The Scandal of Secularism
In recent years, Christianity Today has run several articles about
restrictions against Christians on college campuses, including Tish Harrison Warren's
striking essay about being "the wrong kind of Christian" at Vanderbilt and the news of ministry groups
fighting for
a place at California schools.
I took these cases as a frustrating pattern, but for a while failed to see
how incompatible Christian convictions can be with a strictly secular worldview.
I'm sure many Christian leaders, now and throughout history, have explored
the philosophies of belief and unbelief, but it was a seven-hour marathon of old Tim Keller sermons that made me see this
controversy in new light. (I listened during a long travel day for a reporting trip to Puerto Rico—you can read
that story in
the next issue of CT!)
Like in Reason for God, Keller recognizes that critics of
Christianity's absolutism and exclusive truth claims haven't scrutinized the basis for their own assertions or their logical
conclusion. As he repeats, even a claim that there is no absolute truth is itself an absolute truth claim.
Claremont Graduate University professor Mary Poplin
talked with CT
Women about the struggle for Christian views to find their welcome amid this attitude in academic settings.
"The university used to think of itself as the free open marketplace of
ideas, especially after it left its Christian origins," Poplin said. "But it's the free marketplace of certain ideas and
the closed marketplace of other ideas."
Christian students and educators—and onlookers like
me—have to be aware of how secularism excludes in order to better secure their place and their fields of study,
she argues. She told CT Women editor Andrea Palpant Dilley:
Secularism defines itself by what it is not; it has no agreed-upon moral
compass, so it's an umbrella for anything from the far right to the far left and everything in between—as long as
it's not religious. As Stanley Fish says, secularism has survived by pretending to be neutral, but it's anything but neutral.
Even as circumstances and strategies evolve, our beliefs are never doomed.
Our case for Christ becomes no less true, and the Spirit that changes hearts no less powerful. In fact, Keller repeats
that the result of the seemingly restrictive nature is freedom in Christ.
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment