I recently returned from an academic conference that I attend almost every year. This year I sat in a somewhat befuddled state during multiple sessions that I attended: after facilitating or at least remaining silent about decades of secular-university intolerance toward Christian and conservative expression, large numbers of academics are suddenly terrified that the new administration will abolish free speech on college and university campuses.
The panic was real, and it very much influenced the mood of the conference. I was perplexed by the irony of it all. After years of limiting certain types of expression to “free-speech zones,” sometimes no larger than the size of small concrete slabs on sprawling campus acreages, academics are now worried about the spirit of free expression being violated at their institutions. It was a surreal couple of days.
At one point, however, I actually began to feel sorry for the academics who have, either explicitly or implicitly, facilitated campus environments that have restricted true freedom of expression. As I engaged in a dialogue about how to have difficult conversations on college campuses, I realized how incredibly challenging it is for most academics to manage such discourse. For years, the academy has propagated the idea that truth is relative to everyone’s experiences, desires, and opinions. What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me. You have your truth, and I have mine. And if universities have not propagated this idea, then they have taught that truth either does not exist at all or cannot be known.
So as I listened intently, I felt a little sympathy: of course challenging conversations are almost impossibly hard on these campuses! When you are worried about every little statement offending someone because there are eight billion versions of “truth,” or if you don’t even believe that truth exists, engaging in such conversations must be exceptionally painful!
Difficult conversations can be complicated on Warner University’s campus too—but they are generally less complicated because we believe that, through his word, God gave us an unchanging standard for right and wrong. We do not have to deal with the impossible task of judging good and bad, right and wrong based on ever-changing cultural trends and whims. And we know that we will sometimes offend some people with our use of Scripture as our ultimate guide, but at least we know we might offend them and why.
We know that we have a standard of truth that helps eliminate guessing games—and we can trust it because the savior who rose from the grave inspired it and was obedient to it during his incarnation. The perfection of the God who came to earth to save us was judged by it! The savior who conquered the grave also gave a special authority to the biblical writers who wrote after his ascension into heaven. God’s word is trustworthy, among other reasons, because it has these facts behind it.
What we at Warner University understand is that it’s not only truth that facilitates clarity and eliminates confusion: the very pursuit of truth fosters clarity as well. And herein lies an important Warner distinctive. For far too long, American colleges and universities have been driven by things other than the pursuit of truth. Higher education has been consumed by preparing students to embrace the dictates of cultural movements instead of preparing them to be people of character and solve problems with a clear sense of right and wrong that is determined by something greater than themselves, not by what their pop-culture professor says.
I am proud to serve at a place that unapologetically looks to God’s unchanging word as its guide—not only because of Scripture’s perfection and goodness, but also because of the clarity of direction that it provides. It is a lot easier to navigate contemporary challenges when you believe that truth exists and that there are rights and wrongs that are objectively true for all people. When we have difficult conversations at Warner, we have them in the pursuit of truth—not in the context of propagating a framework that is so open-ended it cannot possibly have any real answers anyway.
