The Integration of Faith and Learning at Louisiana College
John 18:33-38
Presented by Dr. Charles Quarles, Vice President for Integration of Faith and Learning, in the November 3, 2005 chapel service.
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John 18:33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, "Are you the king of the Jews?" 34 "Is that your own idea," Jesus asked, "or did others talk to you about me?" 35 "Am I a Jew?" Pilate replied. "It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?" 36 Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place." 37 "You are a king, then!" said Pilate. Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." 38 "What is truth?" Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, "I find no basis for a charge against him.
While attending a state university, I took a course on the Sociology of Death and Dying. My professor, whom I will call Dr. Gary, was a staunch secular humanist. During the semester Dr. Gary and I developed a close relationship and I frequently visited his office to discuss the various theories introduced in class. On one of these visits, I objected to a sociological theory because of my Christian convictions and I defended my position by quoting the Scriptures. Although our discussions had always been very friendly, at the sound of Scripture Dr. Gary flew into a rage and shouted, “Don’t ever quote that book in my presence.” He reached up to his book shelf and pulled down a copy of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, waved it in the air and shouted, “You have your Bible and your God. Here is my Bible and I am my own god!” I walked out of his office trembling both wounded and baffled by his reaction. I replayed the conversation in my mind, trying to understand why he had acted so aggressively. I concluded that our interchange that day was not the result of a personality clash. He clearly liked me and I loved him. Our sharp disagreement was the result of a clash of two very different worldviews, two very different ideologies, two very different gods, and two very different books. I sought to view reality through the lens of the Holy Scriptures, in light of the truths revealed by the God of the Bible. He interpreted reality through the lens of a contrary human philosophy than deifies humanity and elevates human philosophies above divine revelation. Because each appealed to two very different gods and two very different books, our views on reality were light years apart.
My question to all of us here at Louisiana College is this: who will be the God of our ideologies and what will be the book to which we make our appeal for the ultimate questions in life? Who will be the God and what will be the book that will determine your worldview? In a sense both our mission and our doctrinal standard answer that question for us, for our mission is offer “an educational program grounded in the liberal arts tradition, informed by the Christian faith, and committed to academic excellence.” We are to offer an education “informed by the Christian faith.” The Christian faith looks to Jesus Christ and the Christian Scriptures for truth. Who will be the God and what will be the book that defines our ideologies? Jesus and the Bible. Jesus is our most valuable professor and the Bible is our most valuable textbook. Other people may instruct us and other books may inform us but the claims of all other people and all other books are trumped by the claims of Christ and His Word. The Gospel of John presents Jesus and the Bible as the ultimate sources of ultimate truth. The dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ provide principles to guide us in our integration of faith and learning here at LC.
What is truth? The question asked by Pilate is the same question that puzzles our generation: What is truth? Under the influence of postmodernism, our generation has lost its conviction that truth is necessarily true. In our pluralist culture, it has become offensive to say that one opinion is correct and another incorrect, one statement is right and another wrong. Consequently, postmodernists have decreed that absolute truth simply does not exist. All truth is relative. All opinions, even contradictory and mutually exclusive opinions, are affirmed as true. What is true for me may be different than what is true for you. Many of us in this room see the enormous fallacy in this relativism. We know that 2+2=4, never 3 or 5. Imagine a grade school child who objects when his teacher corrects his equation 2+2=5 on a test by arguing, “Sorry Ms. Crabtree, but 2+2=5 is my truth and 2+2=4 is your truth but both are equally true, and I must affirm your truth and your must affirm mine." I suspect that little Johnny might be sent to the nurse’s office for psychiatric evaluation or sent to the principal’s office for discipline. But while denial of absolute truth is laughable when applied to fields like mathematics, we naively embrace the assertion that all truth is relative when we step into fields like religion and ethics. We must be more consistent. We must acknowledge absolute truth in all areas of life. The next time someone insists that there is no such thing as absolute truth, ask them as sincerely as you know how, “Is that statement absolutely true?”
When Pilate asks, “What is truth?” he seems not to deny that absolute truth exists. He is simply despairing that this truth can ever be discovered with any real certainty. Jesus claims to be innocent of the charges brought against him. The Jewish leaders insist upon his guilt. Pilate wearies of the competing claims and doubts that he can ever get to the bottom of things.
