The College Conundrum

The College Conundrum:  Why are Students are leaving the Faith- and what we should do about it. 

            Since roughly the 1960s, American Christianity has been plagued by what can be termed “college apostasy.”  As young, energetic Christians go off to college, their enthusiasm for the faith diminishes.  Over time their convictions begin to waver and very soon many of them have denied the faith altogether.  Although campus ministries have been sprouting up across the United States to combat these problems, too often these ministries end up being populated by young men and women who walked away from the faith and now want to come back.  And even with their professed desire to come back, often it is found that the pressure of the campus is too much for a firm faith to last.  Students are found to have “abandoned the love [they] had at first” (Rev. 2:4). 

            The book of Hebrews was written to Christians who were experiencing a struggle with their faith in much the same way we see college-aged students struggle today.  Encouragement is provided in the letter for true Christians who are backsliding or having doubts, but what can be expected for those who have left the faith entirely?  Who have denied the name of Christ for the rewards of man’s praise?  Hebrews would tell us that “it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt” (Hebrews 6:4-6). 

            This is a very sobering thought.  None of us should take lightly the author’s warning of the results of falling away.  It is for this reason Peter encourages his readers to “be all the more diligent to make your calling and election sure,” (2 Pet. 1:10); and why Paul encourages the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13).  As Christians, we are to constantly examine ourselves and make sure we are in the faith.  Christians are to be confident that God has saved them, because His election and salvation are all of grace.  However, they are never to be flippant with confidence.  They should never stop guarding their ways against the temptations of the world. 

            This cost of discipleship, it seems, has these days been amped up on the university campus.  Classroom instructors and peers mock the Christian faith as a matter of course, and the mental integrity of anyone who believes in Jesus is brought into question.  A college campus is a breeding ground for the enemies of Christ.  Paul predicted this to Timothy, writing that “in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1).  Many college campuses have fully committed themselves to the teachings of demons.

            Now, all of this is not lost on the majority of Christian parents.  They are fully aware of the pressures a college campus will impose upon their children.  Most of them, if not all, make every effort to cement the faith of their children.  But students are still falling away.  Why is this?  The answer is the foundation of faith.  Christ Himself tells us this:

            “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:24-27).  Jesus tells clearly the reason why college students are leaving the faith, because it is the reason anyone leaves the faith.  Their foundation is not on the rock.  Instead, it is built on sand.  The rain, the flood, and the winds are all going to come, and sometimes none so hard as on the college student.  And if the foundation of his faith is on the sand then his faith will fall, and the result will be apostasy. 

            “College apostasy,” then, is a question of foundation.  What is the foundation upon which Jesus tells us to build, and how do we practically go about building such a foundation?  Jesus says that the man who built on the rock was the one who “hears my words and does them.”  There are two steps here, hearing the words of Jesus, and doing them.  This is what is required to build our house upon the rock.  American Christians are very good at doing.  Entire churches are built simply on “doing.”  Here is the problem we find.  As Americans we have attempted to skip over hearing Jesus’ words and run straight to doing.  As a result, we do not understand our foundation properly. 

            Scripture is replete with teachings that require us to hold to two sides of one coin.  Take, for example, the person of Christ.  To be a Christian, we must believe that Christ was man, and that He was God.  To stray too far in either direction is heresy.  The same is true in the doctrine of the Trinity.  We must believe that God is one in essence and three in persons, and that this never changes.  Again, to disbelieve this is heresy.  Furthermore, to hold to the Word of God without doing the word of God would be to fall away from God’s true intention for us as Christians.  But I do not see this as the problem American students face.  Instead, it is just the opposite.  While we do not want to forsake the “doing,” we have given up the hearing.  Over time, the important teachings we believe about the Word of God have been substituted for a moral authority established by our local church.  In order to stave off the continuation of college students turning away from the faith, it is important that we return to the pure doctrine of the Word, because God’s grace to us is tied up in His word.

            This may seem like a very startling statement.  God’s grace, you may object, is not bound to anything or anyone, and is free to transverse the whole of the earth.  Consider, you may say, Jesus words in John 3:8:  “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  See, it is claimed; the Spirit has the power to go wherever He chooses.  Especially among Reformed Christians who believe in unconditional election this view may be held.  And I must say that in principle I do agree with this.  The Spirit does have the power to go wherever He pleases.   But, I think it is sufficiently clear in Scripture that where the Spirit chooses to go, He also sends the Word.

