Intellectual integrity dovetails with faithful living

By Greg Jao

Most students do not lose their faith while in the College.

They abandon it.

I, on the other hand, found faith as a first year. It proved neither so effervescent that it evaporated, nor so elusive that it escaped reasonably determined pursuit.

Not that I found faith easy. Like Flannery O'Connor, I found it "harder to believe than not to." But the challenges posed to faith by my undergraduate education did not arise from "godless professors," "atheistic authors," or "pagan classmates" (the traditional bogeymen of my conservative church background). In fact, the Common Core saved my faith.

Like many students in the College, I found it tempting to privatize my faith, to reduce the truth-claims value of my religion to the value claims of my personal preferences. It felt much more free, much more tolerable, much more sophisticated to treat the Ten Commandments as the Ten Suggestions and the Golden Rule as the Good Recommendation. A "close reading" of the text, however, disabused me of that notion. The texts did not leave that option open to me.

Ideas have both theoretical and practical implications. Just as the implications of Orestes' actions refused to be discussed only in the context of ancient Greece, the Christ described in Scripture refused to be restrained in the room I regarded as "religious." Honest interaction with the text--with Scripture--prevented me from dichotomizing my life into academic and religious compartments.

The freedom I sought by privatizing my faith had failed me, and I recognized the truth of a student's comment at a recent Harvard graduation: "The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true." It was a freedom I did not need.

Intellectual integrity demanded that I consider the implications of the actions of Orestes in both ancient and modern contexts, and faith-integrity demanded that I understand my beliefs in both its ancient and modern contexts.

Slowly and painfully, my classes began not only to reinforce but also to reinvigorate my faith, and my faith began to revitalize my studies. Faith provided a center from which to examine, evaluate, and integrate the ideas, methods, and issues raised in my Core classes.

And the issues raised by the Core provoked me to deepen my understanding of faith. Over time, my understanding of the flannelboard Jesus surrounded by clouds of cotton-ball sheep that dominated my childhood grew three-dimensional and complex, matching my intellectual growth measure for measure.

In addition to privatization, intellectual hubris nearly derailed my faith. Like others chastened by their failure to enter the Ivys, I took refuge in a classic U of C myth: "I am a better thinker than others."

My classmates and instructors assumed people of faith were second-rate thinkers, and I did not want to confirm that I was second-rate. Evangelical Christianity, with its roots in antiquity, the Reformation, and twentieth century American fundamentalism, seemed especially easy to dismiss as outrageous.

Hubris also raised barriers to my appreciation of secondary source materials, whether in the guise of contemporary Christian authors or the Christian community on campus. Guided by a mistaken vision of liberal education, I almost became convinced that interaction with the primary texts in isolation and independence could prove whether faith was sustainable. Through the sheer power of my autonomous mind, I could apprehend the truth.

In this context, Calculus 150 saved my faith.

Calculus 150 proved I needed a community within which to interpret and apply the ideas I had found difficult to comprehend. I had to acknowledge my need for secondary sources--other students struggling with derivative and other scholars making clear what I thought the instructor had not.

In fellow first-years like Chiquita Flowers, I found helpful answers to my deepest Calculus questions. And in members of my Christian community (the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) I found intellectually credible help for my deepest faith questions. I learned why a liberal education values and why a meaningful faith requires membership in a community. Neither great ideas nor vibrant faith grows in isolation. Intellectual humility, I learned, was a primary prerequisite to a liberal education and to a viable faith.

A little intellectual honesty also revealed that I was not truthfully searching for ideas which were better--just newer, or at very least, not what my parents believed. Ideas which suggested sophistication or cynicism seemed superior. Such sloppy thinking nearly capsized my faith.

And here, the social science requirement saved my faith. My experience in Social Science 120 [Self, Culture, and Society] and my compatriots in InterVarsity challenged me to examine the presuppositions underlying the words of my instructors and the ideas of our authors. I learned to listen for their answers to the basic worldview questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of reality? How can we know anything? What is the basis for morality and social interaction in their system?

What seemed so new and sophisticated became profoundly unpalatable. It led inevitably to Bertrand Russell's assertion that "all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins."

If beliefs had implications, these beliefs suggested suicide.

Intellectual integrity and the Common Core demanded that I re-examine the historic, theoretical, and theological underpinnings of my evangelical faith tradition, and, as a result, I believed. In fact, the objects of my evangelical faith emerged from the flannelgraph caricatures of my childhood Sunday-school classes into realities which validated the historic creeds and confessions and my experiences in prayer, Bible study, and worship.

The Common Core had saved my faith.

Greg Jao graduated in 1990 from the College and served as our staffworker from 1995-1998. He continues to work full-time with InterVarsity. This article appeared in the Chicago Maroon in Fall 1996 (copyright Chicago Maroon, 1996), and is reprinted with permission.