Pilate’s desperation is the inevitable result to his approach for discerning truth. In verse 33 Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus replied with two questions which challenge Pilate’s quest for the truth: “Are you asking this on your own, or have others told you about me?” Jesus’ question outlines the two major approaches that people use today to determine truth. Some seek truth through independent personal investigation. In Jesus’ words, we ask things on our own or as one Bible translation puts it, we seek to come up with our "own ideas." We think, “I can figure this out for myself. I don’t need or want anyone to sway my opinion. I will define truth for myself.” Several have suggested to me in the few months that I have been at LC that this is the only appropriate method for education. They insist that professors should merely present options to students, never arguing that one view is correct and another incorrect, that one is right and another wrong. To say one view is right and another is wrong is to indoctrinate rather than educate. What we fail to recognize is that this method of education drives us right to Pilate’s despair over the very existence of truth. To treat all opinions as equally valid, to merely present options and simply let students pick and choose for themselves fails to model the process of critical thinking that this institution values and smacks of naïve relativism. Just as we cannot present 2+2=3, 2+2=4, and 2+2=5 as equally valid options in a mathematics class, we cannot present Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam as equally valid options in a religion class. The balance of evidence favors one or the other. The evidence leads to a conclusion, and it is the responsibility of the professor to guide students in evaluating the evidence and drawing an informed conclusion.
Another approach in the quest for truth defines truth by popular opinion. Jesus asked Pilate, “Did others tell you about me?” Have you formed opinions about me based on the reports of others? Will you let other people define your conclusions? Believe it or not, in many institutions today truth is defined by the polls, by popular vote. I was recently shocked to discover that a Christian college was using a text that had a very low estimation of Jesus and promoted a very low view of the Scripture. When I asked a friend who teaches at that institution why that text was used he replied, “Because that text reflects the consensus of scholarly opinion in the US.” My question is, since when was truth defined by consensus? Last week one of our graduates who received an outstanding alumnus award noted that when he was in medical school, practically all medical researchers believed that beta blockers caused heart damage. But he noted that today virtually all doctors use that same drug to treat heart problems! He said that 25 years ago he could have been sued for medical malpractice for prescribing beta blockers for a heart patient. Today, the same malpractice lawyer could file suit against him for failing to prescribe the drug to a heart patient! Given such radical shifts in the consensus of opinion, is it wise to define truth by the polls?
When we seek to discover truth merely by personal investigation or determine truth merely by public opinion, we will be driven like Pilate to throw up our hands and ask in desperation, “What is truth?” Pilate’s frustration illustrates the futility of seeking truth merely through worldly patterns of thinking which, by the way, are the very methods on which much of secular education rests today. Pilate’s effort to determine truth by mere personal investigation and public opinion and his frustrated question, “What is truth?” are pointed challenges to this secularist mindset.
Christ urges us to embrace another approach to our quest for truth. The Gospel of John emphasizes that the greatest and most important truths of life are disclosed by Jesus Christ and defined in the Holy Scriptures. Jesus insisted to Pilate that He personally was the key to the truth that Pilate sought, “I was born for this, and I have come into the world for this: to testify to the truth.” Jesus discloses the most important truths that we seek. John’s Gospel insists that Jesus is the truth. In John 14:6, Jesus stated, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus is equated with truth. He is the embodiment of truth so that to know Him is to know the truth. In the Prologue to his Gospel, John taught that Jesus was Deity Incarnate, God in the flesh. God resided in Jesus even more intensely than He resided in the Old Testament tabernacle and temple. John insisted that Jesus was "full of grace and truth." Jesus revealed the truth about God more clearly and powerfully than even the Law of Moses had done. In the Old Testament no one had ever seen God face to face, but God had come into the world in Jesus of Nazareth so that he could be seen and heard and touched, so that the true nature and character of God could be revealed. Consequently, Jesus is the embodiment of the truth. Jesus also knows all truth. John’s Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ omniscience, the fact that Jesus is all-knowing. John 1 shows that Jesus knows about the private spiritual experience of Nathanael that no human being witnessed. John 2 shows that Jesus knows what is in the very hearts of human beings. John 11 shows that Jesus knew what was going on in other places far away instantly, even as it happened. The Gospel of John emphasizes that Jesus knows the details of the future. At the climax of this theme Peter turns to Jesus and ascribes to him full omniscience saying in John 21:17, “Lord, you know all things!” Because Jesus is the embodiment of the truth and knows all truth, he is the only one fully qualified to reveal the truth as he explains here in his interview with Pilate. Consequently, Christian education unapologetically places Christ in the center of the educational process. Christ is our Teacher, Instructor, and Professor, and if true learning is to take place it will occur only at His feet. Truth is disclosed by God through Christ.
