Here we are at the beginning of another fall semester. This year there is a record number of first-year students, who are all attending one of the many Gateway Seminars. I teach two of these seminars, and I look forward to it each year. Why? Because I am privileged to be an important part of getting first-year students started in the right direction on their four-year journeys of learning, self-discovery, spiritual growth, and becoming modern Christian adults. I stress to my two Gateway classes that the purpose of Gateway is to learn how to be a faithful Christian learner. I am not sure that they all appreciate what this really means.
Students at John Brown University (JBU) are privileged to attend a respected and highly ranked center of academic excellence and spiritual exploration. Their parents, and God, are providing them a four-year opportunity to escape the strains and pitfalls of modern life and to spend four years in thinking, learning, growing, and preparing for all that life has to offer and the risks associated with being an adult in a fallen world. I tell my students to appreciate this opportunity and to take advantage of it to grow, mentally and spiritually.
Students, even at a Christian university (remember Chip’s article, “This is not Disneyland”), will learn new things, and be faced with innovative ideas that challenge their “absorbed” and embedded beliefs from childhood. How students react to these challenges will, in part, play a key role in what kind of Christian adults they become. Students can ignore or reject the truths of God’s creation discovered by science and refuse to incorporate those into a deeper and more sophisticated personal belief system and worldview, or they can thank God for revealing key facts about how the universe works, was born, and how we humans developed and changed over time.
I tell my students to embrace revealed scientific facts and to incorporate them into their worldviews. We should feel awe at what has been discovered about the universe and what this reveals about the great God with whom we walk and enjoy relationship. God is splendid, wonderful, beyond all understanding, and yet we walk with him every day and God cares about each of us – small specks in an ever expanding, complex, and amazing universe. Far from challenging our faith or being dangerous to our relationship with God, we take the revealed truth that is in the Bible, the revealed facts we learn in chemistry, biology, astronomy, mathematics, literature, history, medicine, engineering, business, art, philosophy, theology, the law, politics and the Constitution and we are challenged to incorporate these revelations into our faith and grow in depth and breadth as Christians. We realize, through learning, how we can improve on what is and to bring the world closer to what God intended. As intelligent and learned Christians we can be better image bearers. That is what it means to be a faithful Christian learner. Taking your faith into class every day and being awe struck by the universe God created.
At JBU we do not teach students a “Christianized” version (whatever that means) of science, history, literature, etc., we teach these topics in ways that enhance our faith and make us feel awe at the wonders of God’s creation. Being a faithful Christian learner means relishing the time that is set aside for us to learn, to grow, and to ascertain the “hows” and “whys” of creation. God has put JBU here, has sent us students and faculty to enhance our journey of discovery as a form of worship, of giving glory to God. Classes, laboratories, and study groups are forms of worship of the architect of all that is. Approach class as an opportunity to feel God’s presence in the act of learning, of knowing, of thinking, of growing. For knowing is a gift from God, a way that he opens the window of reality and lets us in, even if only for a moment, revealing to us the secrets of creation and of the divine.
So walk the hallways and byways at JBU with a sense of the sacred. For what we do in class is sacred. Knowledge and the thirst for learning is not dangerous and, it does not end in four years. No, God is never finished revealing to us the sacred, the divine, the truths of the universe. Come! Come join the sacred privilege of learning and embrace your walk with God. Commune with the divine in class, in study, in reading, in writing, and let God work his miracle in you.