Faith, Learning, and Liberal Education

Response to a solicitation for questions in my discipline where we integrate faith and learning.

0. I don’t have anything immediately relevant to contribute here, since the pursuit of many, if not most, philosophical questions in depth leads to significant theological issues, and we couldn’t plausibly single out a small set of questions. But I do want to post some concerns about what seem to me salient challenges to the college’s integrative aspirations.

There are two areas in which students appear not to be acquiring the skills requisite to integrating what they learn with their faith. The proximate motivation for these thoughts is my attempt to respond to the multi-page diatribe I recently received from one of our brighter students asserting that he no longer saw any reason to believe that Christianity is true.

1. The first area of concern is our students’ ability to deal with basic questions about the rational justification of their faith. I have found that they generally are not at all equipped to answer the simple question, “Why do you think that Christianity is true?” In fact I find that asking this makes students uncomfortable. I suspect they secretly suspect that there’s no good answer, or if there is, coming up with it is far beyond them. Of course, this intellectual insecurity about their faith often comes wrapped in some ignorant and rather arrogant bluster about the “stupid scientists” who believe in evolution and the Big Bang—maybe they’ve picked up bits and pieces of propaganda from the “Intelligent Design” movement—or about belief in God being necessary for moral decency, or about it just being obvious that God exists, and that only the wicked and foolish could think otherwise. (You’ll note the distressingly effortless move from the contingent particulars of the Christian faith to the “defense” of some sort of “generic theism,” but that’s another issue.) It’s rare to hear anyone even begin a serious attempt to give reasons to think the claims of Christianity per se might actually be true.

Also, when our brighter or more inquisitive students see through these popular but bogus and less than intellectually honest “defenses” of the faith, it’s easy for them to conclude that there’s nothing there. I sometimes worry that we give some of our best students enough of an education to lose confidence in the faith of their childhoods, but not enough to move them on toward a place where they can be both faithful and intellectually honest.

Many of our students originate in communities that are close to being monolithically Christian, at least nominally. Never having personally encountered non-believers, non-belief might seem a merely notional possibility, not a matter of existential moment, and the rational defense of the faith no more intelligible than the defense of any other folkway. A very capable student once referred in an essay to, “atheists and other weird people out there.” Many of our students come from places where Christianity is simply taken for granted and of a piece with being a good person; those who do not believe are simply stupid or wicked. In such venues the Christian faith is also sometimes captive to an ideology, i.e., a system of belief that underwrites group identity and which it is wrong and dangerous to question, or even to think could be seriously questioned. When questioning something is unthinkable, rationally defending it is equally unimaginable.

I doubt that those who are not grappling with the question, “What—if anything—do I know about the world that gives me reason to think Christianity is true?” and with the question, “What is it about the world that undermines or challenges the belief that Christianity is true, and how might I honestly respond to it?” isn’t in a position to move on to the higher order issues we think of as the “integration of faith and learning.”

You might wonder whether my own department [philosophy] is falling down on the job. However, while a treatment of natural theology, i.e., the standard arguments for the existence of God, as well as the problem of evil, are traditional components of the introductory philosophy curriculum, consideration of the reasons for specifically Christian belief lies outside our disciplinary purview. While we philosophers are annoyingly game to have a go at anyone’s reasons for believing anything, epistemology and logic always being of interest to us, we tend to see these questions, as important as they might be to us personally, as beyond the boundaries of our discipline. Perhaps everyone thinks the same thing, and this crucial matter falls into the cracks between disciplines. At another college where I taught we had a General Education course called “Christian Foundations” which addressed these matters. They seem essentially interdisciplinary, involving philosophy, theology, history, biblical studies, psychology, and probably other areas.

The same problem appears when it comes to students’ confidence in the Bible. Here the discussion goes:

Q. Why do you believe that?

A. Because the Bible says so.

Q. Why do you believe that what the Bible says is true?

At this juncture the student is often surprised, never having imagined that someone could ask such a thing. (I’m not making this up: students have told me that they’ve never even thought of such a question.) But more often, the response involves the same sort of uninformed baloney the question about the truth of Christianity or the existence of God elicits, i.e., “Archaeology has proved that everything the Bible says is true;” “There are thousands of fulfilled prophecies and the odds against them all coming true by chance is one in a gazillion;” “It was written by different authors over centuries yet it contains absolutely no contradictions, so it must be God’s word. ” (I’ll leave aside those who tell me we should believe it is the Word of God since, after all, it says it is.) There is a striking disparity between the authority and importance Christians ascribe to Holy Scripture and the effort we make seriously to justify the view that it is anything more than a nice book from the ancient Near East.

2. That brings me to the second area of concern. It seems to me that we do almost nothing explicitly, and too little implicitly, to guide students toward a rational use of the Bible. No doubt hermeneutical issues are dealt with in upper level courses in biblical studies, and in the English Department, but it appears that the General Education Bible course, aiming at giving students an overview of the content of the entire Bible in one semester, can’t possibly do much with the subtle and difficult question of how to read it.

Here I think our customary diffidence toward students, our propensity to be gentle, and not to too overtly challenge their convictions, is not always in their interest. In my classes, when a student in discussion invokes Scripture in an ill-conceived way, I often tacitly accept the student’s interpretation of the text for the sake of argument and go on with the philosophical issue, avoiding a lengthy digression into the complexities of biblical hermeneutics. But I fear that this shortchanges our students. Where in our curriculum do we bring them in a sustained way to the hard task of reading the Bible with all our critical faculties, as it demands to be read? Where do we bring them past the stage of using Scripture as a collection of sacred oracles, and to the point of beginning to hear it as the Word of God? A while back a colleague taught a special topics course, “Sex and the Bible,” and, I believe, did an admirable job of guiding a handful of students in this direction. But I worry that most of our students never get focused on the question of how to use the Scriptures, leaving college with the unreflective hermeneutic with which they entered. In this case, the Bible inevitably is heard saying precisely what we think it has to say, providing the answers we want to our questions. We do not hear it as the Word of God that questions us, forcing us to look at both our theological beliefs, and what we learn about the world, in new ways.

Here too, it seems to me that there’s no real hope of an integration of Christian faith and a liberal arts education absent an ongoing commitment to using the Bible in a serious way, and to getting past formulaic responses about what we assume it says to what it really says. Less obviously, but no less than the justification of Christian belief, this is inherently an interdisciplinary project.

3. I conjecture that these apologetic and hermeneutic endeavors are a natural and necessary “bridge” from disciplinary learning to a maturing Christian faith. A faith never defended in the public arena of critical reason, nor shaped by a hermeneutically self-conscious reading of the biblical text, remains simplistic, unexamined, isolated, and too fragile to bring into fruitful contact with learning in the disciplines.