            Paul lays this out clearly in his magisterial letter to the Romans.  “How then,” Paul asks, “will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?  And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard” (Romans 10:14)?  This is the same Paul who, one chapter earlier, wrote that God “has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever He wills.”  It is essential to see Paul connect the hearing of the Word of God with the sovereign grace of God because it tells us that God has bound His grace and His Word together.  But this is not the only place in Scripture we are told this.  Moses tells the Israelites that the Word of God “is no empty word for you, but your very life, and by this word you shall live long in that land that you are going over the Jordan to possess” (Deut. 32:47).  Similarly Moses tells the Israelites, and Jesus later tells the Devil, “man does no live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3 and Matt. 4:4).  John M. Frame, in his book The Doctrine of the Word of God, sums this all up for us nicely:  “People often claim to have a personal relationship to Christ, while being uncertain about the role of Scripture in that relationship.  But the relationship that Christ has established with his people is a covenant relationship and therefore a verbal relationship, among other things.  Jesus’ words, today, are found only in Scripture.  So if we are to have a covenant relationship with Jesus, we must acknowledge Scripture as his Word.  No Scripture, no Lord.  No Scripture, no Christ.”[1]  John Calvin also captures this message, saying, “in order that true religion may shine upon us, we ought to hold that it must take its beginning from heavenly doctrine and that no one can get even the slightest taste of right doctrine unless he be a pupil of Scripture.”[2]

            It is, conceivably, possible for God to savingly work in the life of an individual without the Word of God.  But, we must admit that this is rare at best.  Instead, we must embrace what Jesus says, realizing that His words are our life.  With the psalmist, we must be able to say “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). 

            What, then, is the pure doctrine of the Word to which college students are to return, and what have they been taught in its place?  I believe that we find three doctrines about Scripture we must reinforce, and three teachings that are prevalent in the church today which have attempted to supersede these doctrines.  While I would like to treat each of these issues in detail, I think it would be helpful to summarize them now.  The first teaching in the church today is that autonomous investigation is the foundation of truth.  We teach our children that they are to believe the Christian faith because it is most in conformity with the facts they know.  That teaching must be replaced with the classical Christian view of the inerrancy of Scripture.  Second, churches are teaching their children the “moral code” of Christianity, instructing them that they are to follow sets of rules and morals that are opposed to the mainstream culture.  This must be subjected to our belief in the authority of Scripture.  Finally, we are teaching our children that the social environment they experience in church ought to keep them involved, but this must be replaced by renewed emphasis on who the author of Scripture really is, and why we are to cling to Him. 

            The rise of modern secular thought can be traced, in essence, back to the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was the proposal that personal reason ought to be the final arbiter of truth.  Prior to the Enlightenment, man believed in certain laws that could not be violated.  These were not the regular laws of nature, but rather moral laws, such as “thou shall not steal”.  It was believed that these laws were above man, because they were the “laws of God.”  But the Enlightenment saw a surge in deism and atheism, which denied to God the right or the power to make such laws over society.  As a result, morality was left to the dictates of one’s own conscience.  Moral law was decided not by God, but by the consensus of society. 

            Christianity, at first, was in direct opposition to Enlightenment ideals.  Christianity maintained that all humanity was subject to the law of God, regardless of what they wanted to think about it.  But over time, Enlightenment thought crept into mainstream society, and moral relativism became the norm.  Subtly, Christians were deceived into accepting this atheist viewpoint.  Christian churches began to teach that the truth of Christianity was founded upon our faith, and upon our acceptance of the gospel.  The God in whom the Reformers had believed was craftily replaced with a God who lived off the praises of humanity, and was in need of us to survive.  Christians were encouraged to “choose Christ,” teaching that Christ had no power to act in their lives until they opened their hearts and let Him in. 

The God of Scripture is nothing like this.  The God of Scripture said, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all its fullness are mine” (Psalm 50:12).  Enlightened Christians claimed that God operated at the behest of man; the Bible declared “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3).  Enlightened Christians did not want a God who did as he pleased, they wanted a god who did as they pleased.  But the Bible would not permit this.  And so, the traditional view of the Bible had to go.  Their first target was the inerrancy of Scripture.  If Scripture declared that God did what He pleased, Scripture must have been wrong.  Because, God did not do as he pleased.  God had to do as man pleased.  God had to listen to what man wanted. 

            Slowly, churches began to doubt the inerrancy of Scripture.  But they did not do this straightforwardly.  To openly claim that Scripture contained errors would not have been permitted, even in the pluralist societies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Instead, Christians simply replaced Scripture’s inerrancy with the inerrancy of reason.  Reason, Christians were told, is really the most important thing.  You have got to be reasonable, or society will refuse to hear you.  Now, this was a very appealing position.  Even the most conservative of Christians did not want to be considered unreasonable.  John Frame captures this development quite clearly:

            “The point was often made (as in Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone) that even if an angel speaks to us, our reason must determine whether it really is an angel, and whether the angel’s words deserve to be followed.  The point is just as cogent (if a bit more startling) applied to the personal words of God himself.  Even if God himself were to speak to you, as to Abraham (Kant would say), your reason must determine whether it is really God speaking, and whether God deserves to be obeyed.”[3]  

So there was no direct attack upon Scripture.  Instead, Kant (who came out of the Enlightenment period) and his heirs simply suggested that man must be reasonable about Scripture.  Whatever Scripture claimed, we simply had to evaluate that claim and decide for ourselves if it was worthy to be listened to.  And this was taught to many young Christians who grew up in the church.  No need to disbelieve the Bible, they were told, we would simply ask you to consider that the claims of the Bible must be reasonable if we are to obey them.  And in their grade school years, the claims of the Bible were perfectly “reasonable.”  The Bible wanted us to be nice to our neighbors, and believe in God and Jesus and that Jesus came to make things right and all.  There was surely nothing beyond reason about this.  And so, the average high school graduate went off to college believing in Scripture because Scripture was reasonable. 

            But this mentality was not a Christian mentality it was an atheist one.  Christianity views reason as a gift of God and subject to the laws of God.  Atheism views reason as god.  The young Christian believed he was going off to college armed and ready to convert the world, in reality he was approaching evil on evil’s terms.  The smallest appeals to atheistic “reason” were enough to crumble the faith of some young believers.  It was up to them to evaluate all the facts, but college professors are the most adept creators of facts to ever walk the face of the earth.  A professor in the college classroom could make many claims about facts and impugn the authority of the Bible.  A history professor would claim that historical records and archeology disproved the Bible.  Biologists spent large amounts of time devoted to showing that life was the product of evolution, and therefore the Bible’s account of Creation must have been wrong.  The truth of the “facts” which the college professor presented was of little importance; simply stating them as the professor at the head of the class made them true.  Arguing with the professor is rarely permitted. 

            At this point, the college student reached a crossroads.  They could choose to believe in the Bible, and therefore be considered “unreasonable.”  But they had been taught, even in their church, that being “reasonable” was everything!  Their other option was to concede that the Bible must contain errors of fact.  Slowly, they began to view the Bible with less respect, and the power of their own reason with more.  Leaving the faith became an east option.  It was “reasonable.”

            This may seem fanciful to some, but it is the experience of many students across the United States.  And while we would like to blame the universities for exposing our children to such a winnowing experience, the truth is that it is only partly the fault of the universities.  Christian parents should hardly expect the university “research” professors to treat Christians with respect.  Jesus said “if you were of the world the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19).  Professors hate Christians, because Christians are to them “the aroma of death.”

            Now, it should be noted that I am not advocating that Christian students be “unreasonable.”  We should be reasonable, but our reason should be a reason that comes from God.  The reason of the world sees the human mind is the final arbiter of truth.  But the reason of God says that God decides truth.  It is not the height of reason to believe in our own interpretation of the facts; the most reasonable thing we can do is believe in the Bible. 

            Here is where the traditional doctrine of the inerrancy of the Word of God finds its value.  Christian reason says that God’s Word is perfect.  There are no flaws in it, no errors.  Wayne Grudem described inerrancy meaning “that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.”[4]  A faith of this kind in the Scriptures is supernatural.  The Spirit of God gives it to us not by man, but by His own power.  Calvin called this the “Internal testimony of the Spirit.” 

This is not simply the claim of Christian theologians however.  The Bible itself claims to be inerrant.  The Psalmist says, “the sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever” (Psalm 199:160).  The Bible says that the word of God is truth.  The sum of the word, everything in it, is truth.  No truth can contradict the word of Scripture.  But this is not the only Scripture verse that talks of this.  What does the college student do when the professor claims that some fact, some statistic, some archeological discovery disproves the Word of God?  The answer is faith in the promise of Proverbs 30:5:  “Every word of God proves true.”  He believes the claim “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Romans 3:4).  The foundation of our faith should not be in the research of man but in the truth of the Bible.  We must teach our children this.  The Bible is truth!  If the college professor claims to have proved the Bible wrong then that professor is wrong.  End of story.  There are no errors in the Bible!  Scholars have tried for centuries to find a mistruth in Scripture, but they have never found a single one.  No errors!  Churches need to stop trusting in the common sense of the individual children in their churches.  Instead, they must maintain that the Bible is inerrant, and all our hope must be fixed in it.

