Thank you! It’s a privilege to share this time with you this morning. I first came to Wheaton as a young Christian, only two years old in the Lord, and the priceless gift that Wheaton gave me, for which I’ll ever be grateful, was the integration of my faith and learning. And it’s this issue that’s on my heart this morning.

Several years ago, two books appeared which sent shock waves through the American educational community. The first of these, entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by E. D. Hirsch, documented the fact that large numbers of American college students do not have the basic background knowledge to understand the front page of a newspaper or to act responsibly as citizens. For example, a quarter of the students in a recent survey thought the president during the Vietnam war was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Two-thirds did not know when the Civil War occurred. One-third thought Columbus discovered the New World sometime after 1750. In a recent survey at Cal State Fullerton, over half the students could not identify Chaucer or Dante.

What has happened to our schools that they should be producing such dreadfully ignorant people? Enter Alan Bloom, who was an eminent educator at the University of Chicago and the author of the second book I referred to, entitled The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s thesis is that behind the current educational malaise lies the universal conviction of students that all truth is relative and, therefore, truth is not worth pursuing. Bloom writes,

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them. … The relativity of truth is … a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it . … The danger they have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it plausible — is the great insight of our times . … The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

Since there is no absolute truth, since everything is relative, the purpose of an education is not to learn truth or master facts — rather it is merely to learn a skill so that one can go out and acquire wealth, power, and fame. Truth has become irrelevant.

Now, of course, this sort of relativistic attitude toward truth is antithetical to the Christian worldview. For as Christians we believe that all truth is God’s truth, that God has revealed to us the truth, both in His Word and in Him who said, “I am the Truth.” God stands, at it were, at the pinnacle of a pyramid of diverse perspectives on the world and in the unity of His intellect grasps the world as it actually is. There is thus a unity and objectivity to truth, which is known by God. The Christian, therefore, can never look on the truth with apathy or disdain. Rather he cherishes and treasures the truth as a reflection of God Himself.

Nor does the Christian’s commitment to truth make him intolerant, as Bloom’s students thought. On the contrary, the very concept of tolerance entails that one disagrees with that which one tolerates. Otherwise, you wouldn’t tolerate it; you would believe in it! Thus the objectivity of truth, far from being incompatible with tolerance, is actually presupposed by tolerance. The Christian is committed to both truth and tolerance, for we believe in him who said not only, “I am the Truth,” but also, “Love your enemies.” The proper basis of tolerance is not relativism, but love.

Now at the time these books were released, I was teaching at Westmont College, the so-called “Wheaton of the West.” And I began to wonder: how much have Christian students been infected with the attitude that Bloom describes? How would my own students fare on one of E. D. Hirsch’s tests? “Well, how would they?” I thought. “Why not give them a quiz?” So I did.

I drew up a brief general knowledge quiz about famous people, places, and things and administered it to two classes of about 50 sophomores. What I found was that although they did better than the general student population, still there were sizable portions of the group that could not identify even with a phrase important names and events. For example, 49 percent could not identify Leo Tolstoy. To my surprise, 16 percent did not know who Winston Churchill was. One student thought he was one of the Founding Fathers of America! Another identified him as a great revival preacher of a few hundred years ago!

Thirty-one percent did not know what Afghanistan is, and 20 percent did not know where the Amazon River is. Imagine! I was disheartened that a whopping 67 percent could not identify the Battle of the Bulge. Several identified it as a dieter’s problem.

So it became clear to me that Christian students have not been able to rise above the dark undertow in our educational system at the primary and secondary levels. This presents a real crisis to Christian colleges and seminaries.

But then an even more terrible fear began to dawn on me as I contemplated these statistics. If Christian students are this ignorant of the general facts of history and geography, then the chances are that they are equally or even more ignorant of the facts of our own Christian heritage and doctrine. Our culture in general has sunk to a level of biblical and theological illiteracy. A great many, if not most people, cannot even name the four gospels — in a recent survey one person named them as Matthew, Mark, and Luther! A number of people in another survey identified Joan of Arc as Noah’s wife! The suspicion arose in my mind that the evangelical church is probably also caught somewhere higher up in this same downward spiral.

But if we do not preserve the truth of our own Christian heritage and doctrine, who’s going to learn it for us? If the Church does not treasure her own Christian truth, then it will be lost to her forever. So, I wondered, how would Christian students fare on a quiz over general facts of Christian history and doctrine?

Well, how would they? I now invite you to take the following quiz yourselves. The following are items which I think any mature Christian in our society ought to be able to identify. Ready? Here we go:

QUIZ

1. Augustine
2. Council of Nicea
3. two natures united in one person
4. Trinity
5. Thomas Aquinas
6. pantheism
7. Reformation
8. Martin Luther
9. substitutionary atonement
10. Enlightenment

How did you do? If you’re typical of today’s Christians, probably not too well! If this is the case, then there are a couple of different ways in which you might react to this quiz.

On the one hand, there’s the real temptation to become defensive and say, “Who needs to know all this junk anyway? I’m not on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” This stuff isn’t important! All that really counts is my walk with Christ. Who cares about all this other trivia?”

I really hope this won’t be your reaction. This sort of response would be tragic because it would close you off to self-improvement. If you react in this way, then this exercise won’t have been of any profit to you at all. You won’t have learned anything from it.

But there’s a second, more positive reaction: You may see, perhaps for the first time in your life, that here is a need in your life and as a result resolve to become intellectually engaged as a Christian. This is a momentous decision. It is a step that is desperately needed in the lives of millions of American Christians today. No one has issued the challenge to become intellectually engaged more forcefully than did Charles Malik, in his inaugural address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center on this campus. He emphasized that we as Christians face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church, he said, is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Listen to what he says:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian doesn’t realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and the professional journals and the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or bigoted, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.

This is a war which we cannot afford to lose. As J. Gresham Machen warned in his article, “Christianity and Culture” in the Princeton Theological Review of 1913, on the even of the Fundamentalist Controversy, if we lose this intellectual war, then our evangelism will be immeasurably more difficult in the next generation. He wrote,

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

Unfortunately, Machen’s warning went unheeded, and biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closets of cultural isolationism, from which we have only recently begun to re-emerge. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we dare not lose: The souls of men and women hang in the balance.

We desperately need Christian scholars who can, as Malik said, compete with non-Christian thinkers on their own terms of scholarship. It can be done. There is, for example, a revolution going on right now in Anglo-American philosophy. Since the late 1960’s Christian philosophers have been coming out of the closet and defending the truth of the Christian worldview with philosophically sophisticated arguments in the finest secular journals and societies. And the face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. Fifty years ago philosophers widely regarded talk about God as literally meaningless, as mere gibberish, but today no informed philosopher could take such a viewpoint. In fact, many of America’s finest philosophers today are outspoken Christians. According to the eminent philosopher Roderick Chisholm, himself no evangelical, the reason atheism was so influential a generation ago was because the brightest philosophers were atheists. But today, he says, “the brightest people include theists, using a kind of tough-minded intellectualism” which was previously lacking on their side of the debate.

This sort of scholarship represents the best hope for the revolution that Malik and Machen envisioned, and its true impact for the cause of Christ will only be felt in the next generation.

So, it can be done! It is my fervent hope that some of you here this morning may sense God’s call upon your life to enter a career of Christian scholarship. But even if you do not become a professional academic, every one of us needs to be intellectually engaged with his faith if we’re to have an impact on American culture.

But here a word of warning is in order. We must never allow academic respectability to become an idol leading us to compromise our biblical integrity. The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a lengthy article by Alan Wolfe, which I’m sure most of you have heard about. It documents the intellectual renaissance going on at evangelical institutions like Wheaton. According to Wolfe, “evangelicals are trying to create a life of the mind at a time when secular America is questioning whether a life of the mind is worth having.” There’s much in the article that’s cause for rejoicing. But the article also contains a veiled message for evangelicals which is all the more insidious for its subtlety.

That message is basically this: If you evangelicals really want to be treated with intellectual respect, if you really want to be regarded as equal players on the field, if you really want your institutions to be academically credible, then all you have to do is become more “open.” Wolfe is clear what that means. Colleges like Wheaton, if they really want to become academically respectable, need to get rid of these archaic statements of faith, which are holding them back. Evangelicals will only come of age, Wolfe says, once they abandon this arcane notion that God’s plan for human sexual activity is heterosexual marriage. In order to be intellectually mature, he advises, evangelicals need to move away from their biblical fundamentalism to a tolerant pluralism.

So Wolfe celebrates Fuller Seminary’s drift to the left in recent decades. He rejoices when certain Wheaton students in a political science class oppose Justice Scalia’s views on permitting non-sectarian prayer in public school. Wolfe says the students stood up for — now listen to this — “the First Amendment’s separation of Church and State clause”! Can you believe it? Maybe somebody had better inform Mr. Wolfe that there is no such clause, either in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution. I sure hope Wheaton students understand the difference between the Establishment clause and the separation of Church and State.

Do you see what’s going on here? By trying to get evangelicals to abandon biblical fundamentalism for pluralism, Wolfe is saying that in order for evangelicals to become academically respectable they have to cease to be evangelical! That is a fool’s bargain. What was wrong with fundamentalism was its cultural isolationism, not its theology. Don’t be intimidated by mere name-calling. As Alvin Plantinga has said, the word “fundamentalist” has become in academia today a term of abuse, roughly synonymous with “S.O.B.” Actually, that’s not quite right, Plantinga says. It really means “an ignorant S.O.B.” And even that doesn’t capture all the nuances of term. Plantinga points out that it’s really an indexical word meaning, “an ignorant S.O.B. far to the right of me and my enlightened friends.”

It’s ironic that the title of Wolfe’s article is “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.” The title is obviously a play on the title of Alan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. What’s ironic is that Wolfe doesn’t seem to appreciate that Bloom’s thesis was that it is precisely relativism, not a commitment to absolute truth, that leads to close-mindedness and politically correct bigotry. Wolfe would have evangelicals open their minds by embracing the very relativism which has led to the closing of the American mind. “Abandon your biblical fundamentalism and then we shall give you the prize of academic respectability which you evangelicals so desperately crave.”

To which I say, in the immortal words of Gen. A. C. McAuliffe, “Nuts!” We should never surrender our biblical integrity for academic respectability! Why trade our inheritance for such a miserable mess of pottage as that? Why should I give a hoot about academic respectability if it costs that much? I’d rather be thought a fool for Christ and His Kingdom than purchase academic respectability at the price of faithfulness to God’s Word. Jesus condemned the Pharisees because they sought the praise of men rather than God. Far be it from Christian academics to do the same thing!

So let us seek to do first-rate, biblically faithful work — and then let the chips fall where they may. If we gain academic respectability, praise the Lord! If not, well, “it is required of stewards that they be faithful” (I Corinthians 4:2). Better to hear our Savior’s words “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” than to hear fleeting praises of men!

To be brutally honest, it’s probably too late for most Christian laymen to get intellectually engaged with their faith. But you students have the opportunity of a lifetime here before you. You have four years to study at a Christian school, under Christian professors, learning how to articulate and defend a Christian worldview, how to think Christian-ly about life’s most important questions. For the Church’s sake, for your own sakes, for your future children’s sake, do not squander this opportunity! So if, up until now, you’ve just been coasting, idling in intellectual neutral, now is the time to get it in gear!

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