John Piper has a question and answer podcast where a lady asked him about ambiguous truth at her college. I have summarized some key ideas, but encourage you to read this article titled “How much can Christians learn from Non-Christians?” This lady asked,

“Today in lecture I could barely keep from crying as we discussed a novel so full of depravity I decided to just read the Sparknotes of the book instead of the book itself. My heart is so weighed down and broken. I don’t understand their pragmatic justifications. Every poem, short story, and novel we have covered is filled with sex, rape, grotesque and graphic depictions of murder, infanticide, slavery, and cursing. It makes me so weary. And they call those things ‘morally ambiguous.’ What can I do? What should I do?⁷”

Unfortunately, if you or your child are entering highschool, she has summarized many of the themes in the books you will face over the next four years, and even more if you pursue university. Some of the first books I read in highschool were Oedipus Rex and Wuthering Heights which largely put a checkmark on each point of the list the lady above was shocked by. These books are often not edifying our youth, they are instead showing the depravity of human nature in ways that a normal mind would likely not construct.

When we study, we are trying to understand an aspect of truth. All of our classes are going to be on a spectrum of truth. With math, we are trying to see the logic and patterns in numbers. In biology, we try to understand the functions in life. In other courses like literature, we are going to find the subject pervaded with ideas that are further from truth and more conformed to bias and judgement. John Piper in the podcast I referenced says,

“In general, we could say that there are two kinds of knowledge Christians gain in school and in lifelong education. One is knowledge of God and his ways and his world. That is distinctively Christian. The other is knowledge that overlaps with what unbelievers know. For example, two plus two is four, grammatical rules, chemical processes, laws of physics, human anatomy. These are the thousands of aspects of common experience of the world that we share with unbelievers.

What this means in the university, generally, is that in the hard sciences, the overlap of knowledge between believer and unbeliever is greater. In the humanities and social sciences, the overlap is smaller and becomes increasingly problematic. In other words, these disciplines reveal almost immediately that value judgments form the warp and woof of the subject matter — value judgments, for example, about what is beautiful and ugly in this literature, what’s right and wrong, good and bad, helpful and harmful, just and unjust, loving and unloving. (Piper)”

We need to carry caution in our courses. Reading literature is one of my favorite past times. As a hobby I am trying to collect all 1400ish Penguin Classic books. When we read these books, especially ones that have been chosen with an agenda in mind, we have to be careful. Not every book or idea will shape us for the better, some may shape us for the worst. Some of you may be able to relate to my wife’s observations. She used to do a lot of childcare as a teenager. If her kids watched a lot of cartoons that showed disrespect towards parents, she would notice almost immediately how her kids would become rebellious and disobedient. What we consume, affects us and we have to be on guard that it does not consume us.

When it comes to literature courses, in as much influence as we or our parents have, we should find classes with Christian teachers who carry our best interest in mind. We may even have to try and avoid courses too.

“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” -Frederick Nietzsche