Does this mean that the Christian should not participate in the study of history, science, or other studies?  Absolutely not!  Some of the best researchers in these fields have been Christians.  Max Planck, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, claimed that science required a belief in God.  The Christian should be the most joyful student of the sciences.  But he should not approach them on his own authority.  Instead, The Christian should look to science, history, and everything else as subservient to the Word of God.  We ought to believe science where it corresponds to the word of God.  If there seems to be a contradiction, we must reevaluate both our interpretation of the Bible and of the facts of science.  But if science, or any other study, claims something that cannot be reconciled with the Bible, then we must accept the Bible.            

If our college students are armed with this confidence in their faith, they will not be swayed.  In fact, this view will drive them to be better students.  When a professor claims to contradict the Bible, the college student who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture will be forced to study more deeply the subject at hand and the relevant teaching of Scripture.  When the Scriptures withstand the scrutiny of the student (they always will), he will better understand the relationship between his faith and the world around him.  If we want our students to stay in the faith when they go off to college, we must not permit them to believe the atheistic notion that their own reason is the determiner of truth.  Truth is God’s word, and the world around us must conform to the facts found therein. 

But an assault on the inerrancy of the Bible is not the only one found on a college campus.  Even some will admit that the Bible may not contain factual errors.  But, they say, just because the Bible is in accordance with the physical phenomena of this world does not mean that it has moral authority in my life.  After all, the laws of thermodynamics are in accordance with the world around us.  But thermodynamics does not make any moral claims on an individual.  Understanding thermodynamics doesn’t tell me that I shouldn’t steal, or that I should be faithful to my spouse.  Moral laws come from somewhere else.  But where do they come from?  Once again, we find that the atheist view has entered into the church.  The atheist view is that moral law comes from autonomous reason.  We are moral people if we are reasonable people.  For example, if I murder my neighbor, I cannot reasonably expect my other neighbors to treat me with respect and dignity.  It is moral, therefore, to look out for my neighbor’s best interest because only in this way can I reasonably expect others to look out for my best interest.  The atheistic principle of morality is the golden rule without God.  If God does not decide what is best for us, than what we do to others will vary widely.  If God does not decide what is best for us, then each of us decides. 

Many of us have heard the complain of the young child who bemoans that “if everyone is special, that means no one is special.”  The same is true for morality.  If everyone decides what is moral, then no one decides what is moral.  What may be moral according to my reason may be offensive to you.  Indeed, many atheists (and many Christians) claim this to be the case! 

On a college campus, many of the things Christian students have been taught were “vices” have now become “virtues.”  Students are instructed on how to drink and have “safe” premarital sex.  In an article recently published at my own university, the author exclaimed that the gay marriage issue was not even open to debate!  There are many more examples that could be brought up.  But the point is, Christians going off to college are often confronted with these social mores and asked to accept them.  How are they asked to accept them? 

Unbelievers on a college campus often use the “personal harm” argument to get Christians to accept their views on these issues.  If it is not doing the Christian any personal harm, then what right does the Christian have to object?  The Christian tries to find all kinds of facts and statistics on why these immoral acts are harmful, but they often lose.  And so, if you cannot prove that gay marriage or safe premarital sex is harmful, then how can you say it is wrong?  The answer, of course, is that it is wrong because the Bible says it is wrong.  The first chapter of Romans condemns men because they “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.”  Even so, many Christians do not see this as a valid argument.  But, they think, How can I convince my unbelieving friend that this act is wrong?  They do not accept the authority of the Bible!  The Christian supposes that the Bible only has authority over those who accept the Bible as having authority.  And this is because churches have failed to teach their children the true doctrine of the authority of the Bible. 

