Does Academia Cause Loss of Faith? — Vince Beiler — Ep. 135

There are some people, I'm sure, that maybe will watch this or are out there that have a reaction against biblical criticism, feeling that there is a danger there of going down the road of, you know, say, someone like Bart Ehrman, which we would say has taken his studies so far he's starting to question a lot of the things of Orthodox Christianity. How would you respond to that? Like, what is the proper way to analyze these things? Is this a real criticism?

Yeah, what's your take on all this? You're right, it is a big question. And books have been written on this, books, books, and more books. And I will not answer it in two minutes. I will not even do it justice in 30.

And even laying out the problems, let me just kind of wander, bumble about a bit, and say some things which hopefully make sense to some level. First of all, Bart Ehrman went to Moody, pretty fundamentalist Bible school, went to Wheaton after that, I think did his MA there, and then went to Princeton Theological Seminary, which is not Princeton University, by the way, same town, completely separate school.

And at Princeton Theological Seminary decided he was an agnostic. I guess he just decided it didn't work for him, the Christianity he understood. And at this point, he's an atheist, maybe even a militant atheist. I think he likes to poke fingers in the eyes of Christians. So he's kind of made a name for himself, a not very good name for himself, you might say, in this area. So yeah, he's a poster child of something that we sort of reflexively, just instantly know we don't want to do, we don't want to be.

And I'll just talk about a couple of things. First of all, Christians who say we do need to be careful are not wrong. I live with this tension of trying to know what to do, how to read the Bible as a Christian, as an academic every day. I live in that tension. In what I do specifically, not as much, but just in the whole environment, it's there.

But there's a couple of things to remember. So first of all, we could just say danger, I shall not go there. Okay. I have not noticed Mennonites to be scared of danger. Like in the Bible, I think the most warnings we get from Jesus are related to money. And yet I know of a lot of wealthy Mennonites. So it doesn't scare us. Like for some reason, this should scare us. Money should scare us like nothing else if we're just taking the Bible at its most literal and just most, what can I do to get this right sort of way. And yet we play in the danger zone, if you ask me, all the time. We're not worried about that.

So it seems almost like academics is an area where Mennonites are like, that's a line you don't cross. But is that actually the way it should be? And I think there's several reasons why just saying keep away from that is not a good answer.

And let me start with just an easy one, sort of by way of illustration. So I grew up thinking, and I'm not sure why if people said this, I'm not blaming anyone, but the idea was that if you do anything academic, you lose your faith. You lose your risk of losing, or you're at risk of losing your faith. So you don't do it. And academics is the most godless thing there is because of the kind of people they turn out, because of the kind of worldview they have. You just don't go there, you don't do it, you don't do it, you don't do it. Okay.

What about this one? In the UK, which is a pretty secular society, right? Less Christians here, fewer Christians percentage-wise than in the US. I think it's around 5% go to church every Sunday. So that doesn't mean they're Christians necessarily, but they go to church. Okay. So that's one metric. About 5% in England go to church on a given Sunday. Okay.

There are several places in the country that have a higher church attendance rate. I think, at least in some cases, about double that. So about 10%. Still low, but higher. You want to guess where these are? I think I see where you're going with this. Is this in like university areas? I don't know, but like that wouldn't— Right. There's an obvious one, which is London. Right? There's a lot of immigrants in London, a lot of immigrants. Higher church rate. That makes sense. You know, you come from Africa. A lot of them from Christian nations in Africa. They come to the UK.

Yeah. So higher there, for sure, because of immigrants. But the other two, yes, you see where I'm going. Cambridge and Oxford. These are the two great academic centers of the UK and really of Europe in a lot of ways. The top 10 universities in the world. They have about 10% church rate. Everywhere else doesn't. So you go out and just like the countryside, like which is sort of the heartland of Christianity in the US is in the countryside, you know, in the deep south or wherever. It is not that way here.

