An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Greetings, I’m Fred Zaspel, and welcome to another Author Interview here at Books At a Glance.
It is no secret that today’s secular university is in large part set in determined opposition to all things traditional, and against Christianity in particular. University professors often seem to feel it their moral obligation to rescue your children from you and from the Christian teaching and values you have sought for them. Dr. Michael Kruger wants to push back with his strategic and important new book, Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College, and he is here to talk to us about it today.
Mike, welcome, and congratulations on a really helpful book.
Kruger:
Thanks! Glad to be with you and excited to talk about this book.
Zaspel:
The title makes it pretty clear but tell us the contribution you hope to make with this book. And with that give us a little personal history as to how it came about.
Kruger:
This is one of those books I have been wanting to write for a long time. I have been waiting to get to it and I am so glad I finally got to do it. It was born out of my university experience at UNC Chapel Hill. Years ago, I had a New Testament professor that was a big challenge for me as a believer. He dismantled the New Testament and tried to show how problematic it was. That professor’s name is Bart Ehrman, one of the most well-known biblical scholars in the world and now has written countless books against the Christian faith. I had him when he was a brand-new professor, he was not famous like he is now.
It was a tough thing to handle as a freshman. I found my way through it by God’s grace. I ended up as a biblical scholar myself. I wanted to write a book to help college students handle intellectual challenges that come their way. The thing that prompted me was when my daughter, Emma, headed off to college herself and went to the same place, UNC Chapel Hill. I wrote it as a series of letters to her to put it in a more approachable format. I wanted people to see this is the kind of thing a father could write to his daughter or son that they will face and help them navigate these intellectual difficulties. It is meant for college students. Theoretically, it could be read by those in late high school but honestly, it could be read by any Christian. Anyone interested in why they believe what they believe and how to handle objections. The book covers all the classic territory you might expect. You can look up the chapter dealing with your question or read it straight through. I try to make it accessible and approachable. I try to distill it down in a way I hope any Christian student can benefit from. My goal is to help them, as the title suggests, to survive their experience at university with faith intact.
Zaspel:
You touch on this in your Introduction – talk to us about why is this book so needed today. It obviously is needed, as I have already mentioned, but how do we account for the increasing loss of our young people at the university? What should we be doing better?
Kruger:
This is largely the motivation of this book. A recognition that we might have a bigger problem than we realize in terms of our ability to keep Christian students in the faith. We train them, put them in church for all these years, they learn the Bible, even go to a Christian school, send them to university, and six months later they come back, and they are already very much different from when they had left. They can have a radically different worldview. How does this happen? The university perspective is that they give people a new worldview and breakdown their old system. From the perspective of the Christian, what is allowing our young people to leave the faith so readily? Are they not being equipped and trained? Is there faith an inch deep in terms of intellectual sophistication? I hope to spur a larger conversation about the depth at which we prepare our students for life in a secular world. Most of them are not ready for life in a secular world. We need to think about how to do that better.
Zaspel:
You make an interesting distinction that churches are sometimes good at teaching doctrine, Christian responsibility, duty, and piety. But they miss this apologetic aspect relating to the counterculture.
Kruger:
One thing I mention in the book is that there are two dominant strains of evangelicalism in America. One is pietism, which is, do you live like a Christian? Another is revivalism, are you a Christian? Both are really important tributaries. We need to make sure we are living like Christians, and people are truly believers. There is a third category, are you thinking like a Christian enough to withstand challenges? Why is that not on the radar? Is it really true that making our kids conform morally is the most important thing? It is important, but is it the most important? Morals flow out of worldviews and morality is not going to last if it is not rooted. There must be more attention to the way we think.
Zaspel:
Let’s talk about just a few of the issues you bring up. Certainly, one feature of Christianity that our culture finds most repugnant is our exclusive claims. As you state the question in chapter 3, how can we say that Christianity is the only right religion?
Kruger:
Any Christian at a big university is going to be overwhelmed by the religious and philosophical diversity there. There are people from every walk of life and view. They are all thinking their view works and is the best way. Along comes Christianity and says it is the only view that is the right one. It sounds remarkably arrogant, incredibly audacious. What happens very quickly is that Christian students feel that problem and then back off the claim. Rather quickly they start thinking it is audacious. They ask, “Do I believe this myself?”
I point out several things in that chapter. One thing I point out is there is a mistake that most non-Christian work with. They think religion is the best human attempt to find out what God is like. If that is what religion is and Christians say they have the best religion, we are saying we figured it out when no one else could. That is not what Christians are saying. We do not think it is about us figuring God out but rather God revealing himself in his word. If that is the case, then it is not arrogance or pride. It is simply acknowledging God’s revelation. Flipping that paradigm around is important. Just the definition of religion itself needs to be recalibrated. Christianity does not work like any other religion; it needs to be seen as a revelation. I remind students that the exclusive claims of Christianity are not from Christians but from Jesus’ own claims about himself and about him being the only way to God. We are not declaring ourselves as the only right one. We are merely believing someone else, Christ. You must ask whether Christ’s claim is credible. If his claim is credible then believing that claim is humility and submitting ourselves to the Lord of the universe.
Zaspel:
We have seen a great reversal in my own lifetime with regard to morals and sexuality. What used to be shameful is now celebrated, and in fact, it is we who say, for example, that homosexual behavior is sinful – it is we who are considered evil, intolerant, and hateful. How do you want to direct our thinking in this regard?
