The Spirituality of Learning

Today I am beginning a book discussion group on Neal Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. Pretty much every student who goes through Calvin College (the CRC’s denominational school) reads this book as part of their first year of studies. A place like Kwantlen University, though, doesn't have any interest as an institution in thinking about the integration of faith and learning, so a small group of us here on campus have taken it on ourselves to think through these issues. How are education and learning, especially at a secular school like KPU, part of our Christian faith and our walk with God? In the introduction to the book Plantinga writes the following:

Thoughtful Christians know that if we obey the Bible’s great commandment to love God with our whole mind, as well as with everything else, then we will study the splendour of God’s creation in the hope of grasping part of the ingenuity and grace that form it. One way to love God is to know and love God’s work. Learning is therefore a spiritual calling: properly done, it attaches us to God. (xi)

What a simple and yet massively expansive vision! Part of the task of a Christian chaplaincy on a non-Christian campus is to open up this vision that brings together learning and the Christian faith in an intimate way. Chemistry, computer science, psychology, business, philosophy, or any number of other university disciplines can all be brought under the lordship of Christ. It is God's good world, given to us to explore and to know. Coming to know and love God's creation is part and parcel of coming to know and love God himself. 

But at a place like KPU that connection can be hard to make. Isn't university for getting a job and taking care of practical things in life? Christian faith is just for church, right? That is exactly the position that Plantinga and the best of the Christian tradition want to challenge. The Christian faith is all about the “practical things in life”. God in Christ has made a truly cosmic claim of lordship. And Christians, in both Christian and non-Christian educational settings, need to be attentive and open to how the Holy Spirit is making that Lordship known in the midst of a broken world.

So I’m looking forward to the discussion and the possibilities of how our Christian faith and practice can be made known on this campus! There is truly not one square inch, as Abraham Kuyper put it, over which Christ our Lord does not say “that is mine”. And a book group at Kwantlen is one small but important way to bear witness to that very truth.