While I was in seminary everything changed. After serving for 5 years at the University of NC in Wilmington, I went off to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to "get some skills and learning". After all, my engineering degree had been a bit short of courses on Western Civilization, Greek, and the Bible. Then it was off to Duke U. to serve among undergrads through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
The "change" came to light most clearly on the night of a dorm talk early in my first semester. I gave a clear, clever and Christ-centered explanation of the gospel and, just as before, someone began to argue with me. Except this time the disagreement was not about the content of what I had said. There were no counterpoints, no presentation of arguments as to why the claims of Christ were untrue. Instead there was an accusation that it was improper to make any such truth claims about religious ideas. I had gone counter to what everyone else apparently already knew. You can't really know anything about religion - all religious ideas were mere opinions and, corollary to that, all claims to know anything about religious truth was merely an attempt to impose one's view upon another. I was, by this student's assessment, being a religious bully.
Something essential was missing from this student's imagination and I had to pursue a steep learning curve.
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