophical and social area of interest. In other words, relativism spills over into theology and RS courses with the suggestion that the really valuable thing to study is not the knowledge of God and the Scriptures (the only definition of ‘theology’ that matters), but how religions impact cultures and attitudes. In itself this is not wrong, but all too often the underlying assumption is that no religion or worldview under consideration is actually true in any meaningful way, and the only interest they have lies in their societal effect. And in our society, which is now so intolerant of anything that claims to be universally true, many accept that all religions must have roughly equal access to truth and roughly equal access to salvation. Anything else would be unfair. Many study RS with a view to teaching Religious Education in schools, and many of these will end up teaching that there is no right or wrong in religion, it is all a matter of preference and choice: religion as a lifestyle option.

Deconstruction

The exact teachings vary with the academic discipline, but in almost every discipline the challenge to truth is taught by reference to Jacques Derrida’s Theory of Deconstruction. We do not have the space to introduce deconstruction fully here, but the theory proposes the impossibility of communicating meaning in a text and hence the inability of God to communicate through his Word. When you hear (and you will) courses that teach that history is incomprehensible (and hence so are historical documents like the Bible), when you are taught that the idea of God communicating (or anyone communicating for that matter) is nonsensical, when you discover that some people actually think that Christianity is unethical for claiming to be true and therefore limiting personal choice, you will almost certainly discover that deconstruction is underlying it all somewhere. You may not understand it at first, but have confidence that although it may look as if Christian foundations are challenged by contemporary academic theory, the good news of Jesus is still true: God does speak by his Spirit through his Word, and there are a lot of thoughtful Christians around who can help you to get to grips with what you are taught. Ask RTSF to put you in touch with people who have been through it before you: http://www.uccf.org.uk/rtsf

Essays

Of course, when people no longer believe in truth or God it doesn’t just affect the content of the syllabus. It also affects how your essays and papers are received. I know one Christian philosophy student who was told: ‘remove the parts of this essay that contain absolute values and you will receive a much better mark’. In other words, write something less Christian in return for better academic prospects.

When students’ values are questioned as strongly as this it takes little imagination to see how current attitudes to truth become assimilated, not only into academic work, but also into students’ worldviews, decision making, morality and faith. It is not that raising questions about values is wrong in itself, but we need to recognise that course material is often far from value-neutral. It may well be the case that Christian values are not being critiqued from a position which is objectively neutral, but from one that has already decided that truth and morality are outmoded concepts.

Right from the start of your degree, get into the habit of spotting the assumptions which underlie what you are being taught. What are the patterns of thought? Do you agree with them? How would you compare those assumptions with biblical ones.

One thing is certain: the best way to stand firm as a Christian in a challenging academic environment is to have sure biblical foundations. As soon as you get to college make sure you get into a good church that teaches the Bible faithfully. Make a habit of reading your Bible for reasons other than study, and watch out for the health of your prayer life.

Getting started

How then should we study? Surely the starting point must be that God has spoken (Hebrews 1).

It is vital that Christian theology and RS students are equipped in three areas: knowing and thinking Christianly, living Christianly and speaking Christianly.

Knowing Christianly

Romans 12.1 says ‘be transformed by the renewing of your minds’. Postmodernism is, at root, a spiritual and moral phenomenon. At its heart is the desire to dismiss and reject all authority, especially that of God. These spiritual values are often presented, however, as highbrow intellectual theory. In other words, spiritual values are challenged not outright and overtly, but by trying to change the way people think. Convince the minds of a generation, and soon you will have won over their hearts and changed their belief systems as well.

The Apostle Paul says that we are able to determine spiritual matters as Christians by letting God renew our minds. How do we do it?

* Know God’s Word well. God’s Spirit uses God’s Word to create and shape God’s people. Actually develop strategies for learning it better — get someone to teach you, get a good book or a commentary to help you, decide to read the Bible in a year.

* Be discerning with what you take in. Be careful what you imbibe from the media, TV and video. There is a lot of stuff that is loaded with relativist assumptions. Also ask questions about the assumptions of what you are taught in your courses.

* Talk about contemporary issues and course work with others trying to work out a Christian point of view on a subject. Very few people actively take an interest in the growth of other Christians any more. Rarer still are those who take an active interest in helping non-Christians think through the implications of course study material. This is an important area to recapture talking about things that matter. In private discussion people are likely to be more honest than when trying to carry an argument in class.

* Read Christian books. Christian reading is still an excellent way to grow as a Christian. God wants us to be both wise and understanding.

Living Christianly

We cannot learn to think Christianly without it affecting our behaviour. If we do then we haven’t really learnt anything at all. We have become stuffed up with knowledge but have no wisdom. No, we must put what we know into practise. What does that mean?

* Be holy. There seems to be an attitude today that wants to demonstrate that Christians are no different from anyone else. Some argue that in the past Christians have been too legalistic and have not claimed the freedom they have in Christ. That is true, to a point. If, however, we think that Christians should be just like everyone else then we are badly wrong. Christians are new creations, alive to God. He calls the shots now.

* Be involved in a local church. The biggest sign of relativism creeping into our lives as Christians is when we start to say, ‘I don’t need to belong’, or, ‘I choose a church according to whether it meets my needs’. When this happens, what we are seeing is not Christianity that says the One who needs to be satisfied is God: what we are seeing is the world which says that the one who needs to be satisfied is me. That means we need to work out where we fit into the body, and what we can contribute, as well as what we receive. I frequently hear students say, ‘I go to one church for the teaching and one for the worship’. That is not a Christian understanding of the church which is God’s redeemed community.

* Be clear. It is quite possible to live in a holy way, but to be very obscure about it. Rather than live bold lives before the world, we hide in the closet. We settle for the mediocre rather than take risks for the Lord. If ever there was a time when Christians need to stand and be counted, it is now. If Christ is unique then people should notice some unique things about the way we live. ‘If you love each other people will know you are my disciples’ (John 13.35).

Speaking Christianly

How do we speak to a world that has given up on truth? Some would have us believe that the way is to engage the world at the level of method. The world exists by telling small stories, individual stories, so let’s try to communicate on that level. That is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. It is great, for example, to be able to tell my story, but it is limited. By definition my story isn’t your story, so how do you know you can share it? And in a postmodern world many will respond, ‘that’s great for you, I’m glad Christianity works for you, but my religion works for me’.

By contrast the good news is God’s story for everyone to share. When we settle for the micro-narrative the next step is to lose our confidence in the big story, as well as our ability to explain it. So we need to do both. We need to be able to share our story, but we need to set it in the context of the big story. And when we tell the big story we must do so in ways that are relational, engaging, honest and respectful, but we must have confidence in the fact that the gospel is not only relational but propositional.

Christ uniquely communicates God to us and that means that there is truth which may be known, and known in such a way as to be able to act on it and find it to be life-transforming.

Marcus Honeysett is the UCCF London Team Leader and author of Meltdown: Making Sense of a Culture in Crisis

This article is an edited version of one which first appeared in From Athens To Jerusalem, Volume 4, Issue 1, Autumn 2003.