Kruger:
Anyone who has been paying attention to the cultural moment we are in is aware of the shifts. I want to remind people that the shifts are not really in behavior. There is some shift in behavior, in prior generations, theoretically, people were behaving seemingly better. It is more of a shift in attitude about the behavior that shifted. The biblical view of sexuality was viewed by some people as old school and you would be dismissed as traditionalistic. Now when you look at the Christian view of sexuality it is an affront of someone’s personhood. The reason is that sex and identity are so combined that to disagree with someone’s sexuality is to be seen as hating them. That dynamic means whatever we do we need to really rethink the way we go about our arguments.
The main advice I give in this chapter is that we make the mistake in most conversations about whether a particular act is right or wrong and then we argue it. There is a place for that, but I would suggest that is not the first place we should go. It is a distraction from the real issue. The real issue is not that the act is right or wrong, but how do you know anything is right or wrong in the first place? Just back the question up one notch and ask where right and wrong in the first place comes from in their worldview. The reason this is important is, first, it will disarm the person because now you are not attacking a behavior. Secondly, it will give them the opportunity to explain where morals come from. You will quickly discover most people have no idea where morals come from. They are literally making things up or simply saying what they wish were the case. There is your chance to talk about worldview and whether the Christian worldview offers a better vision.
Zaspel:
In chapter 10 you pose a great question, which really is the bottom line for everything else: Everything we believe seems to hinge on the truth of the Bible – how do we know the Bible is from God? This is actually a very common question.
Kruger:
I spend several chapters on this. It was the question I faced when I was a student which was a professor attacking the truth of the Bible directly and the New Testament. This is a question that will never go away. One thing to point out is that I deal with the historical issues, how we know where the canon came from, reliable translation, etc. those are important, but I start off in a different place. Do not make the mistake of thinking the only way you can know that the Bible is from God is from historical evidences. Yes, historical evidences play their role and are important in their own way, but I argue that the most fundamental way we know the Bible is from God because the Bible itself reveals itself as a divine book. I talk about the self-authenticating nature of Scripture. How can we lean on Jesus’ own words in John 10? He says, “my sheep hear my voice, they know me, and follow me. We can recognize the words of God in these books. That is a key paradigm. It matters because the books themselves have God’s fingerprints.
Zaspel:
Is there a sense in which we are left to see it or we do not see it?
Kruger:
It is true that you must have eyes to see it. That we need the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to see what is there. People will say that sounds like subjectivism, but we are arguing that these qualities of God and the Bible are objectively there, but you cannot see these kinds of things unless there is spiritual discernment. It is like being tone-deaf. If someone is tone-deaf, they cannot tell something is on or off-key. They might think they could sing well when they really cannot. The non-Christian is spiritually tone-deaf. They cannot hear God’s voice in these books. They assume the problem is the book when in fact it is their own hearing.
Zaspel:
Your final chapter is very practical and important – you give some advice about handling doubts when a student feels his/her faith slipping away. Give us a taste of your counsel here.
Kruger:
I ended on this important content for a reason. Everyone will have doubts. I bring up that if you have doubts that does not make you a bad Christian or person. It does not mean you should go hide somewhere and be embarrassed about it. Doubts are a normal part of the Christian life and what you want to do with doubts is bring them out in the open, examine them, and fight against them. Step one is taking the shame away from doubting.
The other thing I do in that chapter is talk about where doubts come from. People might not realize that a lot of times doubts do not come where we think they come from. Some doubts are purely intellectual, maybe they do not understand or have enough facts. That is actually very rare as the core doubts that people have. Doubts can stem from enduring a great amount of suffering or pain. Doubts can come from behavior, how you act affects what you believe. This is classic college. You live a different lifestyle and suddenly find yourself doubting. Those are not unrelated. I try to diagnose and talk about how you fight it. You must not be content to be in doubt but go after and fight back against it.
Zaspel:
I would love to take the time to have you discuss each chapter with us, but since we cannot just give us a brief fly-over of your book to our listeners can know what to expect and the kind of issues you address.
Kruger:
There are several things that I hope are helpful for people to figure out how to respond to all the things they will find on a college campus. I have tried to break the book down at the macro level. In the table of contents, I ask the key questions that you will get when going out in the secular world. Some of these things are more obvious than others. I deal with the exclusivity of Christ, our morality, how is it offensive. I start off by asking what are the chances that I am right, and my professors are wrong? For college students, you can see how they reason through this. Their professors are the smartest people on the planet, they are the student. If you deal with that head on the rest of the book does not matter. I talk about homosexuality, sexuality, hell, suffering, science, miracles, reliability of the Bible, and doubts. I hope it is helpful and my prayer is that certain college students will be encouraged by it. I hope people do not think it is not for them if they are not in college. Anyone can benefit from it.
Zaspel:
We are talking to Dr. Michael Kruger about his strategically important new book, Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College. It is a strategic and important resource. I plan to give a copy of this book to each high school senior in our church each year, and we encourage you to buy a box or two every year for each new batch of high school seniors at your church also – have them read it before they go off to college. Distribute this book generously.
Mike, thanks so much for your faithful work and for talking to us today.
Kruger:
Thanks, Fred. Great to be with you.
