... but that's how God made things.

Every time I learn something, I realize that I have so much more to learn.

Today is the first day of my OSLEP class on Marriage and Family. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, I'll give you the basic rundown. OSLEP is a seminar program where you do an intensive study with a scholar. Basically, I read a bunch of stuff and did some pre-seminar writing assignments, and now I'm here hashing it out with all the other people who read it and one of the people who wrote it. Good stuff.

It is interesting to be in a secular learning environment for the first time in 2 and a half years. It's surprisingly refreshing. It's almost as if the pressure is off because you don't have to have God on your side when you're done figuring things out. Not that I'm separating my faith and learning, but I think I want to really see what the research says before I make my judgments about what God says.

But this is what I've really been thinking. There is so much to learn about marriage and so many assumptions that we make. Really, even the nuclear family is a social construction and so are gender roles within society and even dating practices. So I've just been thinking about the proliferation of Christian dating books. It seems to me that anyone who wants to can be an expert on Christian dating. And the threat with that is that when someone decides to be an expert on Christian anything the result is not, "Here's my conclusion," it's "Here's what God says." And people have a history of doing stupid, unfounded things in the name of God.

So maybe, Christians, before we decide to claim an expertise based on special revelation that God has given us, we should really look into all of the facets of the issue. Because you might just decide that marriage as an institution is not something you want to claim inherently belongs to the church. And you might decide that things we believe boys and girls should do and roles they should follow may not be as "innate" as we thought they were. And once we have actually educated ourselves, maybe then we will have something worthwhile to say.

Oh college, liberating my mind.

We'll see what I decide at the end of the week. I'll let you know. :)

Love.
-Vern