Presenting Christian Truth at University Level

Problems of witnessing to the saving power of Jesus Christ on the campus of a secular university are numerous enough and fierce enough to have made many a Christian, including myself, quail before them. Let me briefly present the five areas of difficulty I consider most important: technical problems; intellectualism; rebellion; the difficulties occasioned by a society whose value structure, like Mrs. MacGurdy’s hat, is noticeably slipping; and the problem of time. Later I will say something about the value of faith on a modern university campus, and what seem to me to be the strongest arguments for accepting the Gospel.

The technical problems vary from historical questions to socio-psychological efforts to explain away fives changed by Christ. I shall speak only of the historical problems here; my last points will include what I know by way of answer to sociologists and psychologists.

In considering the technical problems posed by history, some disagree with the assertion that we cannot prove that man’s earliest religion was monotheistic. Allowing for nearly anyone’s dating system—and I am happy to hear that Ussher is absent from the pages of Genesis in the new Scofield edition—man’s religious patterns were well established at least thousands of years before the appearance of our earliest literary hints of what he was actually thinking about. Through that vast period, which most recent studies expand to millions of years, what record we have begins with propliopithecus and the problems of fossil hominids. Fossil water and pollen analysis catalogue the progress and recession of oscillating glaciers. During the last glacial stages, now in the Mesolithic period, Gravettian decorations give way to the ghostly mysteries of Magdalenian cave-art. The Neolithic village revolution itself offers many problems, for by the seventh millennium B.C. it had produced towns, fortifications, elaborate burial ritual, apparent cultic paraphernalia such as Jericho’s plastered skulls and the horned chambers of Alaca Hüyük—all possibly 4,000 years before the development of writing. And from the literary sources (now at least 4,300 years old) that finally did appear to show what man was thinking about, we learn that by then he was thinking of many gods.

The scale of arguments about primitive monotheism is easy to load, harder to balance. When we consider that the classical Sumerian pantheon lists nearly 5,000 deities in a descending order beginning with Anu, we can argue, if not prove, that Anu was first and goes back to earliest recollected time. And so on one side of the scale we can place this fact of an ascending order of Sumerian deities culminating with Anu. When we read of the war of the gods against Ti’amat in Enuma Elish and note that the protagonists were a younger generation of gods, we can add Anu’s recessive characteristics to the scale. The logic of Mrs. Frankfort’s personified environmental factors in the book Before Philosophy offers an attractive explanation of multiplying deities, and we can throw that in, too. Personification thus rationalizes the notion of proliferating gods as a cultural index beginning from unity, so we can include that. As a climax we can add Paul’s scorching account of this process in Romans 1.

But the scale has another pan as well, and in it must go animal dances, fertility figurines, mammoth-hunting H. neanderthalensis, and the whole series of Neolithic cultural assemblages already mentioned. Honesty requires that on this side of the scale we also include the problems of demonstrating a personal God, in any case. The weights of these arguments vary with the inquirer. Faith alone will tip the scales, however resoundingly.

If monotheism as man’s first religious form is difficult, chronological problems with the Old Testament also present a barrier. It is not as popular now as once it was to speak of the documents of the Pentateuch. I have heard a noted Hebrew scholar refer to the whole business as “alphabet soup”! But his reasons for doing so were ominous, for he sees Genesis and the Law as the end of a long and fully established mythic and legal system in North Syria, fully capable of supplying one person, Moses, with the precedents he needed for most of the Pentateuch. We escape one problem to land in another.

To move on: to see that a prophet was moved by the Spirit to write of an event before it transpired requires the eye of faith; the eye of scientific historical scrutiny, blind to faith by definition, sees no such thing. Warned away from the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch by most recent scholarship, it still must arrange ideas in an assumed epistemological order. It thus serves up scrambled Judges, Isaiah on the half-shell, and skewered Daniel. And so are they taught on campus after campus in courses in Near Eastern history.

Besides the problems with primitive monotheism and Old Testament dating, there is the problem of the resurrection of Christ.

