College Union

I’m sitting in my office thumbing through a copy of Rod Handley’s book, Character Counts: A Guide for Accountability Groups. I’m guessing many of you know it. It’s popular in Fellowship of Christian Athletes circles.

I like the book. It focuses on an enormously important practice. It’s honest, willing to name problems with which Christians struggle (especially men). It calls for personal integrity, always a worthy goal.

At the same time I’m bothered. The book’s structure and content follows a typical pattern in discipleship literature: (1) find the relevant scripture verses, (2) explain those verses, and (3) show how the verses apply to daily (individual) life. Illustrate with well-placed stories.

Ironically, the book appears to suffer from a subtle Pelagianism. Pelagius (fifth century) argued that if God commands something, we can – by virtue of our created nature alone—“just do it.” His views were condemned as heretical. I contend that Rod Handley’s book is implicitly Pelagian because of its reductionistic approach: first we understand, then we do. Simple.

To be fair, I’m confident that the book’s ruling assumption is firmly attached to a classic understanding of sin and the need for divine grace. My charge of Pelagianism is probably unfair. Still, that classic assumption often goes unstated and unexplained; therefore it goes unnoticed by the readers, who most likely fill in the conceptual gap with all kinds of unbiblical ideas. We’re left, practically speaking, with this description-prescription approach to solving lifestyle problems that strikes me as superficial, naïve and ultimately unhelpful.

So much popular Christian writing lacks a robust, searching understanding of the complexity, power and tenacity of sin. Of course, we can recognize sinful desires, feel contrite, and acknowledge they affect our relationship with God. But how often do we press on to think about the nature of those desires? Whence do they come? Why are they so strong? How they are entangled with good desires? Haven’t you had a student ask, “Why doesn’t God just make us so we don’t have to struggle with so many temptations?” Merely admitting that we’re sinful doesn’t help a student explore this question.

What if we are largely missing the boat in helping our students grow to spiritual maturity? What if we’re stuck on milk and refuse the meat? Consider the culture that has formed them by the time they come to college. They hear all through school (before they get to college) about choices and consequences. You make the choice, you accept the consequence. There aren’t bad people, just bad choices.

By the time students reach college, they should be (or we should help them become) ready to think more deeply. From an adult perspective, “choices and consequences” is a pretty surface view. It doesn’t explain much, doesn’t help me understand the mysterious entanglements of my own heart. There’s just too much stuff in me that I don’t choose, but it’s there. Remember Romans 7?

So, kids get the “bad choices – bad consequences” idea down, then start picking up other distorted messages. If you watch something like MTV’s “Real World,” you see young people who want to be brutally honest with themselves and each other. It’s good to be honest, of course, but usually their “honesty” is reactionary and cruel. Why? Because they believe being honest means simply expressing how one feels. And how one feels is what is real. And their feelings are so intense. And intense is real…

Real adults know that honesty involves much more than expressing feelings. Even more important, real adults know that how one feels is not always a reliable guide. Most important, real adults understand that it takes time, thought and humility to figure out what one really feels. There is a most crucial formational heart/thought process that we must learn in order to travel this path to self-knowledge. This quality is largely missing in young people, even the ones who are developmentally ready to start the journey. They lack the vocabulary to think deeply about themselves and their relationships with God.

Let us remember the stakes in this game. When students come to college, many come with a kind of reckless abandon. They’ve probably never heard of Martin Luther’s dictum about “sinning boldly” but they seem to get and like the idea. Some of them engage in quite dangerous behavior and then are completely surprised when something terrible happens to them or their friends. I am constantly amazed at the moral naiveté of my students. And I’m not just talking about the non-Christians.

If we offer them resources that take only the “what-does-the-Bible-say-and-how-do-we-apply-it” approach, we won’t be helping as much as we could and we certainly won’t be discipling our students as we should. Human desires are complex, volatile and mysterious, especially in young people. They manifest in behavior. And in this age of “passion”-driven language, we need to take care not to ape popular culture by leaning on inane yet hip-sounding Christian talk.

The corrective? Serious, slow, systematic (theological) reflection. Yes, it is not only possible, it is necessary. We must introduce students to these slower practices. Let’s use the Character Counts stuff, but let’s also give students bite-sized portions from the great thinking guides of the church.

I’ve been reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions again, this time as part of my devotional life rather than for a seminary class. His reflections on his own desires—both before he became a Christian and afterward—are well worth pondering. In fact, if you help students get past the foreign feel of the language, they will discover that saintly Augustine had the same problems with which they struggle. His mature thought later in life can help them understand themselves now.

In book 7, chapter 5, for example, he asks a series of questions about the origins and the nature of evil. Is evil a something? If God is good and all-powerful, did God create evil? Is evil eternal, some kind of rival to God? If God did not create evil, can God control it?

Yes, these questions look very much like the typical content of a philosophy of religion class. But, for Augustine, they are life questions, deeply personal. In the same chapter of Confessions, he says, “By it [evil] our stricken hearts are goaded and tortured….” Evil is a heart problem. Evil creeps into and perverts our desires. Those twisted desires screw up our lives. Augustine’s real interest is in finding that joy rules his heart rather than fear, a fear that is somehow grounded in evil. Taking the time to ponder this part of ourselves—of going beyond the standard “I know it’s wrong and I should stop” idea—is surely a salutary practice.

Our students need the same and I don’t think they get it from books like Character Counts. I repeat: it is not that such a book is bad. As I mentioned already, I like the book and would use it. Yet, if such a book is the only sort of resource we use with our students, we are missing the God-ordained opportunity to reflect deeply with them.

Now comes the kicker: If we want students to grow to maturity, we must go deep with them. In order to go deep with them, we must go deep ourselves. It is not primarily about finding the right resources to help them. It’s much more personal, more a matter of our own hearts. There are no shortcuts for them or for us. We must go deep.

Steve Rankin is Kirk Professor of Religious Studies and Campus Minister at Southwestern College, Kansas. His email is srankin@sckans.edu.

Categories: Nurturing the Soul of the Campus Minister
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