It’s been two months since my last essay in this series! The school year began, tasks accumulated, and my calendar filled up! I won’t bore you with the details. Until today, no topic compelled me to drop everything and write. But the question in the title above has been begging me for an answer and I can no longer put off addressing it.

The Rhetoric of Truth

I have noticed that many Christian colleges and universities present themselves to the public as places where the search for truth is honored. They use such slogans as “All truth is God’s truth,” “to pursue truth relentlessly,” and “truth has nothing to fear from investigation.” I think they do this to defend Christian education from criticisms coming from the two philosophies that dominate secular higher education, which I will call modernism and postmodernism. On the one hand, there are those in the secular academy who dismiss the idea of a Christian university as a contradiction in terms. They accuse Christian colleges of presupposing that they have the truth already and that the only task that remains is indoctrinating students. In response to this charge, Christian colleges assert that they honor the search for truth, examine all truth claims critically, and love truth above all else.

A second group within secular higher education (postmodernists) has given up completely on the goal of attaining truth and interprets all truth claims as ideological justifications for gaining or maintaining power. The self-appointed task of such postmodern universities is deconstructing and unmasking the ideologies the powerful use to rationalize their lust for power. This second group of critics charge Christian colleges with perpetuating the myth of white Christian supremacy. In response to the postmodern university, by proclaiming its commitment to truth, the Christian college declares that it has not given up on seeking and attaining objective truth. It presents itself to the public as a haven for truth seekers and a friend of honest scholarship.

The Trojan Horse Temptation

In my experience, Christian colleges use the rhetoric of the search for truth wholly as a defensive strategy. By opening the gates to the rhetoric of truth, the critics are silenced momentarily. As I will explain, however, by including the search for truth in its educational mission, it has unwittingly invited the enemy into the city. How so?

As I observed above, Christian colleges adopted the rhetoric of the pursuit of truth in response to the accusation that they claim to possess the truth already. Implicitly, then, Christian colleges, to blunt the charge of dogmatism, give up all claims of possessing truth. They embrace the perpetual search for truth as a substitute for living by the truth. The search becomes its truth.

And if the search becomes the truth, the teacher becomes the researcher and the subject matter becomes the research method. The high-sounding rhetoric of “searching for”—but never attaining—truth becomes a justification for tolerating uncertainty, lack of commitment and unlimited diversity of opinion. Allied with assertions of academic freedom, the rhetoric of truth seeking becomes the rationale for opening Pandora’s box of evils. The adjective “Christian” in the designation Christian university has been emptied of all force.

Next Time: I will analyze the concepts of truth, reality, knowledge, and understanding and explain why I think Christian universities should not include in their missions the rhetoric of seeking truth. I will argue instead that they should talk about seeking understanding.