Staying Christian in College

Mikel Del Rosario:
Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, Cultural Engagement Manager here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic on The Table Podcast today is keeping the faith in college. And my guest on the show today coming to us via Zoom is Michael Kruger. Michael is the President of Reformed Theological Seminary on the Charlotte campus in North Carolina. And he's also Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Michael Kruger:
Thank you. Good to be back on it.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, it is good to have you back on. It's not your first time on The Table with us. You were on with Andreas Köstenberger back in the day in the early days of our show talking about biblical inerrancy with Darrell Bock. And for those who are listening right now, if you want to check that out, it's Episode 140 and 141 on your favorite podcast app or at dts.edu/thetable.

Mikel Del Rosario:
But today, we're talking about helping Christians, specifically Christian students who are in college, maintain their faith and navigate some of these intellectual challenges that a lot of Christian students face in college, especially those who are on secular college campuses. And Mike, you wrote a book called Surviving Religion 101, and it's a wonderful resource for both parents and students. And tell us how this book came about.

Michael Kruger:
Yeah, this is a different book for me than the others I've written. It's my first lay level book. And it's also one of the few books that has such a personal story behind it. It's partly autobiographical. I tell a little bit of my own story and then talk mainly about I had to help my daughter, Emma, through her college experience by writing a series of letters to her. So yeah, it started years ago when I was an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill and found myself in a religion class that was very challenging to me. And I didn't have answers to the very hard questions being thrown my way. And the professor was dynamic and eloquent and persuasive and didn't believe Christianity at all. And it really rattled my faith in profound ways. And some may know, that professor's name was Bart Ehrman, who now is quite well known as a very serious scholar and critic of Christianity.

Michael Kruger:
And there I was years ago. And he was a new professor at the time, but there I was in his class without answers to the questions. And that sent me on a new trajectory on myself in the biblical scholarship as I've struggled through that, but then also have always wanted to ever since help other college students in the same situation. So when my daughter got to be college age, I thought to myself, "Well now's the time." So I wrote it and thankfully, I'm seeing it helping my daughter, Emma, and hopefully many others.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, as a dad who now has a high school senior who's looking at going into college and looking at which college he wants to go to, it was a timely and good read for me. So I appreciate that.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Now, yeah, Bart Ehrman and his book with Bruce Metzger actually is still my go-to for the transmission of the New Testament, his book on the New Testament text. And he is quite famous now as a New Testament professor that a lot of conservative Christians like to engage with because he's so critical of the Christian faith. But unlike you, you dove into these doubts and questions and became a New Testament professor yourself. How did other Christian students who were hearing this for the first time navigate those challenges?

Michael Kruger:
Well yeah, this was one of the fascinating things about it all. There I sat in a class wondering what do I do with all this? And I also began to watch what my fellow Christian students were doing. And their reactions were all over the map, probably not that different than what you still see today. I mean some Christians just pretend it wasn't happening. "I'm just going to ignore all this, keep believing and just pretend it's not real." And of course, sort of this cutoff idea.

Michael Kruger:
Then other Christians were the opposite, which is, "Oh, it looks like everything I believed is false and I'll just embrace some other religion or no religion at all." And off they went.

Michael Kruger:
And then there were yet others who were trying to find some way to make a hybrid out of what they heard in class and their historic Christian beliefs. And so I watched all this unfold.

Michael Kruger:
My approach was a little different. I simply wanted to know whether anyone had ever answered these questions before in the history of Christian scholarship. So I went on a little bit of a research bend myself trying to figure out whether Christian scholars had dealt with these questions. And I was pleased to discover not only that they had, but that they had for generations, even back to the early church, and that the answers were quite robust and there was a whole other side of the story. So that's what peaked my interest. And then I decided from there, "Hey, I think I'll just keep going down this path." I ended up down a whole new academic career as a result.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So Mike, what would you say to the Christian student who is maybe registered for Ehrman's class or another class at a similar college, and they're concerned about the doubts that they might have, the challenges they might encounter, but maybe they're also excited about what they're going to find there? How would you counsel someone to walk into a situation like that as a Christian?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. So one of the things that I bring up in the book is there's two extremes that I try to avoid. One extreme is to suggest that, "Well hey, I'm impervious to any problems here no matter what anyone says. My faith can never be shaken and I'm all good, thank you very much." So there's a naive approach where you'd go into religion class thinking, "Well hey, I grew up in a Christian home. I'm going to be just fine." No. You want to be careful, you want to be wise and you want to have your radar up, so to speak.

Michael Kruger:
But then there's the flip side of the argument, which is the other extreme, which is some people say, "I can never allow myself to ever hear anything that's contrary to what I believe lest it contaminate me." And there's a cutoff from all non-Christian thought out of fear. And I think we want to avoid that as well. So whether a person takes a class with Erhman or not is not a decision I can make.

Michael Kruger:
But eventually, every one of us is going to have to face those arguments. We're going to have to deal with the world we live in, which is not always friendly to our faith. So at some point, you're going to have to deal with it. And if you're surrounded by good Christian fellowship and you have people you can work through those issues with, then I think you can use those things as an opportunity to grow, to have your faith challenged, to look for answers and to work your way through those problems. But what we don't want to become is Christians is isolated and cutoff, never engaging in these things, because that just hinders our ability to interact with the world around us.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). We found in our research that one of the common characteristics of Gen Z is that a lot of them have a hesitancy to ever express an objective view that somehow suggests other people happen to be wrong about a certain thing, especially when it comes to morality, sexuality, religion, things like this. How would you counsel a student who's struggling with the exclusive claims that Christianity makes, like "Christianity is the only true worldview" for example?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. So I understand very much how after all the cultural pressure we feel and the bombardment we get every day why the average Christian believer is going to be on the hesitant side. You're going to be maybe a little shy, maybe a little worried that whatever you say when you speak up, it's going to get creamed in the class. I get that.

Michael Kruger:
Just a couple points of pushback. First of all, even though it looks like a lot of Christian students may be afraid to make dogmatic statements, I would argue that they should observe the fact that non-Christians make all kinds of dogmatic moral statements all the time. And this is a bit of the paradox and the irony that needs to be observed. It's interesting because while you're non-Christian friend may say morality's relative and that everybody gets to have their own view, they don't actually mean it when they talk about the real world, because they're quite upset about a great many things.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
In fact, cultural commentators have noticed now that there's more what is called "moral outrage" in our culture than ever before. So what's ironic is we're about the least Christian culture we've ever been, at least in America, in its recorded history, but maybe has the most moral outrage we've ever had in our world history. So I think what a Christian student can say is, "Look, I'm making moral claims." Yes, but don't miss the point, Mr. Non-Christian, you're making moral claims too.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
And so now the question isn't whether you can make absolute moral claims, but who has a basis in their worldview for making credible moral claims? At least as a Christian, I have a reason why something's right or wrong or good or bad. I'd simply challenge my non-Christian friend: give me the reasons in your worldview why you think something is right or wrong, good or bad? And let's see who makes most sense of the world. So that's where you want the conversation to go. And I think it's going to be tough to do, but it needs to be done with patience and charity and grace, without defensiveness, and certainly, without some martyr complex where we feel like everybody's out to get us.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I think that's really true, especially today with issues of justice, issues of race, all these things that people are looking at going, "There's something wrong with our world." It really shouldn't be like this. But where does that should come from, right? Why should people be loving each other instead of hating each other, helping each other instead of hurting each other? On a naturalistic worldview, there really is no should, right? And so thinking about what grounds that. Yeah, it would be a really good way to begin having that conversation with somebody who is of a different faith, a different worldview.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Sometimes, the idea is more universalism for some people. It's that I don't want to say my Muslim neighbor's wrong, so maybe can't we all just be worshiping the same God or whatever? What would you say to somebody who encounters that universalism and feels like they don't really know how to navigate that on college campuses?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah, this is common too and it's certainly not new. The whole idea of pluralism, the idea that all religions are the same, that they all get you to the same place, all eventually worship the same God, is a common idea. And it sounds really good on the surface. Can't we just all get along? Why do we have to fight about which religion is better? Let's just say we're all as good as each other.

Michael Kruger:
Well that sounds good on the surface, it runs into a couple of significant problems. One signficant problem is that if you believe in the laws of logic, it can't be true because religions just simply say incompatible things. So they can't all be right. Muslims say Jesus did not bodily rise from the dead. Christians say Jesus did in fact at the day of his resurrection bodily rise from the dead. They can't both be correct. Someone's right, someone's wrong. So on one level, the whole let's all just say we're all equally true idea sounds plausible on the surface, but just in reality, it just doesn't hold up.

Michael Kruger:
The second reason that we need to look at why that doesn't work is because obviously, we're following Christ in all that we do as Christians. And he's the one that made the claim for the exclusive nature of the Christian movement. And this is a thing that we just tend to forget. We tend to think that Christians believe Christianity is the only right religion because we just happen to love our religion so much that we declared it number one, or something like this. Well no, that's not how it happened. Christians don't just happen to like our religion and just want to say, "Hey, we're the best." But rather, we're simply following the claims of Jesus. Jesus says he's the way, the truth and the life and that no one comes to the father but through him. That's his claim, not our claim. But we simply follow and submit to that claim.

Michael Kruger:
And that doesn't make us arrogant. It doesn't make us narrow-minded and it certainly doesn't make us hateful. We're simply acknowledging what Jesus' own claim was. Now, of course, someone can challenge the claim. They can say, "I don't think it's true." Fair enough. But if anybody has a shot at knowing how to get to heaven, I would put my money on Jesus. And moreover, even if someone is wrong about a claim, it doesn't make them hateful for making it. And so I think those are some key points to raise.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. What can you do if you believe it's true, that's your view, right?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah.

Mikel Del Rosario:
It doesn't make you a hateful person.

Michael Kruger:
Absolutely. I mean I always say to people, what if Jesus was right? I mean what if he's right and he is the only way to heaven? Is it hateful to say that? They almost always presume it's not true and therefore it sounds hateful, but what if it is true? Well now, what do you do now? Now, you're to not say it might be hateful rather than to say it.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah. Yeah. In many ways actually, it's tough to be proud in the Christian faith because you have to be humble to be a Christian and say, "God, I can't make it to heaven on my own. That's why I need you and I need to repent of all these wrong things I've done." I think humility really is essential to being a Christian. And so that's another thing we could say as well.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And I find in a lot of apologetics type conversations, if you're talking about the existence of God, the problem of evil, some of these classical apologetics questions, eventually there comes a point where someone says, "Okay, sure. Well maybe there is a God of some sort. But why Christianity?" And then of course now, you're into differences in the gospels. Can we trust the Bible? How do we know that Jesus really rose from the dead? And things like this. How would you help a student who may be starting to maybe deconstruct some of their early beliefs about Christianity and the Bible and re-examine is the Bible really true?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. So I think it goes without saying that one of the most common questions that we get as Christians, and certainly that I get in my field and as a scholar, is this question: why should we trust the Bible? Why should we believe it's true? That's a big question. And it's so big and so vague and vast that the average 19-year-old college student is like, "Well what do I do with that? What's my elevator speech? In 30 seconds, how do I say why the Bible is worth following?" Well what I do in my book is I narrow that question down. Rather than asking whether the whole Bible is true, let's just ask the question about the gospels.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
Do we have any reason to think the gospels are reliable records of the person of Jesus? And if we conclude that they are and they're trustworthy, then you've got every reason to think that the rest of the Bible's true because not only do you have Jesus himself who's been vindicated by his own resurrection, but you also have his own teachings about the Old Testament. We have to remember that Jesus himself believed the Bible. If by Bible, we mean Old Testament, which what it would have been in his own day. And so why do I believe the Bible? Ultimately, because I trust Jesus.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
I think he knows the best about these books. And why do I trust Jesus? Well because I think the gospel's given me a reliable historical record of who he is, what he said and that he rose from the dead. So I think that's a way you can go in the argument, and it's a way I go in the book.

Mikel Del Rosario:
That's a really nice way of breaking it down. We believe what Jesus believed about the Old Testament, that it is the word of God and he quoted it as God's word. And then the New Testament is the sayings, the teachings of Jesus and his official spoke's people. So we have in a nutshell right there just a very short, succinct thing that you can use to begin a conversation about some of those areas.

Now, you said your daughter, Emma, is a medical student, right?

Michael Kruger:
She's a nursing student.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Okay.

Michael Kruger:
So she's in the nursing program at UNC. Right.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And so for some people who are in that field, they're butt up against the idea of maybe I have to choose science or religion. This is a common thing as well that people think that, "Somehow science and religion are exclusive things. Either you believe the Bible or you believe science, but you can't believe both." How would you help someone, and maybe even specifically your own daughter who is in this field, begin to navigate this idea of science and the Bible?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. It's an unfortunate polarization of these two things. And so I remind people that actually Christianity has a great history of Christians who love science and engaged in science, and arguably even some of those famous scientists had a Christian in certainly at least theistic worldview. So some of the greatest advances in science actually come from believing Christians. And so you have to realize there's this great history between science and Christianity that is not at odds with itself like so many people have in their head that it must be.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
The other thing I make a distinction of is when you talk about science versus Christianity is you have to make a distinction between theories of science and the practice of science. Christians are 100% behind the practice, the methodology of science, that we think it is, in fact, a useful thing to explore our world, to understand it, we're certainly pro-science in that way.

Michael Kruger:
But that's not the same thing as saying that we have to accept every individual theory that comes along. And so sometimes what scientists do is say, "Here's a theory. Either you accept it or you don't. And if you don't, well then you must not be scientific." And we're like, "Hold on a second. You can reject an individual theory here and there, but still be pro-science in general."

Michael Kruger:
The last thing I'll say about the science and Christianity thing, which I think is so critical, is that people tend to think that science gives you sure results and religion is totally subjective.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
Well I want to challenge that. I think that's incredibly misleading. On the science giving you sure results point, it's been shown of course that science isn't the neutral enterprise that we think it is. Scientists just throw on the white lab coat and just look at the facts. But Thomas Kuhn and others have shown that science does its own work through paradigms, through systems that themselves are not dependent on science. And so there's a sense in which yes, scientists are biased too. So don't think just for a moment because science says something that it's necessarily bulletproof, because science can be just as subjective to its own bias and worldview problems as anyone else. So when you look at the complete package then, there's nothing incompatible about science and Christianity.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So some people are more on the scientific side, other people are doing more work in the arts, theater majors, people who are working in music. And in a lot of the arts that we've been seeing in our present day, there seems to be a portrayal of Christians as backward, as intolerant, as bigoted.

Mikel Del Rosario:
For example, years ago, I remember there was this Taylor Swift video. She had a hit song called, "You Need to Calm Down." And especially in that music video really captured this popular view that, in the public square, biblical sexual ethics is outdated or intolerant or even hateful in the minds of some people. Of course, there are some really nice people who see the Bible differently in terms of that area of our lives. What advice would you give to a Christian who's having to navigate these conversations about sexuality and gender identity on campus today?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah, this is notoriously complex. I think we all know that for whatever sets of historical reasons, sexuality issues are at the center of a lot of these debates between Christianity and other philosophies and other worldviews.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
It used to be years ago that you could have those debates, go into the public square and talk about sexual orientation or this, that, and the other and just argue about what made the most sense of the world and what was the best way to think about things. And people were willing to have a vigorous exchange and move on.

Michael Kruger:
What I would tell college students today, and of course, I don't even need to tell them this because they know it, is that the role sexuality has in our culture now is very different. It used to be that you can just debate the merits of any particular moral behavior. But now, you're actually challenging someone's own identity.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
To challenge a certain behavior now is to challenge who a person is at their core because they identify themselves with their sexual activities so much. And so that's going to require a more carefulness. It's going to require us to be more patient, more gentle, more thoughtful in the way we articulate our views. It's not going to require us to change our views. We want to be aware that when we talk about a certain behavior being right or wrong, there is a person on the other end of that that may, we would argue wrongly, but still may identify their own identity with that behavior. We need to make sure we navigate that carefully.

Michael Kruger:
The other piece of advice I have I think is really critical here is if you're talking about homosexuality or any kinds of sexuality in the university environment, don't just debate a particular act in whether it's moral or immoral. I think that misses the point and I think it leads to all kinds of immediate emotional reactions. Instead of doing that, step back for a moment, don't debate whether this act or that act is moral or immoral, rather ask how we know any act is moral or immoral. In other words, what I think the real nub of the question is not whether, say, homosexual marriage is right or wrong, but how do you know anything is right or wrong?

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
Now, once you start doing that with your non-Christian friends, it changes the debate entirely. First of all, it's less emotionally laden because you're not just talking about sex now, you're talking about how they get morals from about anything. Once you've forced them down that path, now they have to account for their worldview and have to account for how they know things are right or wrong. And I think we're going to be on much firmer ground there because I think a lot of people don't have a reason for why they think things are right or wrong. They just either like something or don't. We want to point out how that's not a foundation for morality when all the dust settles.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Now, for some Christian students, they have to go through some faith deconstruction stage and they want to take apart what they've believed about the Bible and Christianity and re-examine it. But for some people, they begin to feel like their faith is slipping away at a certain point. How would you counsel somebody who's concerned that they just can't believe anymore?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. So I think this is getting into the subject of doubt. The last main chapter I have in the book is on this subject of doubt. And this was a really important chapter I think to have in the book, because I think honestly, we don't talk enough about doubt in the evangelical church. And I try to avoid two extremes in that chapter, and I would say the same to a college student.

Michael Kruger:
The first thing I want to make sure that they know is that it's normal to doubt, that it doesn't make you some pariah or a second-class Christian. It doesn't mean you should feel ashamed and never come to church again. That doubt is a normal part of any Christian life. And don't just deal with it in isolation, but bring it out and let's have a conversation about it. So to take away the stigma and shame on doubt I think is a real key part of it.

