Sizing up the Students

After fifteen years of teaching in a theological seminary—mostly in what the catalogue was pleased to call a systematic theology—I went back to teaching in a college again. I must say that I suffered some shock.

One can assume, for the sake of argument, that all the men who sit in one’s classroom in a theological seminary are at least in favor of the Christian faith, and that most of them are highly committed to it. The difficulties a teacher faces lie primarily in explaining or supporting what is already a given in the theological tradition of the Christian Church. One gives attention to history and doctrine and makes some effort to set up and support a way of looking at the Christian faith. Next comes the business of how this Christian faith is to make contact with the various philosophies and religions of the world and how its relevance may be shown in such areas as social action. One must also give much time to the workings of the church and must, of course, establish reasons why the particular denomination of the seminary has good reasons for continued existence.

In the college milieu, however, there is a whole different set of problems, a whole different set of assumptions and pre-suppositions. One must learn at the outset that the class before him is representative of our pluralistic society, and that while students in the seminary are generally in favor of the Christian faith, college students who are not headed for the seminary may be completely ignorant of that faith. They may even be opposed to it, for a lot of reasons that they consider rational but that may actually be quite irrational. The college battleground is really in Christian apologetics rather than in Christian understanding and application.

It has been interesting for me to learn about some of the assumptions of the present student generation and to see the enormous changes in beliefs that have taken place among students in the last twenty years. The outstanding moral questions on a college campus are somewhere in the neighborhood of liquor, sex, and cheating; but when one faces these problems head on, he discovers that what William Temple once said is very, very true: “All our problems are theological ones.” If you prefer a different vocabulary or a wider sweep, then all our questions are “philosophical ones.” Most students know no philosophy and therefore have never thought through to the foundations of their beliefs.

A philosophy that is now strong in universities and colleges is logical positivism. In its simplest form this means that nothing is really known, or, that, if something is known, the knowledge is not valid unless it can be counted, weighed, or measured in the laboratory. At its worst and in the superficial form, it has come to be known as scientism, in contrast to science. “Seeing is believing.” “I heard it myself.” These are the grounds of knowledge. I remember one student’s saying to me, “I have decided not to believe anything unless I can prove it by laboratory experiment.” I countered, “Prove to me then that you are not a butterfly dreaming you are a college boy.” Thus the conversation ended. If there is what is called an atmosphere or climate of the beliefs in every age, then scientism is the atmosphere of the present student generation.

A second student assumption can be called relativity. Whatever is known cannot be known for sure, and in the last analysis even laboratory science is dependent on the observer as much as on the observed. This is undoubtedly a sound position in astronomy and, as I understand it, in nuclear physics; but serious problems arise if one attempts to bring this principle over into the realm of law and order. This kind of morality keeps defending itself by saying, “Well, that’s what you think.” It turns out that a man’s position is what he happens to think, but there is a question whether what one man thinks may not be more valid than what another man thinks. This question is not plumbed.

The student’s world view is highly departmentalized. I presume we would all agree that a great many churchgoers practice a kind of Sunday religion that has no relevance on Monday, and that it should not be so. In a related error, many, many students think that Christianity is an interesting study, and that some religionists, whatever their religion, have interesting viewpoints. But the idea that there can be a body of truth heading up in a person who can make the claim, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that this particularism ought to be applied as a world view to every facet of life—this is completely foreign to most collegiate thinking. One can argue that Christianity has no right to make such a claim; but when Christianity does make that claim, one must concede that Christianity is a world view having to do with God, man, redemption, society, business ethics, and eternal destiny. Christianity is not an interesting pastime like stamp-collecting.

One of the strangest discoveries I made about today’s college students was that scientific language is understandable and philosophical or theological language is not. Treating one of the arguments for the existence of God, I discovered that all the students easily handled the argument from the second law of thermodynamics and that whatever could be said about evolution fitted neatly into their way of thinking. Other arguments, however, fell to the ground, rejected as too nebulous, not worth the effort, strange to modern ears.

The theology of evolution is a peculiar business. In the thinking of a college student, everything evolves, though he probably has never looked seriously at Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, or those who followed in their train. To point out some bit of shady evidence regarding evolution automatically marks the professor as not quite bright. The student who says “that’s what you think” about ethical standards swallows evolution happily on the grounds that “everybody knows.”

And this last leads to a very peculiar business. Since their kindergarten days, these students have been trained to discuss everything and have therefore been led to believe that their opinions are pretty good stuff. In college they find it possible to see through everything and everybody except through their own rationalizations about their own behavior. They insist on reasoning everything out. And then they believe in a most irrational way.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

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