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Our Philosophy
Christian Faith Courses at Messiah College: What We Do and Why We Do It The mission of Messiah College is to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character, and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership, and reconciliation in church and society. --Messiah College Mission Statement The goal of the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies is to model and encourage informed thinking about Christian faith and practice and the role of religion in the world. We foster spiritual and theological reflection that enables individuals to develop and deepen Christian commitment, interpret matters of faith intelligently, and minister to others with wisdom and compassion. --Biblical and Religious Studies Department Mission Statement
All Messiah College students must take two General Education courses from the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies, one in Bible and the other in theology (“Christian Beliefs”). Students typically take the Bible course during their first or second year and the theology course during their second or third year. Together these two courses comprise the Affirming the Christian Faith component of the college’s General Education curriculum.
Matters of faith appear in many other parts of the Messiah curriculum. All faculty members at Messiah are required to help students consider the connections between the Christian faith and their academic disciplines. But although faith concerns are not the exclusive domain of the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies, they are nonetheless more explicitly studied there. Whereas other academic departments at Messiah seek to make connections between the Christian faith and their respective academic disciplines, most of the courses offered by the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies have Christian faith as their focus. Like other faculty members at Messiah College, we believe that students are best served when they are encouraged to think deeply. Our courses are therefore academic courses that demand close readings of texts, exposure to new ideas, and critical thinking. In other words, we require our students to do challenging intellectual work—though not intellectual work for the sake of intellect alone. Even as Messiah College’s mission is to “educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character, and Christian faith,” our department’s mission is to help students “develop and deepen Christian commitment, interpret matters of faith intelligently, and minister to others with wisdom and compassion.” We believe that the deepening of one’s faith requires the examining of one’s faith. We want our students to gain a more complete vision of reality and thereby acquire greater abilities to articulate what they believe, why they believe it, and why they practice their faith as they do (as some people say, we hope to enable our students to more fully “own” their faith). We realize that, from the standpoint of our students, this educational process can range from invigorating to threatening. Our classes serve a wide range of students from multiple Christian traditions. Some arrive in our classes having already thought a great deal about their faith, whereas others have done very little reflection on such matters. As faculty members at a Christian liberal arts college, we require our students to wrestle through matters of faith, though not without our assistance. It is not our goal to indoctrinate students but to provide them with the best resources for thinking responsibly about Christian faith and practice. Bible: What We Do and Why We Do It Students at Messiah College take their Gen Ed Bible course during their first or second year. It is not a Bible survey course focused on content, but is rather a course that enables students to read the Bible well. It is our conviction that helping our students read the Bible responsibly in our classes will prepare them to use the Bible well throughout their lives. In Messiah Bible classes, we attempt to comprehend the meaning of biblical passages in their historical and literary contexts. This is because the biblical texts were written by people who lived many centuries ago in cultures that differed in significant ways from our own. To avoid reading our own cultural norms back into biblical stories, we explore what scholars have discovered about the world of the Bible. We apply rigorous academic standards to our work, because in doing so we better understand the biblical message and its relevance to our lives today.
Communication always takes place in a context, and if we do not understand that context, we misunderstand the message. Therefore, to understand God’s word to the world, we study the languages in which the Bible was written (mainly Hebrew and Greek); we study ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean history and cultures; we study archaeology. In short, we seek to understand the living situations in which the biblical messages were first delivered. Our scholarship reveals how seriously we take the Bible. We expect the Bible to speak to us, and we try not to tame its message. Our goal is to help our students attain some of these scholarly abilities—not as an academic endeavor alone, but as the best way to hear and apply the biblical message. As noted in Messiah’s Confession of Faith, the intent of the Scriptures is “to reveal God’s ways and purposes, to nourish our minds and souls, and to instruct us in how we ought to think and to live.” Hearing and applying the biblical message will both comfort us and make demands upon us. Living in light of Jesus’ teachings and his example of selfless service to others removes us from our comfort zones. Because Scripture calls for right living, not just right thinking, our Bible classes emphasize living lives of service and reconciliation in obedience to Jesus’ words—and in keeping with the College’s mission to prepare men and women “for lives of service, leadership, and reconciliation in church and society.” Christian Beliefs: What We Do and Why We Do It Students at Messiah take their Christian Beliefs (theology) course after they’ve taken their Bible course. This is not because the material is more difficult, but rather because we believe the Bible serves as the foundation for doing Christian theology. We believe that reading the Bible well enables students to do responsible theological reflection. Theology, however, is not an advanced Bible course. Proper theological reflection includes Bible study, but it also means entering into conversations about God and the Christian life that have taken place over two thousand years of church history. Indeed, much of what we do in our Christian Beliefs classes is best understood as introducing students to the theological questions, and answers to those questions, that have been posed throughout the church’s history. In some cases, it is relatively easy to identify clear answers to theological questions. In other cases, however, Christians have posed a variety of answers to important questions (for instance, how can we hold together the notions of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility? Were Jesus’ life and death necessary, and if so, why?). These are difficult issues, and there are some theological questions that we must finally admit we cannot fully answer. Still, we believe it’s important for our students—both for their own sakes, and for the sake of people they meet—to think deeply about these matters and to learn from others who have come before them.
Different Messiah theology professors take different approaches as they help students enter into the discipline of theology. Some professors are quite transparent about their theological views, advocating certain answers as the best ones; other professors endeavor to be more neutral, introducing students to various perspectives without (or before) identifying their own. Similarly, some readings outline a variety of theological options, whereas other readings emphasize a particular answer to a problem. In the end, the goal of these readings is the same: to expose our students to crucial theological questions, and to give them resources for constructing theological frameworks that will serve them and their churches well. Given the range of issues we cover in our Christian Beliefs classes, students will no doubt encounter ideas that are both similar to and different from their own. Unlike some Christian colleges, Messiah is committed to being broadly Christian, welcoming faculty, students, and viewpoints from a broad range of Christian traditions. At the same time, the College’s rootedness in the Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan traditions means that Messiah students will also be required to engage ideas from these more particular theological traditions. The key word here is engage. Students are not required to adopt these traditions as their own. They are, however, expected to reflect upon all the material they encounter in a given course, even if some of that material challenges the views they currently hold. Wherever we find students in their journeys of faith, our goal is to work with them—pastorally, though also rigorously—to raise and answer the most crucial theological questions. We wish we could say that our students’ questions are fully answered and their theologies are “all tied up” by the end of this one-semester course. That is not the case. In fact, many of them are just beginning to take certain questions seriously. Our modest hope is that each student will take steps toward developing a theological framework that is faithful to Scripture and conversant with the history of Christian theological reflection. Some Final Words
We recognize that our students are not disembodied minds. They are women and men with histories, families, feelings, and commitments. For many of them, the educational process is wonderfully satisfying, but even then, the journey can sometimes be hard, even painful. Of course, we also recognize that the pain they feel often derives from the very activities we have demanded of them: reading challenging books, engaging in spirited discussions, and writing difficult papers. Our work is this regard is not unlike that of coaches, who work their players hard in view of a larger goal. For us, that goal is to prepare thoughtful disciples of Jesus Christ for the long haul, disciples who have learned to read the Bible well and have begun to develop a theological framework that is truly their own. This sort of training can be taxing, but it is worth the best efforts of students and faculty alike. As faculty members, we stand ready to discuss ideas after class, and to share with our students our own experiences with these issues. In all of this, we hope that they will find our classes occasions to grow in intellect, character, and Christian faith. Department of Biblical and Religious Studies Approved, 6 September 2006
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