Position Paper

Faith and Purpose

In short – the relationship of the Christian faith to our institutional purpose can be summed up with the statement touching administrators, faculty, staff and students: your work is your worship.  We are all given the freedom to change our job into a call to worship.  We make a humble offering of our best as believers as we daily seek to learn and grow in our knowledge and understanding of our discipline, major or calling.  We are given by our Creator, gifts which are realized in practice, study and exercise.  We have the freedom to experiment, to join with others in studies, to be part of a team and to love and help others.

          Science demands strict honesty in reporting of experimental results.  It calls forth the best in us to explain these results.  God is not pushed away or limited in his power by science but rather the complexity and constant capacity for new surprises and insights is humbling.  To see signs of the infinite wisdom and purpose of the creator, we do not have to examine very many elements or molecules essential for life.  Carbon, oxygen, water, DNA, RNA and proteins all have apparently simple traits that force one to rationalize why some unusual feature needed by life is there.  If just one property were different, life would require great modifications.  Perhaps this is why a respected older researcher said to me
”the more I know, the less I know”.  As one learns and gains understanding, it should move you to share and use that knowledge.  An evangelical zeal to share should apply to all realms of college experiences, not just those that fall in the realm of the religious.  Living our Christian faith can only be done by people.  A person seeking to catch a butterfly and keep it unchanged, will be doomed because of the nature of life.  For the learner there is a flow of the unexpected into life and learning.  The college and the individual must recognize this as we are lead in directions we did not initially propose.

     Bonhoeffer clarifies the role of the church (and I would include the Christian college) when he says in Ethics p. 21, “The church is humanity in Christ, incarnate, sentenced and awakened to new life.  She is therefore not primarily concerned with the religious functions of man, but with the whole man in his life in the world and with all its implications”.  I believe Lenoir-Rhyne does this now.