A distinguishing mark of a Christian university is how its faculty pursues truth as a desirable end. There was a time when universities pursued truth. Today they only aspire to produce knowledge. For many truth is a relative concept and an artificial construct. The Christian university aspires to produce knowledge with the hope that knowledge can be transformed and engaged in wisdom. Wisdom is the domain of truth engaged in reality. The Christian university embraces truth in two forms: discovered truth and revealed truth. Truth discovered is that which we understand to be true and real through the faculties of logic and reason. The research biologist, psychologist, and physicist engage the scientific method, empirical observation, logic, and reasoning to attain a limited grasp of what is real and true. We discover that which is hidden and made known through the application of the higher order gifts , abilities, and intelligence that distinguishes us as humans. In the social, behavioral, and natural sciences, truth is a discovery framed as a construct derived from observation. Then there is revealed truth, truth that cannot be discovered, but must be revealed. It must be disclosed and given away, because it is beyond human efforts of discovery. While discovered truth involves human effort and ingenuity, unraveling mysteries and uncovering hidden realities, revealed truth comes to us from a God who delights in making himself known. Discovered truth is about the world that we can directly experience. Revealed truth is about the God who we can directly experience, and who is separate and beyond. In the Christian university, there is a unity of belief that Jesus Christ is the perfect, intentional revelation of God himself, the God who as himself comes, dwells, and moves among us, the God of relationship who seeks fellowship and intimacy. Jesus is the truth that puts a face on God the Father, the truth that is self -evident in His grace, mercy and blessing.
In the Christian university, through the panoply of exposures and encounters, the truth of the living Christ is seen in the people of Christ who make up the university. Christ is seen in the care of the faculty for the students. He is make known in the diligence in which staff members do their part to promote an environment that ensures student development and success. He is present in the spirit of love, compassion, and accountability all people in the university have for one another. When faculty and staff invite students home for a meal, when staff take-up a collection to send an international student home for the funeral of a loved one, when the students in a residence hall gather to pray for a student's father who has cancer, or when a faculty member take the time to come alongside a failing student and become a mentor and a friend, there is the truth that God is love and He is at work through others.
5 comments:
You distinguish between discovered and revealed truth, describing the former as that which is known through logic and reason applied to observation. Under this category you have placed social, behavioral, and natural sciences.
I wonder: where is the place of the humanities in this dichotomy of truths? Can philosophy, history, or the study of literature be reduced to the description of "discovered" truth you have provided? Perhaps you might consider broadening your category of discovery to include the imaginative search for integrated meaning, as Michael Polanyi outlines in his book, Meaning.
Further, do you really want to make this hard and fast a dichotomy, implying a gap between discovered and revealed truth? The implication of your blog is that Christ is a truth revealed on campus only in the action and interaction with faculty and fellow students. It seems to me that the activity of learning and contemplation of truth itself is ruled out as belonging to the process of revelation. Do you not, then, unintentionally foster the notion of an opposition between reason and faith?
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Biology Dissertation
There are “trinities,” of sorts, in various religions. This summarizes five:
Mahayana and Vajrayana vehicles of Buddhism speak of Trikaya, or three bodies: Nirmanakaya is the Buddha in human form, Sambhogakaya is celestial Buddha and Dharmakaya is the formless essence, or Buddha-nature. The Theravada primarily addresses the historic Buddha. The “Three Jewels” are the Buddha, the dharma (his teachings) and the sangha (the community of monks and nuns).
Christianity has its Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit referring to God, Jesus Christ and their spiritual bond of unity (some say the Godhead). Interpretation of the essential nature of each, and their relationship, differed among the churches. In Christian mysticism, the three ways of the spiritual life are the purgative in being purified from sin, the illuminative in true understanding of created things, and the unitive in which the soul unites with God by love.
Hinduism’s trimurti are the threefold activities of Brahman: in Brahma as creator, in Vishnu as sustainer and in Shiva as destroyer. Saccidananda are the triune attributes or essence of Brahman: sat, being, cit, consciousness and ananda, bliss. The three major schools of yoga are bhakti, devotion, and jnana, knowledge and karma, the way of selfless action. Raja yoga can apply to, and integrate, all three in mental and spiritual concentration.
In Islam, nafs is the ego-soul, qalb is heart and ruh is spirit. Heart is the inner self [soul], hardened when it is turned toward ego and softened when it is polished by dhikr, remembrance of the spirit of Allah. This is a three-part foundation for Sufi psychology. Initiation guides them from shari`a, religious law, along tariqa, the spiritual path, to haqiqa, interior reality. It is a gradual unveiling of the Real.
In the Kabbalah of Judaism, sefirot – sparks from the divine – have three fulcrums to balance the horizontal levels of the Tree of Life: Da`at (a pseudo-sefirot) is knowledge combining understanding and wisdom; Tiferet is beauty, the midpoint of judgment and loving kindness; Yesod is the foundation for empathy and endurance. They also vertically connect, through the supreme crown, the infinite and transcendent Ein Sof with its kingdom in the immanent Shekhinah.
(quoted from "the greatest achievement in life," my e-book at http://www.suprarational.org )
I have seen Jesus, and I have seen the Holy Spirit, and I have seen the big right hand, our Father. I have seen the Bride, I have seen into Heaven, and I have been taken out of my body to Heaven with two angels, I have seen Jesus 14 different times now. Email the minister at Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C. And you will see me held accountable for what I say when we are with our Lover. How blessed, how Holy, how sacred is his precious name, Jesus, the Holy One of Israel. I love you, David Lanier
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