F. F. Bruce in The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? effectively discusses the evidence. By all canons of historical judgment save one, we are more sure—and have greater testimony to it by a factor of several hundred—that Christ rose from his grave than we are that Caesar conquered Gaul or even knew that it was divided into three parts. The one argument that gives Caesar the edge because it dominates scientific history is that, until someone does it under laboratory conditions, the dead do not rise. The world must contend with the “resurrection faith”—a point to which we shall return—but Christians must contend the resurrection fact; their witness depends upon it. The point here is the difficulty of proving it as fact.

The problem of the resurrection leads directly to my second area, the matter of intellectualism, the notion that man can better the human condition (to use a greatly overworked phrase) by taking thought. So taught Plato and Aristotle, followed by Cynics, Cicero, Stoics, and others who managed to reach the ultimate in turgidity in the pages of Plotinus. But this was the part of ancient thought Petrarch and others resurrected in developing the humanism of the Renaissance. Man himself, humanists said, rewards study as he is. The assertion quickly led to humanly defined goals, standards, and means of attainment. After humanism, the Philosophes, the Enlightenment, the Age of Expansion, another of Progress, and still other ages of global war, man now stands with head bloody but unbowed, the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. Vituperative asides to the effect that he stands unbowed but on crumbling feet of clay may be personally satisfying and even true, but they fail to negotiate the impasse between the Gospel and all that modern education represents.

Higher education primarily stresses freedom of thought on any subject, the duty of analyzing all experience, and self-reliance in vocational super-training. Its instructors are men and women who, by and large, have tried very hard to solve the problems of their fields. They have had to hack their way with pen or typewriter through the tall grass of departmental and professional intrigue, knowing that to falter means banishment—before tenure to the bush leagues, and after tenure to the genteel poverty of isolation.

This is intellectualism armed to the teeth, its practitioners self-made men, its greatest fear lack of self-confidence. It would be hard to suggest a more obvious conflict with the Gospel. Scripture says Christ came to heal the sick; the committed faculty member claims above all that he is well. Christ said that he who would be greatest among us should serve all; the intellectual serves, if at all, because he is superior. But the greatest offense is the assertion that these efforts to which our colleagues now, and our best students in the future, devote their lives are to God filthy rags—and even that only when they purport to have moral implications, which they rarely do.

Salt—a freighted word in this context, neatly stressed by our Lord—salt is rubbed into that wound by an insult so supreme only God could have devised it. My sin is so great that his Son resigned his position in glory to come to be abused for his acts of infinite grace, to teach what can be learned only in submission; to drip blood and water into the bright dust of an ugly Judaean hill, and to hang there bleeding and slowly asphyxiate because of my rebellion. And so I’ll never forget the price. I am constantly reminded that it is the Cross of Christ that is my only glory, not a Ph.D., not history, not books, not administration. The Gospel is an offense.

Another problem is rebellion. This word is one of those most used on campus these days. Rebellion has touched the lives of many a student from what we probably had better call a Christian background. Trained on someone else’s faith to a religion of behavior, these young people are not so dull that they cannot see pale, pursed lips and braided hair sitting beside a nodding head and glazed, drooping eyes. They do not fail to draw comparisons with the gossip, the reviled “brethren,” and the unfeeling grunts about how different things were when father was a boy. The results, I weary to say, frequent my office. They also are ripe for propagandizing. God is dead, only Watts, Selma, and Viet Nam are real, they hear; and these rebels fall for slogans not as true and twice as cheap as what an Arab malcontent would stoop to throw as he incited yet another escapade into Israel to embarrass King Hussein.

And they sometimes actively join that greater number in rebellion against a society whose value system seems to grow less relevant and comprehensible with each day. The affluent materialist rushes out to buy a car, a camera, a boat, another car, a swimming pool, an airplane, a Cook’s Tour, another car, a bigger house—and each in turn fades from mind as its novelty wears away. His longhaired teen-age son slouches in the living room, the only one in the family who is deaf to the blaring of the Monkees, and almost alone in his acute irritation at the crashing silence when they’ve been turned off. Longhair looks at his camera-draped father inspecting his latest acquisition while erupting cigar smoke, and wonders what it all adds up to.

Those of us who are parents are occasionally brought up short by the realization that we teach our children what we believe more than what we say. Tax-evasion, hostilities, unconcern, come through louder than pronouncements about making something of yourself. Longhair, told to get ahead but shown inconsistencies, has some understandable difficulties differentiating between admissible tax-evasion and inadmissible sex, liquor, and vandalism.

Nor does the rest of the world offer much help. Poverty amid affluence, conflicting accounts of Viet Nam, the credibility gap, racial riots right at the time of enlightened federal legislation—these do not offer a social value structure of unalloyed clarity. Comfort and conflict, without personal experience of the hard knocks the world offers those who are alone in it, provide poor defense against slogans and the appearance of commitment to a cause. And to bring the problem close enough to discomfit us, I could mention the young and extremely successful businessman I know in Indianapolis who two years ago decided that if making money was all life had to offer, he’d sell out. And he would have, except for the influence of a friend who showed him how to channel his success into avenues of Christian service. Another case is the young Inter-Varsity student on the Indiana University campus who is so enamored with the notion of government-imposed, socialistic solutions to the problem of poverty that she seems to be forgetting the importance of changed life to changed lives.

This world, so devoid of appealing values in the eyes of the younger generation, is also without its own self-evident order. The conflict of chaos and order has demonstrably occupied man since the beginning of writing. Sumerian myth, explaining the disruption of storms and politics when both were supposed to be secured by appropriate attention to the proper gods, came to view the natural world plus the affairs of men as being in the hands of a divine cosmos. Gods could argue, come into conflict, and best each other in a system that had no reference to lowly and subservient man. Thus the best of prayers and sacrifices could still result in conquest, disruption, and decay. So used, the internecine quarrels of the divine cosmos could justify, if not explain, the arbitrary intrusion of chaos into a world of order sought but not realized. The same search for order, with gods excised, motivated the pre-Socratics in their search for a mechanistic order of natural events. And so it has dominated philosophers since Thales began the search for his “First Principle.” The effort is still with us as our science seeks to determine whether the world is simply 200+ sub-atomic particles and all their possible combinations, or man’s intellectually imposed structure of institutions and classifications, or a combination of these. And our philosophers ask, What, of all this, is real? These questions are still being asked, as they always were, in the presence of nature’s cruelty and of man’s inhumanity. The world remains order and miasma, a swamp in which one must find a path, or anesthesia, or escape.

Permanent order cannot be found; it must be imposed. The imposition of order demands some kind of value system, and today’s campus youth are poorly equipped in this area. Slipping to a common denominator of experience in search of order without values, many of our young people are descending to the neo-cannibalism of the so-called other culture, abetted by Burroughs’s bible, Naked Lunch.

The situation is not improved, from our standpoint, by the fact that religion is one of the items from which these youngsters are rebelling, without being able to detect a difference between religion and the Gospel.

The last of the difficulties I must mention is qualitatively different from all the others. It operates among Christian young people contemplating a path of service, as well as among those seeking a realistic solution to the quandary of purpose. This enemy is time.

Of all psychedelic and narcotic drugs and all the other reasons for not coming to grips with the reality of the moment, time is the most insidious. Next year I shall get on top of myself and really pitch in with my witness, says the Christian. Someday I’ll consider responsibility as well as rebellion, says someone else. Both allow themselves continually and almost imperceptibly to go on exercising the muscles of delay, failure, avoidance of issues. And all the while the slogans, the half-truths, the “rudiments of this world” in Paul’s phrase, do their work. Witness is blunted, concern is tempered, confrontation with the demands of the Lordship of Christ for Christians, and with Christ himself for listening but unaccepting inquirers, is set aside. If I were required to state the single greatest obstacle to Christian witness on the campus, I should hazard the suggestion that it is the enervation of delay on the part of the 70 per cent who ought to know but fail to speak of their Lord and his demands. If all the 300 who come to Indiana University certified one way or another as Christians would stand up and be counted instead of the mere eighty or so who do, the impact of the Gospel on this campus of over 25,000 students would be multiplied. A decision put off can never be made at a later time as the same decision, for it will occur in different circumstances and be made by a different person. One of my greatest difficulties is in getting Christian young people to see that the time is now. Now is the day of salvation, and more.

