Hello everyone. Today I'd like to talk to you about a concern I have with regard to the present state of education, including my own field of New Testament studies. Let me explain.
How we think is crucial to life itself. In ancient Greece, an impasse occurred when the struggle to gain ultimate truth was not resolved. The debate between the monists and the pluralists ended in the rise of humanistic skepticism. The influence of such skepticism was seen in many arenas, including education. Abandoning the quest for ultimate, normative truth was the sorry result.
Ultimately a worldview of relativism developed. Personal opinion replaced objective reality, and truth was slain both in the ivory tower and in the streets. The supreme credo became homo mensura -- man is the measure of all things. The skeptic Gorgias could even declare, "All statements are false" -- a patently self-contradictory statement if ever there was one.
As I said, as an educator I am profoundly concerned with how my students think. I care deeply about the content and methodology of New Testament studies. Every subdiscipline of New Testament studies, including textual criticism, has an ultimate concern. We need to be radical if we are going to get to the root of the matter. If learning and education are ever again to inspire our youth, we must solve the current crisis. In the coming days, I'll offer some hope, but I suspect there will be a lot of grief along the way. Such is the nature of controversy.
There is much that, in my opinion, is wrong with our approaches to New Testament criticism. Others have offered their own diagnoses of the problem. I readily admit that not every problem in the current impasse can be resolved. But I do believe we will have a much better grasp of the major issues after we recognize what the most proffered remedies are. It will become clear that I believe the key to our educational crisis lies in the hands of evangelical inerrantists. But other hands also hold the same key. This is not a time for inerrantists to ignore this struggle.
I hope to examine with you the extent to which traditional religious values are under attack at every level of public and higher education. We who believe and teach that the Bible is the inerrant word of God need a clearer picture of what our educational system is doing to undermine those values. Hopefully, increased understanding of these matters will translate into concern and then into action.
In my experience, academicians have all too willingly opened wide the door to trendy and faddish methods, accompanied by a flood of meaningless jargon within their academic disciplines. In his book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom noted, "There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain about: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." The major virtue in our universities today -- perhaps the only virtue -- is a commitment to "openness." No longer is there a hope that great minds can discern the truth about life. The quest for absolute truth and certitude has largely been replaced by relativism. The Sophists of our age have severed the tie between reason and virtue.
Irreparably?
I hope not.
In the end, a Christian philosophy of education is based unapologetically upon a Christian view of life and the world. It recognizes that education is never neutral. What sets a truly Christian approach to New Testament studies is the Christian's acceptance of the biblical perspective as both normative and authoritative. This biblical perspective provides a basis on which we may evaluate the non-Christian presuppositions operating in the various sub-disciplines. There is no such thing as removing Christian truth claims from education. Any attempt to claim to be able to do this is merely a substitute of one set of ultimate commitments for another.
One final word for now. We dare not forget the most important players in all this -- the young men and young women in our classrooms who have the potential to become the thinkers of tomorrow. They are the church's most precious treasure. They must be equipped with tools that will enable them to read the original thoughts and writings of some of the greatest thinkers in history rather than what others have written about them.