In the following quote, Carl Trueman, with pinpoint precision, diagnoses the mindset of today’s students and nails how Christian educators (Trueman speaks specifically of college educators, but it applies to any kind of Christian educator) must respond.

Christian colleges cannot win merely by shouting Bible verses, however sophisticated their idiom. Nor will they win by good old-fashioned arguments resting on logic and reason. That’s not how it works any more.

I became acutely aware of the latter fact some years ago, when I was challenged by a student while delivering a guest lecture on gay marriage at a very conservative Christian college. My arguments did not work, because . . . well, they were arguments, and did not take into account how the mind of my young critic had been formed. She had not been convinced by any argument. Her imagination had been seized by an aesthetically driven culture, in which taste was truth and Will and Grace carried more weight than any church catechism or tome of moral philosophy.

In such a world, arguments, even irrefutable arguments, will not suffice. We need something more comprehensive, something to capture imaginations. We need a philosophy of undergraduate education that offers visions of beauty, that connects the fields of knowledge our modern world has torn apart and isolated, and that speaks to the human desire for meaning. A good start might be making the study of poetry, that medium which at its best makes human language carry almost more significance than it can bear, a compulsory course for freshmen. If the narrative and aesthetic of the world are gripping, then we must show that ours are more gripping, rooted as they are in real beauty and real truth…

… Colleges need to be thinking about their curricula in terms of seizing the imaginations of their students: teaching them that there is more to music than rap, more to love than porn, more to narrative construction than soap operas, more to culture than lambasting those terribly wicked white males, more to history than a zero-sum tale of Western oppression of the Other, more to education than a means to a paycheck.

Trevin Wax put it this way:

What is needed is a response that takes into consideration the beauty of Truth. We’ve got the truth portion down when it comes to propositions. What is needed is a beautiful and compelling portrait of Truth – the Person. God is inherently beautiful, but many times, we don’t do well at drawing out the inherent beauty of Truth with a capital T.

In the Scriptures, we have the true, good, and beautiful. Now, we must do the hard work of capturing the minds and hearts of others with all of it.

Read Trueman’s entire article here.