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Are Students Losing Their Religion on Campus?
December 13th, 2005 by Benjamin Wagaman.Categorized as culture, emerging church, life.
ABC ran a story on college students and spirituality. In case you missed the story when it aired on Good Morning America on Wednesday (12/6), you can check it out here: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1375842&page=1
I used to think that college students were just unspiritual, because they didn’t all believe the exact same things I do. But the contemporary culture of our day, a postmodern world, is very open to different kinds of religious experiences. Perhaps the right way to talk to college students about Christ today isn’t what it was before. Looking at a bunch of empirical data to come to a universal absolute systemized worldview worked well before, but there is a different starting point today.
I think the biggest error we can assume today is that if people don’t respond to our methods that they are bad, especially if they worked before. We tell ourselves that we haven’t changed but they have, so it’s their fault. Yet I believe there is a great opportunity today to get beneath mere intellectual faith and share our real life experience with Christ. We need to share what Christ really means to our heart, not just a bunch of propositions.
I believe that if Christians stop resenting the culture and begin understanding it, we will make a big impact on society and how the culture is shaped during the next hundred years. But my hope is mixed with hopelessness. It seems like so many of us are resistant (myself included for many years) to framing our beliefs in a new world. Brothers and sisters, if we do not begin redeeming the culture, our faith will continue to become irrelevant and effectually disappear. And by the way, redeeming the culture does not mean making it modern again.
I welcome comments, and this will not be the last post on this subject.
Hi Wagamans!
about Brian McLaren’s book, Generous Orthodoxy. I am really trying to figure this “emerging church” stuff out. Some of the stuff in the movement seems great — focusing on heart and not just head (but I wonder if head is being thrown out?), a focus on community, the arts, etc. etc. Other ideas from the emergent church movement give me the willies.
Benjamin left a reply over on my so-called blog
Anyway, my sis sent me this site, and I thought you’d enjoy it too
http://ateam.blogware.com/blog/EmergingEmergentChurch
I would love to discuss this stuff once I get it figured out a bit better — and once I read McLaren’s book for myself.
God bless you!
Deb
Wagamans,
You have a large task ahead of you, to reach college students of this day and age. I am a recent college graduate (June 2005), though perhaps I am atypical of my generation. From personal experiences, I have seen that, yes, my peers love to talk openly about spirituality and may not *like* to be told that there is a right way, an absolute. Yet, it seems to me, that they must be told what is truth if they are to encounter it. I am wary of this idea of the emerging church because I fear that it sacrifices the meaty theological discussions that help students my age to really and truly encounter God. Similar discussions may currently exist–but, in the emerging church, I fear that they do not bring students to the feet of the one True Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
I am interested in the idea you present of “redeeming the culture.” You say that that does not mean returning to modernism–thank God, because the moderns had it wrong, too. Many moderns sacrificed the heart for the sake of the head. But are we now sacrificing the head to grow the heart?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
I am not interested at all in removing theology. If you notice my booklist, Grudem’s Systematic Theology is very high on my list. I have taken great pleasure in discourses on Old Testament narrative theology and much more. All I am saying is that we don’t need to stop at getting the right belief system and assume that this is all that Christianity is about. There is so much more.
Bring back the creeds. Bring back art. Bring back the sacraments. Bring back contemplation. Bring back an emphasis on holiness (actions that flow from a right heart).
Search the Scriptures ……… you will find Jesus there. It’s not about ‘religion’ ……. it’s all about having a relationship with Christ. The Gospel is simple. People make it complicated.
God bless ………..
Of course the gospel is simple. But that doesn’t make the gospel simplistic. There is a simple complexity, that a child can understand but the best scholar can’t master. A lot of the world is like that.
I don’t think it’s all about ‘religion’ either. ‘Religion’ for religion’s sake didn’t get me anywhere. I was quoting the ABC article. Yet I do think that many Christians want to dismiss other people’s spirituality just because it isn’t theirs and assume that they don’t care about deeper things. That misses the point.
Dear Benjamin,
My opinion is that the reason that best scholars cannot master it is because they do not accept the Gospel as a child but try to understand it by their own intelligence. As humans we are not meant to understand everything that God says or does. We forget His words in Isaiah 55:8 ……. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. And the words of the Preacher in Ecclesiates 12:12 …….. And further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh. It’s not about Philosophy. It’s all about Christ. See Colossians 2:1-10. We can chew our cuds about it all day, and night, but in the end it is all about Christ. One of my uncles would tell you the same as he told me ……… take your Bible and a good commentary such as Strong’s …. pray to God before you read and study your Bible and He will show you what He wants you to understand. If anyone is a believer they have a direct line to God. Use that first.
God bless ………
I’m not sure what you are trying to convince me about. I don’t disagree with you. I don’t think words have no meaning or we can’t simply read the Bible with a good commentary and understand the meaning. But, as I learned from my Old Testament professor, Richard Pratt, the Bible is organically inspired. This means that there is a divine element and a human element. If you only keep the divine element, you get a dictation theology like what Muslim’s believe. Most Christians I know take a view that the Bible was inspired by God, therefore, above cultural influences.
According to B.B. Warfield,
“These books [of Scripture] were not produced suddenly, by some miraculous act–handed down complete out of heaven, as the phrase goes; but, like all other products of time, are the ultimate effect of many processes cooperating through long periods. . . . There is the preparation of the men to write these books to be considered, a preparation physical, intellectual, spiritual, which must have attended them throughout their whole lives, and, indeed, must have attended them throughout their whole lives, and, indeed, must have had its beginning in their remote ancestors, and the effect of which was to bring the right men to the right places at the right times, with the right endowments, impulse, acquirements, to write just the books which were designed for them.”
Organic inspiration explains all kinds of peculiarities in the Old Testament. For instance, the story of Manasseh in 2 Kings 21:10-16 (which was written during the exile) focused on Manasseh’s sin to explain why Judah was in Babylon. In 2 Chronicles 33:10-17 (written after the exile) focuses on Manasseh as a model for repentance and restoration. So which is it? Is Manasseh a great sinner, or a great repenter.
A simple propositional view of scripture (that is you should read each sentence and understand it plainly right away) is ridiculous, because the Bible is not written in that way. He gave us stories, not doctrinal treatises. This doesn’t make theology bad, but we need to recognize that we all have biases and preconceptions that shade our understanding. Therefore we need to understand the cultural conditions when it was written if we are ever to approach a pure understanding of how to apply the scripture to today.
This is the complexity of scripture, that it was accomodated to a particular people, at a particular time, for a particular purpose and we are largely ignorant of most of these aspects.
The process of interpreting scripture is both easy and hard. And if you think differently, maybe you should read a good book on hermeneutics.