What does it mean to say that the Bible has authority?  Again John Frame is helpful:  “To say that God’s Word has authority, as we have seen, is to say that it creates obligations in its hearers:  obligations to believe what it says, to do what it commands, to write it on our hearts, and so on.”[5]  In other words, if the Bible has authority over us, then we are obligated to obey and respond to what it says.  The Bible claims this for itself.  It is in the first chapter of Romans that Paul tells us that the natural man is condemned, even though he had suppressed the truth of God.  Paul has no patience for men who do not believe the Bible.  In a sense, this makes them guiltier, because they know deep down that they ought to believe the Bible.  When Paul encounters the religious men on Mars Hill, he tells them that “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).  All men everywhere!  But God’s word had not gone everywhere!  This is no doubt part of Paul’s point.  The Word of God has authority over everyone.  Paul would write to Timothy “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).  If God is the Creator of all mankind (He is) and if He has spoken to us in the Bible (He has) then what He says has complete authority over every person in the world.  It is essential that Christian students understand this.  Our morals come from the Word of God.  We cannot negotiate with unbelievers about them, because unbelievers have absolutely no authority to decide what is moral.  If we really believe in God, then we must really believe that God has the right to decide for us what is moral.  When the Scriptures tell us that something is wrong, then it must be wrong, because as we have seen, the Scriptures are inerrant.  They cannot be wrong about a moral truth!  And if they cannot be wrong about a moral truth, then they have the authority to tell us how we ought to behave. 

So this truth is simple for the Christian in college.  All of your morals must come from the Bible.  If you think something is right and the Bible tells you it is wrong, then it is wrong.  Christians must believe this if they are going to stay faithful to the God they claim to serve.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if the Bible is not absolutely authoritative then the Christian should not hold to any morals at all.  Christian churches in America can keep their children from being seduced by the allure of a self-made morality by simply ascribing to the Bible the authority it claims for itself. 

Christians may be coerced into leaving the church by the pressures of the college campus.  But every Christian has an opponent to their faith that does not come from the college campus.  In many ways this opponent is more powerful than any they face on the campus.  No one on a college campus can affect the desires of an individual.  But the individual can be imperiled by the desires of his own heart.  While many college students leave the church because of pressures from the campus, many more leave the church because they do not desire to be a part of it.  Here we see one of the most dangerous aspects of the modern teachings on Scripture.  And this is the idea that Scripture is simply a human document.  Many believe that God gave Scripture.  But, they believe, man wrote it and therefore it contains errors.  It is not the actual word of God.  The danger of this teaching is the attitude it inspires when Christians approach worship.  In true Bible believing churches, Christians understand that when they approach the Word of God they are approaching God Himself.  God has spoken to us.  And when we read His Word, we are reading the words He has spoken,

Again, the Bible speaks of this.  In the Old Testament, many prophets would begin their prophecy by proclaiming, “Thus says the Lord.”  The point the prophets were trying to make was that the words they spoke to their people were God’s words.  In Luke 1:70, Zechariah tells his listeners God “spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old.”  It was God who spoke of old.  In Hebrews 1, the author tells us “long ago, in many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”  The Bible knows nothing of the modern division many see in the Bible between the words of God and the words of man.  In the Bible, the words man spoke are considered God’s words.  It is God who inspired them to speak.  Indeed, in the New Testament, many Old Testament quotations are attributed to God that, in their Old Testament context, are spoken by man.[6]

How does this help our students?  If our students truly grasped who the Author of Scripture is, they would not fool around with the theories and words of the world.  The students who know that when Scripture speaks, they are hearing God speak, will be the students who approach their Christian life with a serious joy.  These students will not apostatize from their faith, because they know that would be turning their back on their very life.  Understanding that God has written Scripture is the key to keeping a heart longing for the life God prescribes. 

University students are leaving the faith.  This is a reality with which the American church must contend.  But God has not left us alone in this fight.  He has given us the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit to equip His people.  In addition to the Spirit, God has given us His word.  This Word is the life of the church.  We must teach our students how to honor the Word if we expect them to remain in the faith.  Students must see that the world is an inerrant witness to the facts of life.  They must be convinced that it contains the authority to pass judgement on moral issues.  Finally, they must be certain that God Almighty is the Author of the Word.  In reading His Word, they cannot fail to be in His presence.  And if they are in His presence, they will go forth and overcome the world.    

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[1] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God.  New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2010, pg. 212.

[2] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  London:  Westminster Knox Press, 1960, vol. 1 pg. 72. 

[3] Frame, John M. The Doctrine of the Word of God.  New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2010, pg. 23.

[4] Grudem, Wayne.  Systematic Theology.  United States:  Zondervan, 1994.  Pg. 91. 

[5] Frame, John M.  The Doctrine of the Word of God.  Pg. 206.

[6] For an in depth study of this concept, see B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible.