Today in a freshman composition class, a student asked about the difference between facts and opinions with regard to the particular essay we are working on.
Today in a freshman composition class, a student asked about the difference between facts and opinions with regard to the particular essay we are working on.
She remembered from her earliest writing encounters a clear division between the two – facts and opinions. My claim that there is not always a clear distinction did not sit well with her.
She remained convinced that a fact could be proven and was incontrovertible. An opinion, on the other hand, was simply a belief. According to her own admission, her beliefs are as good as anyone else’s. As such, I countered, they cannot be proven nor can they be imposed on anyone else.
In other words, according to the student, beliefs are to be relegated to that realm of private preference, of values, of non-rational and non-cognitive truth and have little to do with the completely separate public sphere which includes scientific knowledge, facts, rational and verifiable truth. This represents classic Enlightenment, dichotomous thinking at its best – and this from a professed Christian, reared in the church! Such relativistic thinking in our society is rampant and has infected the church no less than the world.
It is hard work to convince a relativist of the existence of absolute truth. I am personally glad that the job is not ultimately my own but that of the Holy Spirit’s; however, it is encouraging that since the attack on 11 September 2001, even the relativists have begun to modify their claims. The death of so many innocent civilians makes maintaining a relativist position a near impossibility.
After class, the student came by my office to further discuss the matter. Together we wrestled with the issue, and I shared with her my conviction, gleaned from the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey, that if Christianity has anything to say, it has something to say to everything. As Schaeffer put it, “Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital ‘T.’ Truth about total reality, not just about religious things. Biblical Christianity is Truth concerning total reality – and the intellectual holding of that total Truth and then living in the light of that Truth.” Similarly, Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and political reformer, said that ‘No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
And this is the sort of environment that we are attempting to produce at LouisianaCollege – an environment where we take seriously the task of applying our faith to all disciplines, of integrating our faith into every area of our lives. Such integration meets resistance because it denies the Enlightenment categories with which we are so familiar and because it reveals the radical, all-encompassing demands of the Christian faith. Surely, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was correct in observing that when Christ calls us, he “bids us come and die.”
When the student left my office she was not totally convinced, but she did see the contradictions in her own position. Furthermore, she began to understand the rather radical claim that I was making.
In an increasingly post-Christian society we cannot be content to affirm our faith at the expense of reason. We must seek ways to not only defend our faith but also to connect our faith to those around us through acts of mercy and charity, through allowing our Christian faith to permeate our various disciplines, so that when asked why we settle for nothing less than excellence, we can reply that we do what we do for the glory of Christ.
This means that we need, now as perhaps more than any other time, Christians to be truly Christian in all of their respective vocations.
This means that the glory of God ought to consume us no less in the laboratory than behind the lectern, that the glory of God ought to consume us whether we be doctors or lawyers or ministers or stay-at-home moms or nurses or teachers or politicians or businesspersons or actors.
(Ph.D. from BaylorUniversity,
Waco, Texas, expected this May)