You go there and you have dying churches. You don't have living churches. Things are not happening. Cambridge is sort of the evangelical hotspot of the UK. I don't know why. It's a funny thing. Like half the divinity faculty, and when I say divinity, I don't mean they're teaching or training you to become pastors. It's really the old name for what's now a religious studies department, I think. I think I can say that accurately. Basically, they're looking at religion in a number of different environments and contexts, things like that. Half the religious studies faculty, the divinity faculty here at Cambridge is evangelical Christian, which is what other university in the world can say that? I don't know.

It's an unusual fact. It's a funny thing. So I think what I'm saying is that academics and faith are not necessarily pitted against each other. I think it's how we've been conditioned to think, and we've seen it happen, and we've seen Bart Ehrman, and we've seen, you know, I don't know, MCUSA or something. We've sort of said, this doesn't work, and this is why it doesn't work. And I think maybe our reasons need to be rethought a little bit.

So that's one thing. That's just one possible thing that we should think about. While I'm at the same time saying it's not wrong, some of the criticisms that have been leveled, it's not like they're without merit. Please. I'm for sure not saying that.

But it's something that needs to be thought about. Something else to think about, and here I may need to restate several times to get this said very well, is the problem, and I'm just asking this as a question that I've tried to wrestle with, is the problem that Christians who enter academia leave faith, become agnostic? Is the problem with academia, or is it with the Christian who entered that academia?

Let me say that again. Is the problem when Christians who join academia become agnostic, is the problem with the Christian or with the organization they entered? And I think we've sort of thought that it's with the organization they entered. And I would like to think about that a little bit more and think about it a little more carefully. Like who says?

Who says that's how it is? What I've noticed in academia, and this is just anecdotal, I don't have any claim of great knowledge, but what I've noticed is that Christians, particularly fundamentalist type Christians, you know, more evangelical, this is what the Bible says, this is what we believe the Bible says, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're sure about this, and you know, this is what we hang our hat on, and we're very, very certain when they hit academia, when they interact with these things, they lose their faith. There are many other people who are very committed to their beliefs that do not lose their faith.

Jews are a very notable example to that. So some very, I don't know if conservative is the right, conservative is a word you can, very broad terms, you can throw around in a lot of different ways. But you know, they're wearing their kippah, they're wearing that, you know, in teaching, they observe a number of, you know, the observances that they do, whatever they are, Shabbat, other things. And yet they're in academia, and there's no contradiction for them. And if you want to talk Christians who do seem to do better in academia, in my opinion, it's Catholics, other high church type Christians, you know, Dutch Reformed, Orthodox. They seem to do better in interacting with academic ideas while keeping their faith than do evangelical Christians.

And so again, I guess I'm asking the question, is the fault of the trend towards agnosticism and evangelical Christians when they enter academia, is that the fault of the organization that they're entering, or is it the fault of the Christians who tried to enter it, of the person trying to enter it? It's an open question. I don't claim to know the answer, but I think we need to think about that a bit more carefully. Because let's face it, we often have a very naive reading of the Bible, and we just sort of assume we know. I'm not sure why we think we know, but I think sort of because you asked me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart, and so we just know.

And because of this, just somehow this amazing knowledge we have, we just assume we're going to get every question right, and we sort of, we're winning without trying. And no matter what we enter, we're just going to be right. And then we hit an idea that doesn't seem to fit with our worldview, and we have no idea what's going to happen next. We don't know. And then we just lose everything. So it's like a baby bathwater, you know. We're trying to be sincere. We're so sincere, sometimes we confuse ourselves.

And so I think it's obviously a multifaceted issue. It's complex, but we need to be careful before we just say it's bad, we shouldn't do it. And of course, we shouldn't just say, oh, it's perfect, there's no critiques to be made.

Lots of humility is required. But we do need to be careful. We often are very bothered by certain viewpoints, and we just know they're wrong. Why are they wrong? Because it disagrees with mine. Well, that's not a very substantive way to have a conversation. And in our effort to be ideologically pure, we've increasingly shut ourselves off from people who think other than ourselves.

And it makes faithful people, I don't know if it makes very deep Christians or actually very committed Christians, just in a way, ignorant Christians. We mean well, and I think God is blessed with that, but I think he's blessed with Christians who understand the complexity of what the Bible is, and yet refuse to believe it.