Michael Kruger:
The flip side though, I also want to say that we don't want to just revel in our doubts. There's some today that make it sound like the most excellent virtue you could pursue in the Christian life is doubt. It's like uncertainty is the highest moral thing that we strive for.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
No. I think doubt if left unchecked could lead to serious problems and may even lead to some people leaving the faith entirely. So we want to work against our doubts, but we don't want to pretend like there are some sort of shameful stigma.

Michael Kruger:
And so once you get that on the table, I think that welcomes people to come into a conversation about that. And I hope the church can do a better job welcoming these questions and just helping Christians work through their doubts. And I do that in my chapter in the book. I talk about different kinds of doubt, I talk about why people doubt, what causes them to doubt, and then some steps to work through those doubts once you have them.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And one thing you mentioned is the idea of, "Doubting your doubts." Unpack that for us.

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. So I give Tim Keller some credit here for the way he phrases that, and I say in the book: I took that from him. Doubting your doubts is just a way of realizing that: if you doubt a Christian belief, okay, you're probably doubting that Christian belief because you've come to believe some other thing that challenges it. But what if you started to doubt that some other thing that challenges it? In other words, what if you subject to that other thing also to the same level of scrutiny and doubt as you did to your Christian beliefs?

Michael Kruger:
You might find very quickly that doubting your doubts alleviates that problem. So take, for example, the idea that evolution proves the Bible's untrue, okay? So I believe the Bible's true, and then I have a secondary thing called evolution that comes along and says, "Well the Bible's not." And therefore, I start doubting whether the Bible's true.

Michael Kruger:
To doubt your doubts means but what if you subjected evolution to the same scrutiny you subjected the Bible to? Well you'd quickly discover that evolution has its own pile of problems. In fact, so many in fact, I think it has bigger problems than the Bible would ever have. In fact, there's reasons to think evolution is suffering from its own set of problems and is not worthy of chucking your faith over that. And so by doubting your doubts, you realize that you can pick away at those problems one by one.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Just before I asked you that question, you had mentioned you wish that churches could do a better job at helping college students navigate these things. Could you give just one suggestion of one way that a church might be able to come alongside a Christian college student in this regard?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. Well there's two layers of this. What do you do with students before they leave for college? That's one question, right? And then you've got students who already have gotten there. And certainly, one of the good things we're blessed with on many American college campuses at least is really good Christian fellowships. There's Christian fellowships that are there from parachurch organizations and then also churches at Christian ministries. And this is going to be a key part of surviving religion one-on-one, so to speak.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Kruger:
And here's where I come to what I call my horror movie rule. I love scary movies. I know not everyone likes scary movies, but I have this thing I call, "the horror movie rule." And what the horror movie rule is, and it's always violated in horror movies, is that when you're in a horror movie situation, you don't go anywhere alone and you don't go anywhere in the dark. Of course, the joke is in every horror movie, the protagonist just does this for whatever senseless reason. He'll go off alone and in the dark. You're like, "Why are you doing this?"

Mikel Del Rosario:
Right.

Michael Kruger:
And inevitably, bad things happen. But if you follow the horror movie rule and don't do that, then what you do is you stay in a group and you stay in the light. How do you survive religion one-on-one? Well you need to stay in a group. You need to stay in a light and not make the horror movie mistake and run off alone in the dark. And this is where church has come in. Churches and parachurches can provide that fellowship where students can process their doubts in Christian community rather than processing their doubts in a religion class. They can bring it to the Christian community, they can have a dialogue about it and talk about it openly rather than with stigma and shame. And I think that's the thing that needs to happen in the church today. And I'm not sure it's happening necessarily the way we want it to.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Those are great ideas. Mike, how can people connect with you if they want to find out more?

Michael Kruger:
Yeah. The best way to connect to me is probably my website. It's called Canon Fodder, which is a pun. It's one N in Canon, referring to the biblical Canon. But the URL is just michaeljkruger.com. And so they can just look up my name, they'll find my site. And there, I have blog articles, I have posted my academic articles. It mentions my books and I have tons of videos and resources and other types of things on there where people can learn more about the Bible and its origins. But also, I cover a lot of different theological topics there. And of course, you can get links to all my books from there. So yeah, that's probably the best way to connect with me.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Awesome. Well Michael's book is Surviving Religion 101, I really enjoyed this book, Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College. It's really a unique way to present the material. I enjoyed it. You can connect with me as well. If you're on Twitter, you can add me on Twitter @ApologeticsGuy. I'm also Apologetics Guy on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. And we thank you for joining us on The Table today.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mike, thanks for joining us too.

Michael Kruger:
Thank you. Good to be with you.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Good to have you back. Please do subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave us an honest review. It really does help the show, it helps people discover these conversations and the content that we produce. And we hope that you will join us here again next time on The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture.