Christians Going to College Have to Be Intellectually Prepared

Intellectual Preparation

In the fall of 1989, I began my freshman year at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Like many freshmen, I was excited for the next chapter in my life, eager to explore the new opportunities and experiences that college had to offer. As the oldest state university in the country, and one with a strong academic reputation, UNC was a promising place for my new adventure. Of course, I knew there would be challenges. College life would not be easy, especially for a Christian. But I had grown up in a solid Christian home, was taught the Bible from a young age, and was a faithful member of my church youth group. And there had been no shortage of advice about my forthcoming college experience—from parents, older friends, and even my youth pastor—all keen to offer warnings about the dangers and pitfalls that awaited me. So I figured I was ready.

I wasn’t.

Now, it’s not as if I was entirely unprepared. When it came to moral issues (substance abuse, sex, and the party scene) and practical issues (how to get along with my roommate, manage my budget, and stay focused on my studies), I had received plenty of good input. And to be sure, these are important things for any college student to address. Many believers have shipwrecked their faith over such matters.

The problem stemmed not from what I was taught but from what I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t prepared in the one area that would matter most in a university environment. I wasn’t prepared intellectually. And I would soon learn (the hard way) that intellectual preparation was what I needed more than anything.

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Of course, in retrospect, it seems a little surprising that I wasn’t more intellectually prepared. After all, I was headed to a big university where foundational academic issues would surely arise. So why wasn’t I ready? I am sure there were a number of reasons. Although I was a good student in high school, my free time wasn’t spent studying Greco-Roman religions or biblical archaeology. Like any teenager, playing sports and hanging out with my friends occupied most of my time.

But my lack of preparation wasn’t just because I was a teenager. The Christian culture in which I grew up also played a role. The most important issues in the evangelical world of my youth were personal conversion (was I saved?) and personal piety (did I live like a Christian?). To be clear, I think these two issues are very important, and I am tremendously grateful to have grown up in churches that did not ignore them (in our current day, many churches need a renewed focus on them). But generally speaking, my theological training stopped there. There was very limited instruction on the Christian worldview—what we believe and why we believe it—and virtually no instruction on how to respond to non-Christian thinking.

Loving God with Our Minds

In short, I learned to love God with my heart but not with my mind. There was no category (or at least a very limited one) for an intellectual expression of my faith that was rigorous, deep, and well reasoned.

Needless to say, I don’t believe my experience as a youth was unique—either back in my day or in the present. While evangelicalism is certainly not monolithic, most would agree that large segments of the movement today still lack deep doctrinal reflection and intellectual engagement. That could be due to a focus on personal piety and conversion (as in my youth experience), or it could be due to evangelicalism’s newer fascination with social action and cultural change. Either way, the development of the Christian mind has not been a priority. Surely, therefore, many Christian college students over the years have found themselves in a position very similar to my own—lots of zeal but little knowledge.

My lack of preparation reached a head in the spring of my freshman year when I took a religion course titled Introduction to the New Testament. The professor was a young scholar who was bright, engaging, funny, and persuasive. It didn’t take long to see that he lectured with an eye toward evangelicals, even sharing how he was once an evangelical himself not long ago. He used to believe what we believe, he told us. He used to think like we did. And then during his graduate studies, after deep engagement with the text, he realized he could no longer maintain his evangelical beliefs. The New Testament wasn’t inspired after all but was full of mistakes. It wasn’t reliable but was filled with made-up stories and fabrications. And its original form wasn’t even accessible to us but had been badly corrupted by scribes over years of transmission.

In short, argued my professor, the historical evangelical position on the Bible is intellectually untenable. It is a book not from God but from men. You can believe it with your heart—after all, isn’t that what religious people do?—but you cannot (or at least should not) believe it with your mind.

That professor’s name was Bart Ehrman.

Although I could not have known it at the time, I was taking a class with a scholar who would become one of Christianity’s loudest and most prolific critics. Ehrman, now the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at UNC, would go on to publish more than thirty books about the New Testament and early Christianity—five of which became New York Times best sellers. And these books, generally speaking, rehearse the same claims about the New Testament I experienced in the university classroom: it is untrustworthy, is filled with mistakes, is poorly transmitted, contains many books that are forgeries, and so on.

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Needless to say, such a religion class was a lot for a first-year student to handle. Rattled to the core, I spent that semester wondering whether my Christian beliefs had been a lie. And I was not the only one. I watched as many other Christian students struggled through that class. In an effort to protect their faith, some students just refused to engage with the material—keeping their religious beliefs cut off from their studies. Others looked for a way to mix their faith with what they were being taught, creating a “hybrid” view of sorts. Why can’t 2 Peter be a forgery and still be the word of God? And still others used the class as the opportunity to abandon their belief in Christianity entirely, pursuing new religious, intellectual, and moral pathways.

For myself, I decided to see if there were answers to Ehrman’s questions. Diving deeply into the class material and historical sources, I began to probe into the New Testament’s origins and reliability, and whether earlier Christians had ever addressed the issues Ehrman raised. Surely, these challenges were not new (though they were new to me). I quickly discovered that Christians had addressed these issues—even from the earliest days of the Christian move- ment—and had done so with depth, precision, and intellectual rigor. In short, there was a whole other side to the argument, even though that other side was never discussed or explored in class.

Simply learning that there were answers to Ehrman’s claims was not the end of my intellectual journey. Sure, it was good to know that my Christian faith did not require me to stick my head in the sand every time someone asked tough historical questions. But I found myself genuinely fascinated with this new world I had discovered. I wanted to know more—more about the origins of the New Testament, more about its transmission, and more about its formation into a twenty-seven-book collection. Thus, in a rather ironic turn, my experience in this university religion class set me on a new intellectual trajectory, one that eventually led me to become a New Testament scholar myself, focused on these very same historical issues.

Students Need a Framework

But for many college students, the story ends very differently. Confronted by an intellectual world for which they are not prepared, Christian college students are leaving behind their faith in worrying numbers.¹ And Christian parents feel this tension acutely. Having labored to raise their children in a Christian environment and with Christian beliefs—often with great financial cost—those same children often return, after only a single year of college, with very different beliefs from what they held when they left.

Of course, most modern universities will not see this as a problem. On the contrary, they might argue that this is exactly what the university experience is designed to do, namely, expose students to new beliefs and ideas that they have not yet considered. And if that leads to a change in their belief system, then so be it. After all, that is the price of an open intellectual environment with the free exchange of ideas. Beyond this, some in the university system would even celebrate such intellectual shifts as a form of liberation. In their minds, they are setting these students free from the unfortunate religious “indoctrination” they experienced as youths.

In short, the universities are doing these Christian students a favor.

On the surface, all that sounds eminently reasonable. Who’s not for intellectual freedom? The question, however, is whether modern universities are actually exhibiting the intellectual freedom they claim to value. Are they genuinely interested in presenting both sides of the argument? As one sample area, consider the way modern universities represent political views. A recent article by Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School, highlights the fact that professors at the top major universities are overwhelmingly Democrat in terms of political affiliation, vastly outnumbering Republicans.² At some of the most liberal colleges and universities (e.g., Wellesley, Swarthmore, Williams), this ratio was a mind-blowing 120 to 1. Sunstein, a Democrat himself, laments this fact, calling it “genuinely disturbing.” He states, “Students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy. Students and faculty might end up in a kind of information cocoon.”³

Christians need to think more seriously about how to prepare the next generation of believers to handle the intellectual challenges of the university environment.

This is not about politics, nor am I picking sides in the Democrat versus Republican debate. I mention these statistics on political affiliation only to illustrate a simple point: university students are not, generally speaking, hearing both sides of arguments. It seems that modern universities are for every sort of diversity (gender, race, ethnicity) except diversity of ideas. And nowhere is this trend more evident than in religion classes. Sunstein points out that when it comes to individual academic departments, religion faculties have some of the most lopsided ratios of liberals to conservatives, exceeding 70 to 1.

Indeed, as noted above, my Introduction to the New Testament class was decidedly one-sided. If my own upbringing was religious indoctrination, then one might argue that this class was just another form of religious indoctrination—only in the opposite direction. The class was not so much a rejection of absolutism as the mere exchange of one set of absolute beliefs for another.

Needless to say, it is difficult for the average nineteen-year-old freshman to recognize that this is what is happening in his or her university class. Students often see the clash before them as one between religion and science. On the one side are those dogmatic, biased religious folk, conditioned (even blinded) by their faith commitments. On the other side are neutral, unbiased, open-minded historians—trained in the finest universities in the world—who are merely giving you the “facts.” Given that framework, it is not hard to imagine why most students respond the way they do.

Unfortunately, the ideological state of the modern university is unlikely to change anytime soon. In the meantime, Christians need to think more seriously about how to prepare the next generation of believers to handle the intellectual challenges of the university environment (and beyond). We need to do more than prepare them morally and practically; we need to train their minds to engage effectively with an unbelieving world.

So how’s that going to happen? Ultimately, it will require a macroshift in the broader evangelical world, moving beyond just pietism and revivalism and recapturing the deep historical and intellectual roots of the Christian faith. And then, that same evangelical world must think carefully and critically about how we pass that robust version of the faith to the next generation. Admittedly, that sounds like an overwhelming challenge. But we can take baby steps in that direction.

Today’s college students need more than dating advice and tips on how to make good
grades. They need a framework for dealing with the flood—no, tsunami—of intellectual attacks they will receive from their professors, classmates, and campus organizations. Sure, Christians outside college face similar challenges from our culture. But the intensity and concentration of these challenges in a university environment is unmatched. And college students are dealing with these immense pressures at a relatively young age. That’s why the intellectual preparation of Christian students for college must be a priority.

Notes:

David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church . . . and Rethinking Faith, with Aly Hawkins (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011).
Cass R. Sunstein, “The Problem with All Those Liberal Professors,” Bloomberg, September 17, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-17/colleges-have-way-too-many-liberal-professors.
Sunstein, “All Those Liberal Professors.”

This article is adapted from Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College by Michael J. Kruger.

Michael J. Kruger (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a leading scholar on the origins and development of the New Testament canon. He blogs regularly at michaeljkruger.com.

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