A friend of mine here recently said, he said, we need to stop telling people that the Bible is written so that a sixth grader can understand it. He said, the Bible nowhere makes such claims to be understood by a sixth grader. Like stop saying, this is all simple, we can get this. The Bible is easy to understand. Like the Bible does not make that claim. That's something the sayer of that has superimposed on the text itself. It's an extra biblical idea. And so to say the Bible is simple, and only if you just in your spirit, you realize it, and that's the way forward, and viewing Bible stories is just these neat little stories about how you should do things and how you shouldn't do it and how you should trust God and not do that.

If that's just your little simple view of the Bible, I think you in a way haven't engaged with all the Bible. So it's not just that we're saying the Bible needs to be read a certain way. We aren't even engaging with the text itself as carefully as we are.

So just, yeah, I think it's a warning to all of us to be more careful in what we're doing before we're just assuming we know. So we're taking a bit of a pivot away from that conversation. I guess it kind of segues into this one, but your work there at Cambridge, it sounds to be fairly complex, technical, along those lines. How have you found that level of deep study of the text or of the manuscripts? How has that affected your personal spiritual life? I mean, I'd love to tell you just do whatever I did and it'll all work out perfectly.

The truth is I'm a person, and listen carefully, I'm a person who struggles with my faith. I don't want to, but I don't find it easy to believe.

And I've talked to some people about this, and one of the pieces of advice that seems to have stuck the best with me, and I don't claim to live it out very well, but I do try, is that recognize that faith is not the absence of doubt, but sort of the choice to go forward in the midst of it. And you think about it, that makes more sense too. Like faith that of a child is beautiful. They just trust their dad's going to catch them if they decide to run off the edge of the table. They don't even think about it. It's beautiful, but it's childlike. And while we do need to have the faith of a child, I think it would be incorrect to say that that's all we should have.

Because we aren't children, we're adults. And God calls things of us in keeping with our ability. And that is our physical ability, our mental ability, our emotional, et cetera. He calls us in keeping with things that ask everything of us. That's God's style.

He doesn't want us to just be these little babies. And so I think it's important that faith realizes complexity and chooses to go forward. And that's what I want to do. I hope I can do that. But in terms of how my technical, complex studies, whatever, Cambridge seats with that, there's really no contradiction, I don't think.

What I'm doing is most decidedly not controversial. I don't care how fundamentalist of a Christian or how, I don't know, atheist isn't really even the opposite, but whatever the other poll would be here, they're both looking at my work with equal happiness. Like it's data, it's not lying, it's not making it up.

It doesn't factor into faith, really. I think if something in academics would make it difficult is that you're very alone. So it's not the work itself, but the fact that you're alone. You know, Christianity works best in community, and you don't have your community. And what makes it more difficult is that I find that it's often easiest and best to talk to people who are at the same place in life that I am. You know, someone else that's, I don't know, in academics or that's thinking through some Bible problem or struggling with it, you know, those sorts of things. Those are the people that I can connect with best on some of these deep issues for me.

And there aren't many people like that from my past. I really can think of almost no one. So it's very lonely. And that's probably more detrimental than anything else or a potential for detriment because it's hard to stay in community when you're alone. I know that I suppose taught us that too. Reminds us of that. Is there anything else you would like to add in closing as we wrap up this episode? I mean, I would say to people that are interested in academics, I'm not just saying biblical studies, but whatever subject you're interested in, you know, if you do it faithfully and you do it well, I think you should find a lot of success.

One thing Mennonites have going for them is their usual, their willingness to work hard. And in academics, people think you have to be really smart to go somewhere. No, you don't have to be smart. Maybe all you have to be is stubborn. You just keep working at it. There's so much of life, like take a language, for instance. We all can speak a language, even those people with the lowest IQ there. I mean, I guess at a certain point there's a cutoff, but people can speak is the point. And we all can learn a language if we're willing to work at it long enough. So you don't have to be brilliant. You have to just keep at it.

Wow, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on, Vince. And maybe we can do this again sometime, hopefully in person. Maybe I can get over there again after the virus is over, so that would be awesome. Come and visit. Come and visit. Love to have you here, Agan. That was that, yes. Thank you so much for your time and blessings in your studies.