Quandary of Our Culture

Spirituality Column #166
January 12, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Quandary of Our Culture
By Bob Walters

Most, if not all, of America’s early colleges and universities were established as some fashion of Christian religious training institution or seminary.

Knowledge was the province of God, academia was the servant of religion, and education’s foundation was scripture, morality, ethics, philosophy and truth.

The physical sciences were studied, but woe to the scientist who came up with anything really radical or new … truth lay exclusively within the purview of faith and the faithful. The sciences by comparison bordered on heretical curiosities, generally dismissed from the grander “truth” conversation.

My, how times have changed.

Dallas Willard is a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California. He was ordained a Baptist minister in the 1950s but turned his pursuits to philosophy and academia in the 1960s. Willard said God told him, “If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you, but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.”

Therein resides the new truth, the conundrum of modern times: academia no longer reveres faith as viable knowledge. Our institutions and secular culture overwhelmingly enforce the diminishment of faith from its lofty stature of providing knowable life truths to a station not of knowledge, but of oft-ridiculed personal opinions.

In a recent conversation with noted Christian minister and author John Ortberg at Menlo Park (Calif.) Presbyterian Church south of San Francisco, Willard took on many of the toughest questions that can be asked of the Christian faith.

Ortberg posed that we’re all taught “the scientific method” as the only way to test for truth; the only thing that offers testable claims of knowledge.

Willard responded: “That’s the quandary of our culture, because everything that really matters in human life falls outside of science. Go over to the university and ask for the Department of Reality, or ask ‘where is your Department of the Good Life?’ or ‘who is a really good person?’ or ‘how do you become a really good person?’”

Ortberg replied, “We don’t think of these things being connected to knowledge.”

But they most certainly are, Willard explains in the very compelling video of this extended and thoughtful exchange with Ortberg at http://mppc.org/toughquestions (still there as of 5-10-13).

I came to Christ when – admittedly late in life – I realized what a smart guy Jesus was. Willard calls on Christians to reclaim knowledge in areas of human experience where science cannot help.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com)counted) 43 5-10-minute vignettes on tough topics in this Ortberg-Willard video. Brilliant. Amazing. Understandable. Have a look.