JESUS AND THE MISSION OF PLU

PLU is presently considering a revision of its Mission Statement. The proposed revision deliberately avoids making any commitment to Jesus Christ. That is an issue which must be addressed.

Many have already expressed their concern to the committee which wrote the revised statement. Many have pointed out the necessity that a commitment to Christ be present in the Mission Statement, yet they have been steadfastly resisted by the committee and no trace of commitment to Jesus has been present in any of the drafts written by the committee. The committee will soon bring its work to the faculty to be voted upon.

The Mission Statement, if used properly, should chart the direction in which PLU will go; it is, or should be, an important document. Our present statement of Objectives includes statements such as this: "The University community confesses the faith that the ultimate meaning and purposes of human life are to be discovered in the person and work of Jesus Christ." The switch to a Mission Statement which contains no commitment to or affirmation of Jesus Christ is a dramatic change in the direction of the university. It is a thing of grave importance.

An argument that is sometimes used to justify the exclusion of Jesus from PLU is that an organization cannot have faith, therefore it is absurd for an organization to make any confession. In fact, organizations must make confessions, and must take faith positions. One faith position which is presently sacred to many academics is the faith position that diversity is good; the revised Mission Statement contains a whole paragraph expressing that faith position. Diversity presumes that all people are of equal value and, therefore, that differences in individuals do not cause them to be of less value; rather, differences are part of what makes an individual valuable. Some notable thinkers, however, have opposed that belief with carefully constructed alternative views. Nietzsche, for example, would not believe that the less-evolved herd of humanity was equal in value to the more-evolved "superman". The belief in the equal worth of people is a faith position.

Unfortunately, the faith in diversity has too often been set against the faith in Christ, especially by academics. It is said that PLU will not be a "welcoming" place to diverse faculty and staff if it confesses Christ. Such a statement reveals a hopeless ignorance of either the nature of diversity or the nature of Christ.

Diversity is not itself an absolute good; it must be limited and enriched by some higher good. If diversity were an absolute, then whatever is "diverse"/different must be welcomed and even invited to PLU. This must include Neo-Nazis and skinheads, racists, anti-feminists as well as feminists, Muslims and Buddhists and legalistic Christians, Satanists, those in favor of slavery, etc., etc. These are all "diverse" views, and if diversity is absolutely good, then all these views should be equally respected at PLU and their advocates deliberately invited to join the PLU community and contribute to it. But diversity is obviously not an absolute good. It is good only so long as it serves some higher good. The real and deepest question is, then, what is the higher good which it should serve? The revised Mission Statement is silent on that, and the silence is telling.

I believe that diversity is one of God's greatest gifts to us (and the truth of that is especially obvious in the creation of man and woman). I believe that each person is enabled to see something about God that no other person can see, and so each person becomes a revealer of God to all other people (this is the priesthood of all believers), and I believe that only a fool ignores the revelation of God which others can bring him. But I also know that some people's vision of God is at this time horribly distorted, and that only a fool would accept such distortions. How do I know, then, what to accept as truth and what is false? I know that Jesus Christ is the one completely true Son of God who alone reveals God perfectly. His truth is love--love which comes from the God who is Love and who created all people equally in His own image.

The goal of a university is to seek the truth, and the only reason for seeking the truth is because there is truth--otherwise the effort is pointless and a waste of time, akin to a person spending his life searching and learning to search for unicorns. Jesus said, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life." If Jesus is right and if our present Statement of Objectives is right, then "the ultimate meaning and purposes of human life are to be discovered in the person and work of Jesus Christ." If that is true, then PLU would be criminally negligent if it refused to encourage faculty and students to find the meaning of life in Jesus Christ.

But, of course, everything revolves around the word "IF". If we cannot trust Jesus to be the Lord and Savior of ourselves and of everyone in God's world, then we should make no confession of Him. The basic issue is as simple as it has been for century after century, and as Luther himself recognized: do you trust Jesus Christ or not? If He is Truth, then a university must confess Him; if He is not, then it should not. The recognition of truth is critical, for it is the truth that shall set you free--to any kind of real and valuable freedom and diversity.

The committee's revision of the Mission Statement is hopelessly incompetent, if for no other reason, because it fails to give any way to distinguish between good diversity and bad diversity; it fails to address the most crucial of all concerns. The result of such evasion of the issue will be chaos in which each person claims the truth and none can deny it, and there will be bitterness and cruel political infighting without any concern for what is right. There will be a terrible tyranny of the majority and of those who can manipulate the majority. The "proper" diversity will be what the majority says it is, with no way to gainsay it.

If PLU rejects Jesus as the Truth, as the revised Mission Statement deliberately does, then it should no longer make any pretense of being a Christian university. There should be no Christian chapel on campus, nor any Christian chaplains, nor time set aside for Christian chapel, nor required Christian religion courses, nor should the word "Lutheran" appear in its name, nor should it open the school year "in the Name of Christ." If PLU deliberately denies Christ but then keeps the trappings of Christianity in order to attract students who wish to find a Christian education in a world which increasingly persecutes Christians, that is the grossest deception and most depraved hypocrisy.

PLU must make a real choice.