Truth is also discovered in the Scriptures. In his famous prayer of John 17:17, Jesus prayed to the Father, “Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth.” Just as Jesus equated himself with truth, he now equates the Father’s word, the Holy Scriptures, with truth as well. The Holy Scriptures contained the same unadulterated and powerful divine truth that resided in Jesus personally. This truth was so powerful that it sanctified God’s people, consecrated them, set them apart for whole-hearted devotion to God. After studying very carefully and critically for the last 25 years, I am more convinced now than ever of the truthfulness of this book. How could Daniel have possibly named the precise year that Jesus would begin his public ministry hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth? God’s word is truth! How could Job say that God “hangs the earth upon nothing” hundreds of years before scientists would discover that the earth is suspended in empty space rather than resting on a solid foundation? God’s word is truth! How could Jeremiah describe the stars as infinite and innumerable in a day when the greatest astronomers from Ptolemy to Kepler without the benefit of the telescope numbered the stars at approximately 1,000? Daniel, Job, and Jeremiah defied the consensus of opinion in their day and made statements that their contemporaries would have mocked and ridiculed but which science has now confirmed. How? God’s word is truth!
So I ask again the question, “Who will be the God and what will be the book that defines truth at Louisiana College?” Jesus is our God and the Bible is our book!
To some this commitment to Christ and His word will seem scandalous. To some this commitment may seem to threaten our legitimacy as an academic institution. Some critics of LC’s mission have recently argued that if we are to be a serious academic institution that Christianity and the Bible must be taught here just like it is in secular schools: just throw out all the options and let the student make up his own mind. I have serious objections to that approach. First, as one of our administrators recently asked, if that is our approach, what would be the reason for the existence of a distinctively Christian school? Why should Baptists spend potential mission dollars funding a purely secular education that is no different from that offered in any state institution? Second, do we really think that professors in secular institutions just throw out all the options and never attempt to guide students to a particular conclusion? I sat in a state university for three years and heard secular humanist professors, atheist professors, Marxist professors, and even occult practitioners argue their points of view just as passionately and clearly as I have argued a Christian point of view here today.
Some critics have recently argued that the fact that we are solidly committed to Christian truth means that competing ideologies can never be presented fairly and objectively and thus we can never offer a true education. Really? This last Saturday our Wildcats mauled the Choctaws of Mississippi College in our homecoming game. Did the Wildcats have an advantage by playing here in Pineville? Sure they did. This is Wildcat territory. There are paw prints everywhere. The Choctaws were playing on our turf. Our fans filled the stadium. Cheers for the Wildcats drowned out the warhoops of the Choctaws. The Wildcats had a definite advantage. But was the game fair? You bet. No one paid off the officials to influence their calls. No one bribed the opposing team to give less than their best. No one moved the goal post or built a barricade around the in-zone. The game was absolutely fair and in the end the Wildcats won simply because they were the best. In a similar way, our classrooms at Louisiana College are to be home fields for Christian truth. Opposing ideologies are welcomed to compete with our faith in our classrooms and we will guarantee these opposing ideologies a fair fight. In the end our faith will win, not because the contest is rigged, but simply because it is the best. But Christianity has the home team advantage here. This college will root for Christian truth. Our cheerleading squad, the faculty, will cheer for Christian truth. All those sitting in the stands, our convention, trustees, and alumni, will pray for and expect the victory of Christian truth.
Some have argued recently that the founding fathers of this institution would roll over in their graves if they knew of LC’s present commitment to offering a distinctively Christian education. I am convinced that they would applaud this commitment. Our alma mater that we sing at formal functions shows the historic commitment of this school to Christian truth. Written by an alumnus of 1921, the third stanza of the song says “Christian knowledge e’er bestowing until eternity.” That’s the heritage that we are to honor. That’s the mission that we must embrace, bestowing Christian knowledge until eternity dawns. I have observed that the seal of LC that adorns many of the objects associated with our school bears three words – Deo, Veritati, Patriae – superimposed on an open book which appears to represent the Bible! These Latin words describe our school as dedicated to God, to truth, and to country or family. Notice that the commitment to God precedes and supersedes all other commitments. This does not imply that our founders did not value truth. They merely recognized that God is the source of all truth. It seems that our founders knew that it is only through commitment to and worship of the God of all truth that the ultimate truths of life are disclosed and discovered.
You may not be aware that, in addition to our alma mater, LC also has a college hymn written by Eugene Hall. One line of the hymn urges professor to inform their students of the truths revealed by God, "Teach us the truths that come from God's own mind."
Contrary to recent criticisms, the founders of our college are smiling upon us now. They would applaud our efforts to integrate the Christian faith with the education offered here.
“Don’t you quote that book in my presence! You have your Bible and your God, here is my Bible and I am my own god!” This is just one of many examples of how the Bible is banned and God is muzzled in secular universities. Here in this Christian setting, we must unleash them and let them speak again. Let us enthrone Christ as King of Louisiana College. Let Jesus be the God and the Bible the book that we look to for the truth!