My latest: on faith and doubt in CT

I’ve got a column in Christianity Today this morning called “Doubt is a Ladder, Not a Home.” About a third of the way into it, I write the following:

I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is how many ordinary Christians feel. Or at least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought in the back of the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and intellectual pressure is very real. The doubts add up.

It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and not only in the wider culture. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity. That faith without doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of faith, a kind of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is a sign of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you can fill in the rest.

The pro-doubt crowd gets two important things entirely right. First, they want space to ask honest questions. Second, they want to remove the stigma of doubt.

I go on to elaborate what they get right, but also to point out four ways they go too far. Click here to read the whole thing.

Every fantasy a comedy, every comedy a theodicy

Recently I wrote about returning to Osten Ard, the fantasy world of novelist Tad Williams in his two series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard. One of the things I’d forgotten about the first series, a trilogy written from 1988 to 1993, is its interest in theodicy. Multiple characters throughout the books wonder, both aloud and to themselves, about the existence of God (or the gods); about their power; about their goodness; about the supposed truths taught by priests and monks; about the myths of old, handed down for centuries; about whether a world such as theirs—namely, a world of unremitting pain, illness, suffering, violence, and death, all apparently senseless, random, and unrectified—is one a just God would either create or sustain. As the lead character Simon realizes at one point: he no longer feels himself capable of praying to such a God even if he does exist. Yet this very realization is itself an indication that there is no such God, since he would not correspond to “the old stories.”

I do not know whether Tad Williams, the author, believes in God, nor can I say just what his aim was in posing these theodical questions throughout his trilogy. I’ve not yet re-read the second half of the third book in the series, so my memory may be wrong, but I don’t recall him resolving these questions in a clear or satisfactory way. That’s fine. Theodicy is usually a dish best served incomplete anyway.

Here’s the thing, though. Williams’ story wraps up beautifully. Every narrative thread is woven, by story’s end, into a gorgeous tapestry clearly thought through and planned out from the beginning. This is what makes the epic tale so marvelously told. There is not a character forgotten, nor a plot device left by the wayside. By the final pages, it’s as though behind this seemingly senseless drama stands an author, an author with meaning and purpose, whose design may have been hidden before but has now been made manifest.

It seems this way, because it is this way. The author isn’t a hypothesis we are forced to postulate in order to make sense of a story we otherwise couldn’t make sense of. We know the author’s name. The story is a novel. He wrote it. He planned it. He designed it. Duh.

But there’s the rub. If, outside the text, there stands an author, then inside the text, within the story, there must likewise be an Author. The perfect pleasing blueprint of the thing works because there is an architect. The fact of there being an architect is itself an answer to the characters’ ponderings about God. The characters wonder to themselves whether they are living in a meaningful story or a meaningless chaos. Well, we know: it’s the former, not the latter. The end of the story clears that right up. More to the point, the fact that they are characters inside a story written by an author for readers’ pleasure is as direct an answer as one could have. It may not be an answer available to the characters, within the story, but it’s a meta-textual answer available to us, the readers of their story.

In this way, Williams is unable to render a negative answer to the theodicy his narrative is meant to embody, however ambivalent his own intentions may be. Merely by authoring the story and having it make some kind of sense, he answers his own question: Yes, there is a God. In a word, it’s him. He’s the deus ex machina. He’s the one behind the curtain. There’s someone pulling the strings. It’s him. And if he exists, then the existence of God (or the gods) within the world he’s created is a given. Of course he (they) exist. Otherwise the story wouldn’t unfold the way it does; wouldn’t be orchestrated and choreographed in such a supremely fitting and satisfying manner.

This, in turn, becomes an extra-textual answer about our world, not just Osten Ard. There is a God in our world just as there is in that world, as evidenced by the fact that we make worlds like Osten Ard. Human sub-creation imitates and exemplifies divine creation. In the words of poet Franz Wright:

…And the way, always, being 
a maker 
reminds:

you were made. 

What I mean is this. Insofar as a fantasy is a comedy, it is also a theodicy: it poses and answers whether there is a God and, if he exists, whether he is both all-good and all-powerful. There is and he is, fantasy replies. For in a comedy, the Good triumphs in the end—ultimately, in some way, to some degree. This is why Dante’s masterpiece is called, simply, La Commedia. It’s the comedy, and therefore the divine comedy. This world is a comedy, for all its evil and suffering. It is not a tragedy.

For modern fantasy to avoid theodicy, it would have to embrace tragedy. Not darkness, not “grittiness,” not violence and sadism and gratuitous sex and playing footsie with nihilism. Actual, bona fide tragedy. I’ve not encountered fantasy that does that. And even then, if there’s a human author doing the tragedy-writing, there’s a case to be made that it can’t fully escape the pull of theodicy. It seems to me you’d have to go full Sartre and write a fantasy akin to La Nausée. But what world-building fantasist wants to do that? Is even capable of stomaching it?

We write because we are written. We make because we are made. We work providence in our stories because providence works in ours. We give the final word to the Good because the Good has the final word in our world—or will, at least; we hope, at least.

This is why every fantasy is a theodicy. Because every fantasy is a comedy. And comedy is a witness to our trust, howsoever we deny it or mask it, of our trust that God is, that God is good, and that God will right all wrongs in the End.

Calvin, zombies, and the false faith of the reprobate

This week I read Edward Feser’s wonderful book Philosophy of Mind. One section in particular brought to mind an interesting connection.

In the middle of a dense discussion of Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and property dualism, Feser adverts to a common trope: namely, the difference between a conscious human person and a zombie duplicate. While criticizing Chalmers, Feser deploys the zombie example to show that Chalmers cannot account for a conscious human being’s knowledge of qualia as reliable knowledge if his theory would imply also, and necessarily, that a zombie would falsely but sincerely suppose it had qualia. If the latter were true, in other words, then why should anyone believe that her qualia are real and not the figment of her imagination? On what grounds would you or I suppose we are not zombies? For, epistemically speaking, we are in an identical position as a zombie that believes itself to be the conscious subject of genuine experiences. Even if it is just the case that I am a non-zombie with qualia and the zombie is a zombie without qualia, I have no good reason to believe I am any different; and the zombie may equally well believe its condition not to be what it in fact is.

A complex matter, to be sure. What it brought to mind is this.

In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin takes up, among other things, faith and election. After a brief introductory treatment, chapter 2 addresses the matter in detail. In section 11, Calvin faces head-on the obvious question: Aren’t there people who sincerely believe that they believe in Christ? I.e., believe they have saving faith in Christ? But who, according to Calvin, lack saving faith? I.e., are not among the elect? What of them? Not least given Calvin’s understanding of divine sovereignty?

Calvin bites the bullet, as only he can. Let’s just say it’s not the most satisfying part of the Institutes. And given the intended pastoral aspects of the doctrines of election, sola fide, assurance, and the perseverance of the saints, Calvin’s answer is doubly unsatisfying. In a word, it’s the original zombie problem, at least for Christian theology. Here’s how it unfolds:

The elect (non-zombie) “knows” he is saved, whereas the reprobate (zombie) believes (falsely) that he is saved. But precisely because there are reprobate (zombies) intermixed with the elect (non-zombies), the elect have no certain grounds for supposing themselves not to be reprobate (zombies)—for it has already been established that the reprobate (zombies)’ belief that they possess saving grace is utterly sincere; and, moreover, that God himself is the agent and source of their having this belief. Why, then, should anyone in the church, in the full knowledge of this spiritual and epistemic situation, suppose himself truly saved, because elect, rather than falsely confident (even “certain”) of a status lacking all independent verification?

That, it seems to me, no Calvinist, including Calvin, has ever resolved satisfactorily. At least not in this non-Calvinist’s eyes.

In any case, here are the two passages in full. I’ve not indented the quotations, given their length; I’ve placed in bold the crucial sentences; and I’ve broken up a few of Calvin’s ultra-long paragraphs. The first passage comes from pages 111-114 in Feser; the second comes from sections 11, 12, and 19 in chapter 2 of book 3 of the Institutes.

Feser on the zombie problem

The whole point of property dualism is to insist that there are non-physical qualia; if the theory also entails that we can never know that there are such qualia, then how (and why) are we even considering it? How can dualists themselves so much as formulate their hypothesis? Chalmers attempts to deal with this problem by suggesting that the assumption that there must be a causal connection between the knower and what is known, though appropriate where knowledge of physical objects is concerned, is inappropriate for knowledge of qualia. The existence of a causal chain implies the possibility of error, since . . . it seems to entail a gap between the experience of the thing known and the thing itself, a gap between appearance and reality: it is at least possible that the normal causal chain connecting us to the thing experienced has been disrupted, so that the experience is misleading (as in hallucination or deception by a Cartesian evil spirit). But knowledge of qualia, Chalmers says, is absolutely certain. Here there is no gap between appearance and reality, because the appearance—the way things seem, which is constituted by qualia themselves—is the reality. Knowledge of qualia must therefore somehow be direct and unmediated by causal chains between them and our beliefs about them. The fact that they can have no causal influence on our beliefs thus does not, after all, entail that we can’t think or talk about them.

But an objection to this is that it seems question-begging, since whether our knowledge of qualia really is certain is part of what is at issue in Dennett’s argument. Moreover, Chalmers’ claim that there is no gap between appearance and reality where knowledge of qualia is concerned seems problematic, given the assumption he shares with other property dualists that propositional attitudes can, unlike qualia, be reduced to physical processes in the brain. For while there is a sense of “appearance” and “seeming” which involves the having of qualia (a sense we can call the “qualitative” sense), there is also a sense of these words (call it the “cognitive” sense) which does not, but instead involves only the having of certain beliefs: one might say, for example, that at first it seemed or appeared to him that Chalmers’ arguments were sound, but on further reflection he concluded that they were not. Here there need be no qualia present, but only a mistake in judgment or the having of a false belief. But the having of beliefs and the making of judgments are, by Chalmers’ own lights, identical with being in certain brain states, so that there is a sense in which even a zombie has beliefs (including false beliefs) and makes judgments (including mistakes in judgment). But in that case, it could “seem” or “appear” even to a zombie that it had qualia, even though by definition it does not. So there can be a gap between appearance and reality even where qualia are concerned. Dennett’s challenge remains: how can property dualists so much as think about the qualia they say exist? How can they know that they aren’t zombies?

Chalmers’ view seems to be that this sort of objection can be avoided by arguing that it is just in the very nature of having an experience that one is justified in believing one has it, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and knowing one is having it. The evidence for my belief that I’m having the experience and the experience itself are the same thing; so I don’t infer the existence of the experience from the evidence, but just know directly from the mere having of the evidence. But this seems merely to push the problem back a stage, for now the question is how one can know one really has that evidence—the experience—in the first place, given that an experienceless zombie would also believe that it has it (and, if it’s read Chalmers, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and being justified in believing it does). Chalmers’ claim seems to amount to the conditional: if you have qualia, then you can know you have them. But that raises the question of how one can know the antecedent of this conditional, i.e. of how one can know one does in fact have qualia. Chalmers’ reply is “Because it seems to me that I do, and its seeming that way is all the justification I need.” But a zombie would believe the same thing! “But I have evidence the zombie doesn’t have my experience!” Chalmers would retort. Yet the zombie believes that too, because it also seems to it (in the cognitive sense) that it has such evidence. Any response Chalmers could give to such questions would seem to invite further questions about whether he really has the evidence he thinks he does. His only possible reply can be to say that he has it because he seems to have it, but if he says that he seems to in the cognitive sense of “seems,” then he’s saying something even a zombie would believe, while if he says, even to himself, that he seems to in the qualitative sense of “seems,” then he’s begging the question, for whether he has the qualia that this sense of “seems” presupposes is precisely what’s at issue. Chalmers’ reply to the sort of criticism raised by Dennett thus seems to fail.

Property dualism would thus appear to lead to absurdity as long as it concedes to materialism the reducibility of the propositional attitudes. If it instead takes the attitudes to be, like qualia, irreducible to physical states of the brain, this absurdity can be avoided: for in that case, your beliefs and judgments are as non-physical as your qualia are, and there is thus no barrier (at least of the usual mental-to-physical epiphenomenalist sort) to your qualia being the causes of your beliefs about them. But should it take this route, there seems much less motivation for adopting property dualism rather than full-blown Cartesian substance dualism: it was precisely the concession of the materiality of propositional attitudes that seemed to allow the property dualist to make headway on the interaction problem, an advantage that is lost if that concession is revoked; and while taking at least beliefs, desires, and the like to be purely material undermines the plausibility of the existence of a distinct non-physical mental substance, such plausibility would seem to be restored if all mental properties, beliefs and desires, as much as qualia, are non-physical. Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of its own, namely that of explaining exactly how non-physical properties could inhere in a physical substance.

Property dualism, then, is arguably not a genuine advance over substance dualism . . . .

