By the time I graduated in 2003 from the college named in his honor, I’d resolved that what William Jennings Bryan should have said on the witness stand is this: Because the Bible is God’s Word and is truthful in all that it affirms, the book of Genesis accurately records how God created the universe and life on earth. Based on the scientific accuracy of the Bible, one must conclude that the creation week consisted of seven twenty-four-hour days and that 1,656 years elapsed between the creation and the flood, 342 years elapsed between the flood and the birth of Abraham, and two thousand years elapsed between the birth of Abraham and the birth of Christ. Geological and fossil evidence does not conclusively prove an earth age of millions of years but can be explained by the argument that God chose to create things at full maturity with the appearance of having developed or by the argument that various factors, such as the earth’s magnetic field, may have changed through the years and affected the accuracy of carbon dating. Contrary to the theory of evolution, the Bible teaches that God separately created distinct kinds of organisms and that the similarities between these organisms point to a common creator rather than a common origin. The theory of evolution fails to account for the degree of complexity inherent in biological organisms, to produce a sufficient fossil record of transitional species, and to explain the many ambiguities in biological classification. Therefore, it should not be taught as fact in public schools. Most important, the theory of evolution is dangerous because it undermines the authority of the Bible and threatens the foundation of Christianity.4
I learned most of this from Dr. Kurt Wise, one of the leading young-earth creationists in the country and a favorite professor among Bryan College students when I studied there. Armed with a degree in paleontology from Harvard University, Dr. Wise had studied under Stephen J. Gould, a renowned evolutionist and science writer. Dr. Wise said that his goal was to formulate a model of earth history consistent with both Scripture and the scientific data. An angular sort of person, with long legs and a wide gait, he moved about the campus at a deliberate and accelerated pace, as if he was always on his way to do something important. He enjoyed spending time with students in long conversations after class and in hiking and spelunking trips through the mountains.
Dr. Wise told us the story of how, as a sophomore in high school, he had dreams of becoming a scientist but could not reconcile the theory of evolution with the creation account found in the Bible. So one night, after the rest of his family had gone to bed, he took a pair of scissors and a newly purchased Bible and began cutting out every verse that he thought would have to be removed to believe in evolution. He spent weeks and weeks on the project, until he’d gone through the entire book, from Genesis to Revelation. By the time he finished, he said that he couldn’t even lift the Bible without its falling apart. That was when he decided, “Either Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.”5
In many ways, Dr. Wise embodied the spirit of Bryan College. While not everyone on campus supported young-earth creationism, the overriding principle behind the school’s educational approach was that the Bible serves as our most reliable textbook, that it provides an infallible foundation on which to build the academic disciplines. We learned that everything from science to history, economics, art, psychology, politics, and literature can be studied from a “biblical worldview.” The goal of a Bryan College education was to develop a comprehensive approach to life in which we looked at the world wearing Christian glasses.
I’ve never in my life encountered an organization so consistently on-message. I’m willing to bet that if I were to show up on campus today and ask a random student about his or her purpose for studying there, the response would be, “To develop a biblical worldview.” We used to tell freshmen that if a professor called on them in class and caught them unprepared, the best strategy was to simply blurt out, “Worldview?” and hope for the best.
I came to Bryan College in 1999 both hungry for answers about Christianity and eager to prove my mastery of it. Having lived in Dayton for five years, I already knew most of my professors and was familiar with the Bryan campus and its traditions. I knew, for instance, that instead of hazing freshmen, the senior class welcomed them by washing their feet. I knew that after the first snowfall, students used trays from the cafeteria as sleds. I knew that the three major worldviews are naturalism, transcendentalism, and theism, and that biblical Christianity falls into the theism category. I knew that the Bradford pears dotting the hilly, pastoral campus turn ruby red in the fall but smell funny when they bloom in the spring. I knew which dorms boasted the best views of the mountains, which professors most inspired their students, and which upperclassmen were considered cool.
My best friend, Sarah, and I had decided ahead of time to live in the same dorm but to room with girls we didn’t already know so as not to get too cliquish. We lucked out on roommates and quickly developed new, long-lasting friendships. I immediately ran for student government and won my race for freshman representative to the senate, thanks mostly to my controversial campaign slogan: “Want Your Voice Heard? Go to Held.” I majored in English but loaded my schedule with theology and Bible classes. It took some effort to hide my disappointment when a show of hands revealed that I wasn’t the only one in my Introduction to the Bible class who was familiar with dispensationalism.
In keeping with the college’s vision, I immediately took a required introductory course titled Biblical Worldview. In this class, I learned not only how to define and defend a biblical worldview but also how to dismantle opposing worldviews. My professor, a warm and affable theologian with a penchant for sweater vests, taught me that when defending my faith against atheists and agnostics, the best strategy was to ask questions, questions to which I already knew the answers, of course.
