Recently I was given the honor of sharing the keynote speech at our graduation ceremony. Here is the transcript:
What I’d like to do today is to offer a simple message of encouragement and challenge to our graduates. As I was thinking about the many things that can be said at an event like this, and the many things that have been said and forgotten, I decided to describe what I hope every eagle will be that we graduate from this place. What do we want the characteristics of a BCHS Eagle to be?
We want our Eagles to have keen vision.
Your parents and your teachers here have tried to give you insight into the philosophical issues of our day and training that will prepare you for the intellectual challenges you will face. We have also tried to help you see your culture for what it is, in contrast to the culture of Christ. Many of you, perhaps even most of you, have accepted this training and have prepared well. I commend you.
Some of you have worked the system. Sorry to be so blunt here, but some of you have only jumped through the minimalist hoops we have designed for you to jump through and you are not in the least prepared to face thoughtful representatives of other worldviews and stand your ground.
One of three things could happen to you, and to any who are not prepared to face cultural and intellectual challenges to the Christian faith.
One, you could be overwhelmed and assimilated. You will perhaps sit in a lecture hall and hear compelling words artfully denouncing your beliefs, and you will not know what to say or even what to think. Perhaps you will conclude, “if I can’t beat them, why not join them.” And you will drift away.
Perhaps you will sit in your dorm hall and see glamorous, outrageous and fun people boldly and colorfully flouting God’s moral standards, and apparently getting away with it. And without an ability to articulate the emptiness of it all, you will end up living exactly as they do.
A second result may follow from a lack of preparation. Perhaps instead of joining them, you will separate wholly from them. You will descend from the evil of the culture and the dangers of intellectual challenges into the safe confines of the Christian subculture. Here you will surround yourselves with Christians, buy Christian music, Christian books, and Christian products of all kinds. Perhaps here you will remain a Christian, but you will be an impotent one, unable to meet thinking people on their ground and bring the truth of the Christian worldview into the marketplace of ideas.
But there is a final possibility. Perhaps if you haven’t prepared, on facing these challenges firsthand, you will wake up from your intellectual slumber and begin your training. This would be my prayer for any Eagles leaving this place today unprepared.
We also want our Eagles to mature rapidly.
The challenges of nature are urgent and that is why actual Eagles must mature so rapidly, but perhaps it is no different for our Eagles.
The writer of Hebrews similarly charges Christians to mature more rapidly than they were. He says to them, “by now you should be teachers, but you need someone again to teach you the elementary principles of God’s word.”
What is a mature Christian? According to Scripture, it is one who has learned in order to be a teacher. It is one thing to learn in order to navigate a test or dupe a teacher into thinking you read a book. It is quite another thing to learn so well that you become a resource for the next generation. And so I ask each of you solemnly: Have you learned well enough to be a teacher? Can you articulate the faith once for all handed down to the saints? Can you model it well? The time is coming when you will encounter people who will need more than Mr. Martin’s notes… as good as they are. They will need you to be a living witness to the reality of God in the world, both in word and in deed. I know by God’s grace you will be that for people.
We like our Eagles to be Aggressive.
You may remember the words of Dr. Bahnsen: “We set for the absolute necessity of Christianity in order to make sense of human reason, moral law, human dignity, love and every other intelligible human experience.”
That’s an aggressive statement. We see nothing here of the possibility or the probability of Christianity. We see no hedging or hemming and hawing. We see a gauntlet thrown down in the midst of all available worldviews. “Let Jesus be true and all else shown to be liars.”
But as you have learned here, this aggressiveness requires confidence in one’s understanding of one’s own faith and the deficiencies within other worldviews, and also grace in communicating both.
I challenge you to go forward from this place confidently proclaiming that education, morality, human reason, science, unity and diversity, and therefore love—are all our intellectual property as Christians.
It is time to play offense, to assert the superiority of Christ in the world loudly, and to insist that burden of proof is a shared burden when it comes to worldviews. We must insist that the atheist or pantheist, Muslim or postmodernist, demonstrate to us how their worldview makes sense of human reason, love, individual dignity, moral law, science and the like.
In the end, we need to be able to address the gaping philosophical emptiness of other worldviews, and demonstrate that Christianity is the only philosophical position that can suffuse the human experience with beauty and meaning.
We want our Eagles to Soar.
You are probably familiar with the parable of the eagle and the chickens… It goes something like this:
An eagle egg falls from its nest into a chicken coop, where it hatches. The eaglet is then raised by chickens and learns to behave like a chicken, scratching and pecking at the ground. And as I recall there are two interesting endings to the story; one in which the chicken sees an eagle in flight and after a certain length of time mounts to the skies to live among the clouds as nature designed him to live. The other, and less happy ending, has the eagle content to live the remainder of his days on the ground among the chickens though he was made for so much more.
My prayer is that you will soar higher than your culture.
That you will, in the words of Dr. Horner, “out-think and out-live your culture.”
My prayer is that you will lead in the arts, in science, and that our culture will be deeply affected by your various contributions in it.
In closing, let me say this: We love you! You are ours. You are our “living epistles, written on human hearts.” We have a vested interest in you. If you need us, you know where to find us.
