You Are Not Your Beliefs
In the early 2000’s I had the privilege to teach at Delaware County Christian School, in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, ten miles outside of Philadelphia. I taught a variety of theology and biblical studies courses to 9th thru 12th graders, one of which was apologetics. I cannot say what benefit my students derived from my teaching, but I can confess that I gained a lot from my students. Their questions pushed me to think about the most biblically accurate answers, and the best way in which to deliver those answers. I will be forever grateful for those students and classes. But I can say, that around 2007, I began to notice a shift.
Now, to say that I noticed it in 2007 is not to say that is when this “shift” began. In point of fact, the very nature of this “shift” demanded that I could not conclude that its point of origin was 2007. No, the “shift” I noticed was actually the fruit that had its root long prior to its emergence. What was this “shift”? It was the increasing propensity of students to be unable to distinguish between a person and the beliefs that a person professed as true. I noticed this increasing propensity, because I began to have students come up to me after class and apologize for disagreeing with me.
At first, I interpreted the student’s apology as nothing more than the result of an overly sensitive conscience that had been taught a biblical view of authority and submission to it. I thanked the student for their sensitivity, but assured them that they did not need to apologize, because it was not necessary that they agree with me on everything. I explained that we are not our beliefs; that, in point of fact, the two are distinct, even while organically united. Frankly, it is a truth that is so basic to reality and a biblical anthropology that I thought my students already understood the point. Why did I need to explain the point to this student who had grown up in the church? Still, my immediate conclusion was that it was simply a student with a perhaps overly sensitive conscience. But then it happened again and again. And there was no reason to suspect that this was some sort of planned strategy among them; these were spontaneous apologies independent of each other. And that is when it hit me: these students were expressing the rank relativism or subjectivism of the culture in the most profound way.
For years, I had been teaching, in both Christian schools and the churches I pastored, the history of ideas in the West that explained the roots and development of a subjectivistic or “person-centered” approach to knowledge (epistemology). How had we arrived at the point of people referring to “my truth” instead of “the truth”? How had we arrived at people constantly prefacing their knowledge claims with “I feel like . . . ”? Why was seemingly all debate about the correct interpretation of Scripture shut down by the retort, “Well, that’s just your interpretation.”? The objective aspect to knowledge and knowledge claims had been almost entirely eclipsed.
Much of my own life journey over the then previous 25 years revolved around me getting an answer to those questions. It had led me to get a M.Div. and Ph.D., and write a dissertation on the man—B. B. Warfield—who perhaps waged the fiercest and most scholarly refutation of this subjectivism. Today marks the 105th anniversary of his death. In both my history of Christian theology and apologetics classes I explained the roots and developments of this Kantian view of knowledge that fed Protestant Liberal theology. Yet, even as I taught this history and explained the character of this epistemology, I was not really ready for getting confronted with sincere Christian students who had, in some significant measure, become extensively corrupted by it.
This corruption needs to be accurately assessed. Perhaps its most distinguishing feature is the inability of people to make and maintain proper distinctions between not only people and the beliefs they hold, but between two or more beliefs. It is, in fact, whether people want to admit it or not, another manifestation of the feminization of American culture. One of its greatest ironies is that it is expressed by many young men whose calling-card is the bellowing of their manliness. Those given over to it are very slipshod systematic and practical theologians precisely because they cannot make or hold biblically faithful distinctions as they engage in both of those practices.
Do the math. Those students to which I referred are now in their late 30’s. These were students who professed saving faith in the Lord Jesus and attended church regularly. I doubt that they were the exception to other teenagers in their day of a similar profile. Indeed, everything that seems to have marked the broader Christian landscape over the past 20 years seems to indicate that they were not the exception. When you add to this subjective relativism a heavy dose of “male-bashing,” then you have the recipe for a generation of males who have the propensity to have very little ability to make and maintain proper distinctions between ideas and beliefs, and a rather significant propensity to believe that anyone disagreeing with them is, by the very nature of the case, attacking them. What else is there to do but attack back? And, no, not every male in the church today in his late 30’s or early 40’s has fallen prey to this.
There is much, much more to this issue that needs to be addressed. I conclude for now, but let’s be clear, all that needs to be addressed proceeds along the path titled: “You are not your beliefs.” Believe it. It’s not a threat.
