The room was quiet for a moment's pause. Frustration was welling under our skin as we sat in the classroom. The conversation was ripe but no one wanted to breach the silence. No one wanted to answer the question the professor asked, Is the Christian worldview mixed with other worldviews or is the book we are reading wrong? There was too much at stake to answer. People would much rather say "This is stupid" and "I am just not interested in this conversation" than answer the question. No one wanted to open up the silence and see what lied underneath. No one wanted to admit that they were sort of curious of the answer.
Everyone has to take a worldviews class at Regent University. From many students I hear petty sighs about homework when it comes to Worldviews. To most people, the class seems inconvenient, an extra dose of philosophy for the mind to digest. Out of fatigue, people come to the class, sit, never talk and leave without engaging in discussion. Others talk the whole time ready to pounce on any word that challenges their scriptural perspective. No one wants to be the one to challenge what the church has taught them.
Slowly my classmates began to come out of hiding. The fear that discussion would become a reason to attack each other slowly changed into a genuine questioning of the class textbook. People started hypothesizing and recollecting and formulating their own ideas. The fear that individual opinions were not relevant was overcome by honesty. People began to realize that it is not wrong to consider the question, What do I think of the Christian worldview? An invisible unity was building among us students. It was a spark of excitement and a respect for the learning process that begins by admitting three words, "I don't know."
Being in a classroom is about learning. Learning is a matter of rummaging in the dark to find the boundaries of knowledge. Once we find them, we stretch them and they snap back on us like a tight rubberband that slaps us in the face. This makes us remember that boundaries were set for a reason. They help us interpret knowledge successfully. Daring to ask hard questions and share opinions is not a sign of stupidity; it is a sign of the challenging the norm and engaging in learning. After all, what is higher education made of? It the study of various opinions.
Central to the learning experience are the ideas of honesty and humility. We must all be honest enough to admit our questions, even if they challenge the norm or seem meaningless. It takes humility to share thoughts with others. It involves the risk of being attacked for what you think. It takes humility to hear others and not be ruled by the desire to immediately attack and destroy their thoughts. It is not a courtroom we are attending, it is Regent University. We are in college where learning is the goal. If you have come to Regent, you have come for a reason and your opinion is important to classmates, to the university but also to Christianity as a whole.
Humility is daring to question what you know is familiar to find out what is right. Speaking up in class involves the risk of being wrong. It also involves the risk of being right. Humility is the ability to understand how to approach a topic appropriately and gracefully when you are the one who is right. Do not ever fear being wrong. Fear the fear that causes us to be quiet and not learn. Being wrong is part of the learning process. This is how we create new ideas. This is how we learn. If students can dig deeper into Christianity, ask hard questions and bring them up in class, who knows what could happen? The classroom may become a completely new environment. God is big enough for this expansion. Are you?
