The Audacity of Certainty: Biola and the New York Times

I admit to experiencing a sinking feeling today when I saw that the New York Times had decided to bring its investigative powers to bear on Biola University, an evangelical Christian school in Los Angeles. I count an uncle and cousin among the school's graduates, and my brother was the school's commencement speaker last year. As such, I feel some fondness for the school, and I know enough about it to recognize that its fundamentalist strain of Christianity would be prime fodder for the Times' unique brand of smarter-than-thou journalism. To my surprise, the Times did a fairly decent job of trying to engage the school on its own terms, letting students tell their stories and keeping the reporter's own right-thinking secularist subtitles to a minimum.

In the end, of course, the Times has to let it be known that all is not right with the Biola worldview, especially to the extent that the worldview presumes to have the answer to the world's questions. The article's concluding paragraph deconstructs two students' efforts to witness to Nicole, a cashier at the local Starbucks:

Brittany and Krista [the Biola students] hung on Nicole's every word as if they were lucky to be talking to her at all. They interrupted a story about her daughter's birthday party to ask exactly what kind of cake Nicole ordered. Although their purpose in getting to know Nicole was to save her soul, part of their motivation appeared more mundane: Nicole is simply different from anyone they know. The women's interest in her stories, the way they lingered over the details, seemed to express something about the world -- the unredeemed, unsaved, unchurched part -- that was not evident in their public prayers in church. Going off campus, even just a mile away, was interesting because it was unpredictable. Talking to the Starbucks bikers or Nicole was compelling on its own terms; Brittany and Krista, like many of the Biola students I met, enjoyed not knowing what would happen. On some level, they seemed already to know what . . . is evident in the often open-ended, messy tales of the Bible: that the most compelling stories unfold when you don't start out with the answer.

I don't regularly (ever) chat up area merchants for the purpose of saving their souls, and I'd be very hesitant to endorse that approach to evangelism. But my hesitation has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that life's deepest questions have an answer. And I'm not sure that the "open-ended, messy tales of the Bible" lead to the epistemological void suggested by the Times reporter. Admittedly, Paul's journey to Damascus begins without Paul having the answer, but the story is compelling, of course, because of the unmistakable terms with which he becomes familiar with the answer during the journey. And from that point on, Paul's life is driven by the certainty of his answer, making for pretty compelling adventures. The same can be said for the other New Testament followers of Christ, as well as Old Testament figures who received singular answers to their existential cries, such as Jonah (answer = whale), Abraham (ram), Job (God), Moses (burning bush), etc.

The Times' implicit suggestion seems to be that the most rewarding way to engage life is to affirm our mutual cluelessness as to its meaning. For those who reject the viability of divine revelation, perhaps this is an entirely sensible proposition. But don't drag the Bible in as support for that mindset.

Rob