Bob Jones University and Knowing What's True

I had the fun experience of speaking to some students at Harvard Law School last Friday (and welcome to any of you dropping by this blog who were there).  I pitched the kind of faith we talk about here and we had about half an hour of discussion after I'd finished my remarks.  What many students, presumably with a churchgoing background, wanted most to talk about was my take on truth.  If truth was really this big thing that we'd spend a lifetime exploring...was I saying, effectively, that truth couldn't be known?  It just seemed unsettling.

I thought of that conversation today over breakfast as I read this item, spotlighting what struck me as a completely unexpected move from the current president of the famously arch-conservative, arch-fundamentalist Bob Jones University.  Here are the first few paragraphs.

Bob Jones University has apologized for racist policies including a one-time ban on interracial dating that wasn't lifted until nine years ago and its unwillingness to admit black students until 1971.

The private fundamentalist Christian school said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible, according to a statement posted Thursday on the university's website.

The university in northwestern South Carolina, which has about 5,000 students, was founded in 1927. It didn't begin admitting black students until nearly 20 years after the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

"We failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful," the statement said.

Let's go back to that amazing statement early in the article:

The private fundamentalist Christian school said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible.  A fundamentalist school says that something it believed and taught for eighty years was cultural and not the objective, obvious truth of God?  What sort of world are we living in? 

To me, this seems as clear a sign as any that the waters are shifting throughout the church, that what we've previously thought gave us the "truth" that we taught no longer seems so compelling.  We previously thought that compelling arguments helped us somehow gain God's vantage point on truth, that it would be an abandonment of the gospel to ever admit that all of us perceive everything through a cultural lens.  If we conceded that, then how could we say we believed and lived for the truth?  How could we know what it was?  To concede that would be to concede the whole game to the secularists.

Well, if Bob Jones University has given up on that point, that has to say something. 

So what is the basis for what you regard as true?  My answer on Friday night?  My experience was the basis for that.  I did, happily, regard the Bible as profoundly true.  How so?  Because when I did my best to live out what it pitched, it consistently was self-validating.  The things it led me to expect would happen when I followed its teachings did, in fact, happen.  Jesus, in particular, proved to be a trustworthy guide.

But is that your answer?  Truth, we all agree, is very important.  So how do you go about figuring out what's true?