Calvin on reprobate “faith”

11. I am aware it seems unaccountable to some how faith is attributed to the reprobate, seeing that it is declared by Paul to be one of the fruits of election; and yet the difficulty is easily solved: for though none are enlightened into faith, and truly feel the efficacy of the Gospel, with the exception of those who are fore-ordained to salvation, yet experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected in a way so similar to the elect, that even in their own judgment there is no difference between them. Hence it is not strange, that by the Apostle a taste of heavenly gifts, and by Christ himself a temporary faith, is ascribed to them. Not that they truly perceive the power of spiritual grace and the sure light of faith; but the Lord, the better to convict them, and leave them without excuse, instills into their minds such a sense of his goodness as can be felt without the Spirit of adoption. Should it be objected, that believers have no stronger testimony to assure them of their adoption, I answer, that though there is a great resemblance and affinity between the elect of God and those who are impressed for a time with a fading faith, yet the elect alone have that full assurance which is extolled by Paul, and by which they are enabled to cry, Abba, Father.

Therefore, as God regenerates the elect only for ever by incorruptible seed, as the seed of life once sown in their hearts never perishes, so he effectually seals in them the grace of his adoption, that it may be sure and steadfast. But in this there is nothing to prevent an inferior operation of the Spirit from taking its course in the reprobate. Meanwhile, believers are taught to examine themselves carefully and humbly, lest carnal security creep in and take the place of assurance of faith. We may add, that the reprobate never have any other than a confused sense of grace, laying hold of the shadow rather than the substance, because the Spirit properly seals the forgiveness of sins in the elect only, applying it by special faith to their use. Still it is correctly said, that the reprobate believe God to be propitious to them, inasmuch as they accept the gift of reconciliation, though confusedly and without due discernment; not that they are partakers of the same faith or regeneration with the children of God; but because, under a covering of hypocrisy, they seem to have a principle of faith in common with them. Nor do I even deny that God illumines their minds to this extent, that they recognize his grace; but that conviction he distinguishes from the peculiar testimony which he gives to his elect in this respect, that the reprobate never attain to the full result or to fruition. When he shows himself propitious to them, it is not as if he had truly rescued them from death, and taken them under his protection. He only gives them a manifestation of his present mercy. In the elect alone he implants the living root of faith, so that they persevere even to the end. Thus we dispose of the objection, that if God truly displays his grace, it must endure for ever. There is nothing inconsistent in this with the fact of his enlightening some with a present sense of grace, which afterwards proves evanescent.

12. Although faith is a knowledge of the divine favor towards us, and a full persuasion of its truth, it is not strange that the sense of the divine love, which though akin to faith differs much from it, vanishes in those who are temporarily impressed. The will of God is, I confess, immutable, and his truth is always consistent with itself; but I deny that the reprobate ever advance so far as to penetrate to that secret revelation which Scripture reserves for the elect only. I therefore deny that they either understand his will considered as immutable, or steadily embrace his truth, inasmuch as they rest satisfied with an evanescent impression; just as a tree not planted deep enough may take root, but will in process of time wither away, though it may for several years not only put forth leaves and flowers, but produce fruit. In short, as by the revolt of the first man, the image of God could be effaced from his mind and soul, so there is nothing strange in His shedding some rays of grace on the reprobate, and afterwards allowing these to be extinguished. There is nothing to prevent His giving some a slight knowledge of his Gospel, and imbuing others thoroughly. Meanwhile, we must remember that however feeble and slender the faith of the elect may be, yet as the Spirit of God is to them a sure earnest and seal of their adoption, the impression once engraven can never be effaced from their hearts, whereas the light which glimmers in the reprobate is afterwards quenched.

Nor can it be said that the Spirit therefore deceives, because he does not quicken the seed which lies in their hearts so as to make it ever remain incorruptible as in the elect. I go farther: seeing it is evident, from the doctrine of Scripture and from daily experience, that the reprobate are occasionally impressed with a sense of divine grace, some desire of mutual love must necessarily be excited in their hearts. Thus for a time a pious affection prevailed in Saul, disposing him to love God. Knowing that he was treated with paternal kindness, he was in some degree attracted by it. But as the reprobate have no rooted conviction of the paternal love of God, so they do not in return yield the love of sons, but are led by a kind of mercenary affection. The Spirit of love was given to Christ alone, for the express purpose of conferring this Spirit upon his members; and there can be no doubt that the following words of Paul apply to the elect only: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5); namely, the love which begets that confidence in prayer to which I have above adverted.

