230 Chapter 7 students to participate in the meeting, deliberately including students from the most conversative Reformed ecclesial backgrounds in the Netherlands. The attention paid to ‘absolute truth’ started in TAR meeting 11, when a member of the insider team referred to the idea of truth-holding within the social in-group as a means of ‘black-and-white thinking’ and of ‘we-andthem thinking’. The other TAR participants recognised this depiction of the way in which DCU students seem to think about truth and epistemology. They tend to be brought up with the idea that absolute truth exists amidst a network of falsehood and deliberate lies; moreover, they are told that it is their calling, especially as Christian teachers, to uphold the truth and pass it on to subsequent generations with care and responsibility. If they want to be open to people who hold other perspectives (critical openness), they may very well do harm to this heavy responsibility. Outside of the safety of their social context, in which the truth seems to be obvious, they place themselves at risk of being influenced to let the truth slide away. In the second TAR meeting, a question was asked about where the anxiety seen in students in terms of ‘adding water to the wine’ would have come from. In meeting 11, the conversational community discovered that it had to do with this truth-holding idea. For this reason, it decided to organise meeting 13 with students about absolute truth and epistemology—that is, to look for a way to handle the Christian truth claim between critical openness and faithfulness. This meeting’s conversation, among others, will be analysed in Section 2. For now, the conclusion of this sub-section is that truth often seems to be handled by DCU students as something that is present in their cultural ingroup and that should be carefully guarded through loyalty to God, parents and social background. 7.1.2 Loyalty to (Biblical) world-centredness The conversational community encountered not just hesitation in the students when it comes to opening themselves up to other people and perspectives but also an inner motivation to be open towards others and society as a whole. This motivation, however, seemed to be somewhat unspoken, un-worded, almost subconscious. While the students sometimes seemed unable to give words to the experienced need to be open towards society in all its diversity and complexity, the members of the outsider group managed to give words and meaning to a faithful, Biblically motivated reason to be open. This motivated reason was captured in the code ‘mission’, which presented itself in almost all the minutes and transcripts, as observed in Chapter 6.2, with a total of no less than 59 appearances.
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