Last week I wrote about my journey as a developing follower of Jesus in a secular university. I told you that I’d become a stronger Christian during my time in the academic world, and now I want to tell you a little bit about what happened in my mind and heart during that time. This post is, to an extent, a response to Andy Walsh’s question in the comment thread of last week’s post in this series:
You mentioned that your Christian faith is stronger as a result of the experience. Did you find that aspects of your theology changed during that time? To put it another way, were there any shifts in what you believed along with how strongly you believed them? […] Â I was just musing that we (Christians broadly) talk a lot about strengthening/deepening our faith, and I wondered if that was a general phenomenon, or if it correlated with particular beliefs. In other words, is it possible to have a strong/deep faith in anything, or are there certain beliefs which are more amenable to that kind of reinforcement.
I came into college a brand-new believer and left a pretty new believer — going on 6 years now, nearly all of which passed while attending the U of Montana. So you could probably guess that my thinking has been shaped a lot by the academic world. And you’d be right. The methodology I began to put to use in school sparked further personal research outside of the classroom. The critical, “outsider†lens, which is generally employed in the secular classroom, caught my attention. Secular scholars have come up with some really tough arguments that I needed to overcome or adapt if I could continue to believe in the creation of the world — however long that process took — and the physical resurrection of Jesus.
Those are two beliefs, creation and resurrection, that my academic research has greatly strengthened. [Read more…] about Becoming a Thoughtful Christian in the Secular Academy: Part II