Lest I present too grim a picture—for it is not grim but joyful to work with students who really want to understand—let me not end with problems of historical proof, personal offense, rebellion, disordered values, and the narcosis of time—particularly since there is in the matter of values a key that I, at least, have occasionally found effective.

The point is that no amount of study and attempt to understand the world of physics, biology, or society will reveal any natural order of affairs. Mathematics and philosophy have alike been charmed by the order of logic. Many have been impressed by the sophistication of engineering design that holds those 200+ atomic particles in their various known combinations. However, static design is one thing; ultimate fact and an order in action are something else—perhaps they do not exist, beyond relativism. Certainly they have not been demonstrated in human affairs. If they had been, philosophy would have been curtailed, sociology completely mechanized, and departments of religion exterminated.

Since order has not been demonstrated, the student, confronted with slippery questions of values coupled with an exponentially growing index of knowledge, and unable to discover a rationale, must ultimately impose his own rationale, his own order. To do so is an act of faith, for it asserts that in the face of disorder there is reason in ultimate ends. Whether human perfectability, ultimate social reform, Marxism, Zen Buddhism, or a firm determination to realize one’s own fulfillment—whatever the means—is the issue, the vehicle is faith that a certain volitional pattern is feasible. The result is a rationale imposed by a faith. It is as clearly present with the atheist as with the theist. I have occasionally been successfully tempted to assert that rationale, withdrawal, or mental disorientation are man’s only choices.

Within this broad view of faith, however, many alternatives exist. Of all these alternatives, the best in my view is historic Christianity with its insistence upon the fact of sin, which usually, if not always, is demonstrable. Christianity has a clear statement of human need that is abetted by the hollow searching of our charges, as noted long ago by Augustine. It has a drastic solution for a desperate problem at Calvary, and above all—or, more carefully, on top of all these other things—it has a challenge to serve others indiscriminately and without cause other than the love of Christ. Presenting the Gospel as one alternative in a world whose lack of structure demands faith of some sort has often seemed to me to be a way to start Christian witness. As an alternative, it seems to make sense to all who are not specifically and willfully set upon one of the other alternatives. This last problem aside, it appears relatively easy to make a case for the Gospel as the superior alternative, and I have found it effective both in group presentation and in personal counseling situations.

This may get youngsters listening; the remaining question concerns the viability of the Gospel. The only way to prove Christ is to meet him. Regeneration depends upon the Spirit of God doing his work in the heart of the sincere seeker. This demands a miracle, and I would not wish to minimize the way this fact burdens Christian witness. We must tell our audiences that God will meet them. The first requirement for doing so is that we believe such a modern miracle will occur and bring with it the assurances our arguments cannot prove. Beyond that central fact and largely subsequent to it are the aids to assurance that can come from a number of things. The experience of personal change is one. The historically demonstrable changes brought about by the Gospel in the fives of believers is another. Here, once possessing Christianity is separated from professing Christendom, the resurrection faith that transformed the Roman Empire, reformed the medieval church, informed the Wesley Revival, and conforms the fines of modern mass evangelism can stand out in bold relief. Its results can be tested against the fruits of atheism in murder and bloodshed in the Congo, Viet Nam, China, Stalinist Russia, and so on. The comparison, to the believer, is devasting.

Finally, and most personally, I find the greatest sustaining proof of the Gospel in the pages of Scripture. The clear majesty of Romans and the incisive demands of its final chapters, the insights from Mars Hill, the wisdom of the gospel parables, to mention but a few portions, reinforce again and again, and stronger and stronger, the absolute assertion that God is the divine Inspirer of Scripture and that the absolute fact of existence is “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

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