For example, if someone said to me, “You should be tolerant of other religions and belief systems,” I should respond by asking, “What about the belief systems of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin? Should I be tolerant of those?” Or if someone said, “I cannot believe in God because of all the injustice in the world,” I should say, “Are you saying, then, that there is an absolute standard of right and wrong? Where do you get this standard? On what is it based?” If someone announced that the universe began with the big bang, I should ask, “Do you have any proof of that? If the world came into being by chance, how do you explain its intricate design?” If someone said, “There are no absolutes,” I should ask, “Are you absolutely sure?”
In Biblical Worldview, we picked apart dozens of belief systems, from secular humanism to Buddhism. We examined their strengths and weaknesses and occasionally chuckled at their absurdities. Sometimes, for class projects or chapel programs, we performed skits. We learned to adopt the high-pitched tone and dazed expression of the stereotypical tree-hugging New Ager in order to explain that transcendentalists believed that “we are aaall god . . . aaall one . . . aaall okay,” often concluding with a mock yoga pose and an exaggerated “ohm.” (To be fair, we also made fun of ourselves in the skits, dressing up in cheesy Christian T-shirts and talking about how we’d burned all our secular CDs and kissed dating goodbye.)
The only worldview system that provides adequate answers to life’s ultimate questions, my professor said, is biblical Christianity. Looking through the glasses of a biblical worldview brought everything into focus; it made everything make sense. “All truth is God’s truth,” he said, “so as Christians, we can expect to see reality continually support our premise.”
With this assurance, we studied common challenges to Christianity, such as the problem of evil and the destiny of the unevangelized. These were treated as issues that atheists and agnostics might raise to try to undermine Christianity, not issues that believers generally struggled with themselves, so I had to be careful how I phrased my questions in class.
One day I asked, “So, Dr. Jordan, what if . . . what if my opponent challenges me by saying that if Christianity is the only path to salvation, that means the majority of the human population will be damned to hell?”
Dr. Jordan said something about how we all deserve hell anyway, something about falling short of the glory of God.
“Yes, but doesn’t that mean that . . . wouldn’t my opponent charge that most people were just born at the wrong place and the wrong time, that they never even had the chance to be saved in the first place?”
Dr. Jordan said something about the importance of going into all the world to preach the gospel.
“Yes, but . . . but what should I tell my opponent if she still thinks that’s not fair?”
Dr. Jordan talked for a while about God’s higher ways and then suggested that I use the opening to challenge my opponent about where she gets her standard for right and wrong, to suggest that with such a piqued conscience, she must believe in a universal standard of justice after all.
Before I had the time to say, “Yes, but won’t she know I’m just changing the subject?” the guy sitting in the desk behind me whispered, “Rachel, wrap it up. Your opponent’s about to argue right through my next class.”
What was happening at Bryan College was happening in evangelical schools and churches across the country during the apologetics movement of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Born of the necessity to more effectively engage modernism and avoid embarrassments like the Scopes trial, the apologetics movement in America represented a significant evolution within the evangelical subculture, an evolution away from blind faith, anti-intellectualism, and cultural withdrawal toward hard rationalism, systematic theology, and political action. You might say it was the culmination of modern Enlightenment values applied specifically to religious dialogue.
Theologians like Francis Schaeffer, Norm Geisler, and Lee Strobel entered the scene, introducing words like presupposition and worldview to the common Christian’s lexicon. These scholars claimed that if Christians would simply prepare themselves to reason with skeptics, armed with the right scientific, historical, and philosophical facts, they could convince even the most hardened atheist of the inherent truth of the biblical worldview. The hard evidence, they urged, supports Christianity. As Josh McDowell announced in his landmark book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, “I took the evidence that I could gather and put it on the scales. The scales tipped the way of Christ being the Son of God and resurrected from the dead.” The validity of the Christian faith, he said, was “confirmed through investigation.”6
With that in mind, the apostle Peter’s command to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks” became a rallying cry for true believers during the apologetics movement. To be caught unready, like William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand, equaled outright disobedience to God and characterized what Francis Shaeffer called the “great evangelical disaster” of thoughtless faith. To fight the good fight, the most important weapon was the sword of absolute truth, and the goal of the Christian life was to learn how to use it. As Dr. David Noebel wrote in his mammoth volume Understanding the Times, “The battle lines have been drawn. As Christians armed with the truth — indeed, armed with the revelation of Truth Himself . . . we are more than equipped to shatter the myths of all opposing worldviews. . . . Truth is our greatest weapon.”7
War imagery pervaded the aggressively intellectual apologetics movement. Dr. Noebel authored titles ranging from The Homosexual Revolution to Mind Siege to The Battle for Truth. Geisler, who earned himself the nickname “Stormin’ Norman,” began calmly enough with Christian Apologetics (1976) but grew increasingly militaristic with titles such as Christianity Under Attack (1985), The Battle for the Resurrection (1989), and Battle for God (2001). Drawing battle lines worked because, as the new millennium approached, evangelicals in America were indeed feeling threatened. In the years following the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Supreme Court barred religious instruction from public schools and outlawed school-sponsored prayer. During the Cold War, fears that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in science and technology led Congress to support updating science textbooks to include evolutionary theory. Feminism threatened the church’s patriarchal leadership system. Higher criticism challenged the accuracy of the Bible. The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 left many Christians with the sense that their government had abandoned them. From keeping nativity scenes in public buildings to keeping “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, defending America from the perceived takeover of secular humanism became the purpose of the modern church.
