The question was:
What has allowed you to stand firm in your faith in Christ during your time in grad school, college, or both?
Why am I asking this question? Because so many people who enter higher education professing Christ are swept away from their beliefs. I want to know more about the flip side.
And this is my response. I post it here because some people wanted to reference it.
I think there is a large factor of self determination that happens when people enter college. They must now choose to go to church, whereas before if they were coming from a Christian family they would have had to choose not to go to church. So in effect is part of the issue that they are freed from family and social pressures for the first time?Second, to what extent does the person’s upbringing and understanding of the relationship between God and nature affect the pulling away? Will a person when confronted with ideas, theories, and systems take a literalistic-infallible approach or realize that all truth comes from God. That is, in their studies, will they see God or see an absence of God? I fear than many of the people you are referring to come from backgrounds that will put them in opposition to observation and well founded theories. This leaves them three choices: reject one, reject the other, or form a more complex understanding of the world and God’s action in it than they were brought up with. I know people in gradIV that have each chosen differently from those options.
Speaking for myself, I can say that higher education has forced me to reconcile many things I’ve learned with the often naive or misinformed opinions I had. However, although I grew up in a PCA church (and PCA is know for being rather conservative), I had parents who were quite ecumenical. I think having been exposed to several flavors of Christianity (I was confirmed in a Lutheran church, I went to a Catholic high school, most major days in the church calendar we went to an Episcopal church (i.e. Easter Vigil, the Christ Mass, etc)) kept me flexible enough that I could approach learning from a stand point of recognizing and appreciating God’s work rather than a standpoint of trying to pit existing beliefs against what I was being exposed to and seeing which one came out ahead.
So I guess my summary of this would be that people are not being brought up to appreciate that all truth comes from God. They have instilled in them a rigid belief that either must stand or crumble completely. The very process of learning about human nature, history, societies, persons, nature, math, etc should be some thing that churchs should prepare young people for.
We should not be like Joshua who, when approached by an angel of the Lord, could only think of two options: “Are you for us or for our enemies?”. The angel’s response was “neither”, but he carried a message of truth for Joshua. Let us not approach things as pitting our faith against the other, but recognize truth and the pursuit of truth no matter the source and be in wonder of God’s creation or despair at the results of the fall. The commander of the army of God was not for or against God’s chosen people. Let us not be so conceited (as Joshua was) as to assume that we are waging the important battles for God. Let us prepare young people for the truths they will encounter and to love and be humble.
Maybe then, maybe if we don’t draw battle lines but love those who persecute us, maybe if we really seek truth and not just affirmation of what we believe, maybe if we learn humility, maybe if we learn to question ourselves and learn discernment (Jesus was constantly tweaking the beliefs of the Pharisees (who seem to have so much in common with certain approaches to Christianity)), we can grow in our faith and train and encourage those younger (no matter their stage of learning) to become mature and complete. And perhaps without forming a battle, their faith won’t be on the line when they hit college.