A Plea for More Thoughtfulness, Less Stupidity

Through a series of events that some would attribute to chance and others attribute to Divine Sovereignty, I've been able to participate in a discussion alongside faculty and administrators who are putting together a forumn called "Difficult Dialogues." The Ford Foundation has given UNC a bunch of money to facilitate discussions surrounding issues of religion, faith, and conscience in the public university setting.

To be part of the discussion alongside faculty has been incredibly enlightening. It's interesting being the 'token evangelical' in the room who not only has to speak for all the Christians in the world on all issues, but also try to represent the students' perspective and experience as best I can.

It can also be terribly embarrassing. Consider one illustration from today's discussion.

A woman on our committee was teaching her summer school class last week and she was encouraging the students to consider the sexist language inherent in the word 'sportsmanship.' Her assertion was that 'sportsperson-ship' was a better word because it encompassed both men and women. A student raised his hand to object: "But in Genesis it says that woman came from man. So 'man' covers both men and women."

Forget, for the moment, the presenting issue and consider the dynamic here. The professor is a warm, articulate, intelligent woman who is scarily well-versed in the history of how religion, especially Christianity and especially the Scriptures, have been used to oppress and exploit people. Ergo, citing Genesis 1 and 2 as the supporting evidence for your (in my opinion very weak) argument is not going to be very productive.

For the Christian who's struggling to understand why this might be so, consider this. Suppose someone approached you and said that clearly Jesus isn't God because the DaVinci Code said so. You would, appropriately, blow them off. In the Christian plausibility structure (that is, the way that we understand the world and organize it around our core beliefs), the DaVinci Code doesn't have any credibility. It is the same thing for this professor with the Scriptures.

More thoughtfulness from this student might have looked something like a course-ending paper examining the radical Judeo-Christian belief that both men and women are image-bearers. A discussion of how this is developed and asserted throughout the Scriptures might be helpful as well. Then a very honest and humble look at how the church throughout history has both failed miserably to live this out faithfully and at points succeeded gloriously in living this out faithfully would perhaps build trust and get a hearing with someone who's heard more than her fair share of flat, black-and-white, non-nuanced versions of Christianity.

And perhaps in the process you'd see that even language is not immune from the curse and effects of the fall and is in need of the redemption of Christ. Which yes, might even include radically re-thinking how we use language that does or does not affirm the wonder and dignity of all image-bearers.