Never before had the words Christian and biblical been used so frequently as adjectives. Evangelicals read Christian books and listened to Christian music. They sent their kids to Christian colleges, where they received Christian educations. Apologists and theologians talked about the biblical approach to homosexuality, the biblical response to global warming, and the biblical view of parenting. The Moral Majority, and later the Christian Coalition, mobilized millions to political action, while James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, instructed his radio listeners to vote based on their Christian values. The election of George W. Bush in 2000 and his reelection in 2004 were widely attributed to the action of conservative evangelicals across the country who had been convinced that, as a born-again pro-lifer, Bush would take their side on the important moral issues. It was as though the Christian community sat perpetually on the witness stand, always ready for a fight, always ready to defend itself against the world, always ready to give an answer.
It was within this social context that I and an entire generation of young evangelicals constructed our Christian worldviews. You might say that we were born ready with answers. We grew up with a fervent devotion to the inerrancy of the Bible and learned that whatever the question might be, an answer could be found within its pages. We knew what atheists and humanists and Buddhists believed before we actually met any atheists or humanists or Buddhists, and we knew how to effectively discredit their worldviews before ever encountering them on our own. To experience the knowledge of Jesus Christ, we didn’t need to be born again; we simply needed to be born. Our parents, our teachers, and our favorite theologians took it from there, providing us with all the answers before we ever had time to really wrestle with the questions.
My experience at Bryan was everything a college experience should be. I made lifelong friends, learned how to think critically, and became well versed in Christian apologetics. I maintained a solid-enough grade point average to participate in an array of extracurricular activities that taught me a lot about myself and how to work with other people. My love for literature grew more pronounced with each of Tennyson’s alliterated lines and every frighteningly precise Flannery O’Connor character. Some of my English professors thought my writing showed potential. Best of all, I met and fell in love with a tall, handsome New Jersey boy, whom I married six months after earning my degree, thus fulfilling my mother’s charge to go to a Christian college and marry a Christian boy. My classmates elected me their senior class president and asked me to deliver the commencement address on graduation day.
On the outside, I embodied all the expectations I had for myself going into college. I was confident, articulate, ready to change the world. But on the inside, something different was happening. I started to have doubts.
You might say that the apologetics movement had created a monster. I’d gotten so good at critiquing all the fallacies of opposing worldviews, at searching for truth through objective analysis, that it was only a matter of time before I turned the same skeptical eye upon my own faith. It occurred to me that in worldview class, we laughed at how transcendentalists so serenely embraced paradox and contradiction, but then went on to theology class and accepted without question that Jesus existed as both fully God and fully man. We criticized radical Islam as a natural outworking of the violent tone of the Qur’an without acknowledging the fact that the God of Israel ordered his people to kill every living thing in Canaan, from the elderly to the newborn. We sneered at the notion of climate change yet believed that God once made the earth stand still. We accused scientists of having an agenda, of ignoring science that contradicted the evolution paradigm, but engaged in some mental gymnastics of our own, trying to explain how it’s possible to see the light from distant stars. We mocked New Age ambiguity but could not explain the nature of the Trinity. We claimed that ours was a rational, logical faith, when it centered on the God of the universe wrapping himself in flesh to be born in a manger in Bethlehem.
Most worrisome, however, was how we criticized relativists for picking and choosing truth, while our own biblical approach required some selectivity of its own. For example, I was taught that the Bible served as a guidebook for Christian dating and marriage, but no one ever suggested that my father had the right to sell me to the highest bidder or to take multiple wives, like Abraham. Homosexuality was preached against incessantly, but little was said of gluttony or greed. We decried the death of each aborted baby as a violation of the sanctity of human life but shrugged off the deaths of Iraqi children as expected collateral damage in a war against evil. We celebrated archeological finds that supported the historical claims of the Bible yet discounted massive amounts of scientific evidence in support of an old earth.
Despite my emerging doubts, I went on looking for ways to glue the pieces of my faith back together, trying to convince myself and my friends that everything was okay. In my commencement address, I assured the senior class that we were exceptionally prepared to answer life’s questions, that our biblical worldview glasses would bring everything into focus, sharpening the contrast between black and white, right and wrong, evil and good. I said it, wanting desperately to believe it was true. I said it, knowing good and well that it wasn’t going to be that simple. I said it, knowing that the world just didn’t make that kind of sense anymore.