The Importance of Professors

I was thinking about a section from a book I've been reading lately, "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning," on my way to class this morning as I listened to a D. A. Carson sermon on "Justification". I can't remember exactly what Carson was saying that sparked my memory of a part of this book, but it did connect somehow. I then thought about how important it is for Christian Professors to really be grounded in Scripture and to not be swayed by the liberal theology that seems to be sweeping a lot of Christian colleges and universities. It's I quite frightening actually. I attended a more liberal Christian university for a semester and ran into some pretty crazy ideas about how a Christian is supposed to live and what they should believe. That in and of itself woudl take up a whole entry, so moving on.

I've also been thinking a lot about the fact that those younger than I and myself are the "next generation." I'm an adult now, making adult choices, and at the age where I could have my own children. The reality that this country is going to be run by my peers and those younger than I is pretty jolting. Then the fact that I could be responsible for passing on faith, values, and worldview among many other things, gives me a small anxiety attack. It makes me want to be more serious about the choices I make, what I believe about Christ, and what I feed my mind on. I really can't be as careless as I once was. Life is about so much more than making myself happy and comfortable. 

Anyway, this is the section that I was pondering this morning. It led me to pray for Christian professors, those that I know and those that I don't, those that are currently teaching and those that will be teaching in the future. Oh and also, I would highly recommend this book to everyone, especially Christians and Christian artists. I have really been enjoying learning about the philosophies and worldviews behind each movement of art history. I feel that it has been encouraging me more and more to be a "thinking artist."

"The arts are often dismissed by Christians as mere entertainment, a leisure activity. Aren't there more pressing issues calling for our attention--such as what's happening in the White House?"

  Secular people know better. Consider a much-quoted line by Todd Gitlin, former president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). After the 1960's student protests, Gitlin said, the Left began 'marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House.' Today we must ask ourselves: Which was the more effective strategy? The 1960's radicals who avoided the draft with student deferments made their way up through the universities, became professors, and inculcated their radical ideas into the minds of generations of young people--ideas that shape the way they now vote. 

  This explains why Christians and other moral conservatives continue to lose ground culturally, in spite of a huge increase in political activism in recent decades. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, author of Culture Wars, says evangelicals have grown adept at mobilizing money and manpower to reach political goals. But they overlooked one crucial fact: that America's secular elites had already reached an intellectual consensus on the legitimacy of things like abortion and homosexual rights 'far earlier than any kind of legislation or court decision that would ratify that consensus.'

  In short, what came first was a shift in worldview. Ideas are born, nurtured, and developed in the universities long before they step out onto the political stage..."

- Nancy Pearcey

From: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Leonardo-Secular-Assault-Meaning/dp/1433669277/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335819964&sr=1-1

Convicting

While I am a heterosexual Christian, listening to the audio version of  Wesley Hill's "Washed and Waiting" has been convicting me about a lot of things. What Hill talks about can pertain just as much to heterosexuals as it does to homosexuals. As a Christian who holds to the commands of the Bible about all sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual), I've wanted to learn more about the struggles of homosexual Christians. I most definitely do not want to be one of those people holding signs that say "God hates fags" (or holding that angry judgement quietly in my heart), because I don't believe those people could actually know Jesus, the reality of their own fallenness and sin, and still be saying those things. Yet at the same time, I want to try to be true to what Scripture teaches about sexuality, sin, and God's transforming power. 

Here's a section from the book:

"Far from being a tolerant Grandfather somewhere rocking in his chair, far away in the sky, God most often seems dangerous, demanding, and ruthless as He makes clear that He is taking our homo-erotic feelings and actions with the utmost seriousness. Like Cain, we sometimes squirm as we relate to God. We experience Him both as an unwanted presence reminding us that our thoughts, emotions, and choices have lasting consequences, as well as a radiant light transforming us gradually, painfully, into the creatures He wants us to be. 

  British theologian John Webster speaks of the Church facing the resistance of the Gospel, meaning that if the Gospel brings comfort, it also necessarily brings affliction. The Gospel resists the fallen inclinations of Christian believers. When we engage with God in Christ and take seriously the commands for purity that flow from the Gospel, we always find our sinful dreams and desires challenged and confronted. When we homosexual Christians bring our sexuality before God, we begin or continue a long, costly process of having it transformed. From God's perspective, our homo-erotic inclinations are the 'craving for salt of the person who is dying of thirst,' to borrow Fredrich Beuchner's fine phrase. Yet when God begins to try to change the craving and give us the living water that will ultimately quench our thirst, we scream in pain, protesting that we were made for salt. The change hurts.

   'Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith?' asked one gay Christian in a letter to a friend. 'Certainly not,' he concluded, 'but anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation, of discipline, of learning and not merely a place to be comforted and indulged.' 

  Engaging with God and entering the transformative life of the Church does not mean we get a kind of free pass, an unconditional love that leaves us where we are. Instead, we get a fiercely demanding love. A Divine Love that will never let us escape from it's purifying, renovating, and ultimately healing grip. And this means that our pain, the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God's demand for purity in the Gospel, far from being a sign of our failure to live the life that God wants, may actually be the mark of our faithfulness.

   We groan in frustration because of our fidelity to the Gospel's call. And though we may miss out on the short run on lives of personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction, in the long run the cruelest thing that God could do, would be to leave us alone with our desires, to spare us the affliction of His refining care.

 'Not only does God in Christ take people as they are, He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be,' writes historian Andrew Walls. In light of this, is it any surprise that we homosexual Christians must experience such a transformation along with the rest of the community of faith? The Christian story proclaims that our bodies belong to God and have become members of the corporate, communal body of Christ. This is yet a third reason Scripture and the Church's 'no' make sense to me.

 From the first page of Genesis, the Bible rings with the truth that we are, before anything else, creatures. The prophet Jeremiah and Paul after him both use the metaphor of a potter and clay. God is the master artist and we are His earthenware vessels. 'Who are you, oh man, to answer back to God?' Paul asks rhetorically. 'Will what is molded say to it's molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the Potter no right over the clay?' Romans 9:20 & 21. The Gospel proclaims that we belong to God twice over. First because He created us, and second because He has redeemed us through the work of his Son.  'For none of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself,' states Paul epigramattically.  'If we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.' Romans 14:7-9 

  Though it sounds politically incorrect to modern ears, the Gospel has always said that God may demand from us what He wants since we do not belong to ourselves. Strictly speaking we have no inalienable rights. God reserves all rights for himself and this extends even to the realm of our sexuality, what we humans do with our bodies."

-Wesley Hill

from:  http://www.amazon.com/Washed-Waiting-Reflections-Faithfulness-Homosexuality/dp/0310330033/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335638385&sr=8-1