On the other hand, we see that God is mysteriously offended with his children, though he ceases not to love them. He certainly hates them not, but he alarms them with a sense of his anger, that he may humble the pride of the flesh, arouse them from lethargy, and urge them to repentance. Hence they, at the same instant, feel that he is angry with them or their sins, and also propitious to their persons. It is not from fictitious dread that they deprecate his anger, and yet they retake themselves to him with tranquil confidence. It hence appears that the faith of some, though not true faith, is not mere pretense. They are borne along by some sudden impulse of zeal, and erroneously impose upon themselves, sloth undoubtedly preventing them from examining their hearts with due care. Such probably was the case of those whom John describes as believing on Christ; but of whom he says, “Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man” (John 2:24, 25). Were it not true that many fall away from the common faith (I call it common, because there is a great resemblance between temporary and living, ever-during faith), Christ would not have said to his disciples, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31, 32). He is addressing those who had embraced his doctrine, and urging them to progress in the faith, lest by their sluggishness they extinguish the light which they have received. Accordingly, Paul claims faith as the peculiar privilege of the elect, intimating that many, from not being properly rooted, fall away (Tit. 1:1). In the same way, in Matthew, our Savior says, “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up” (Mt. 16:13). Some who are not ashamed to insult God and man are more grossly false. Against this class of men, who profane the faith by impious and lying pretense, James inveighs (James 2:14). Nor would Paul require the faith of believers to be unfeigned (1 Tim. 1:5), were there not many who presumptuously arrogate to themselves what they have not, deceiving others, and sometimes even themselves, with empty show. Hence he compares a good conscience to the ark in which faith is preserved, because many, by falling away, have in regard to it made shipwreck. . . .

19. The whole, then, comes to this: As soon as the minutest particle of faith is instilled into our minds, we begin to behold the face of God placid, serene, and propitious; far off, indeed, but still so distinctly as to assure us that there is no delusion in it. In proportion to the progress we afterwards make (and the progress ought to be uninterrupted), we obtain a nearer and surer view, the very continuance making it more familiar to us. Thus we see that a mind illumined with the knowledge of God is at first involved in much ignorance,—ignorance, however, which is gradually removed. Still this partial ignorance or obscure discernment does not prevent that clear knowledge of the divine favor which holds the first and principal part in faith. For as one shut up in a prison, where from a narrow opening he receives the rays of the sun indirectly and in a manner divided, though deprived of a full view of the sun, has no doubt of the source from which the light comes, and is benefited by it; so believers, while bound with the fetters of an earthly body, though surrounded on all sides with much obscurity, are so far illumined by any slender light which beams upon them and displays the divine mercy as to feel secure.

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Misdiagnosis

A running theme has emerged on this blog over the last few years, but especially the last 18 months or so. That theme is the sorry state of the church in the U.S., in particular “low church” traditions: non-denominational, baptist, evangelical, and other similar communions (like my own, churches of Christ). The focus is on those traditions because those are the ones that compose my world: the Christians I know, the neighbors I live among, the students I teach. I stay abreast of analogous problems in Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline churches, but they’re farther afield in terms of my lived daily circles.

Lately I have found myself struck by a commonality that unites so many of the objects of my critique and frustration within this lagging, sagging, tattered sub-world of American Christendom, such as it is. That commonality I will call a fundamental misdiagnosis of the situation, that is, of the root problems besetting the churches today. So far I can tell—granted that this is an untrustworthy mix of anecdote, hearsay, reading, and guesswork—a certain framework and diagnosis is shared among an enormous unofficial and unconnected network of pastors, church leaders, writers, and academics. When these folks look at the churches today, what they see is a surfeit of errant but otherwise strong, and strongly held, beliefs. This surplus of conviction is a problem for one of two reasons. Either the content of the conviction is wrong or the confidence in its truth is overweening. In both cases it is the pastor’s, the church’s, or the seminary’s job to exercise discipline—that is, to transform the content or to undermine the confidence. Sometimes the act of discipline is self-directed; sometimes the passion of directing it outward stems from autobiography. In any case, frustration results when laypersons do not take kindly to the attempt at discipline. Mutual distrust lingers like an aura, even in the absence of such an attempt. Each side wonders when the other will make a move.

I do not doubt that there are communities in which this description obtains. I do not doubt, in other words, that there are churches in this country filled to the brim with self-assured, belief-suffused Christians who sniff and snarl at the faintest whiff of a notion that they are not one hundred percent right in their every opinion—and, what is important to add, that many of those opinions have next to nothing to do with the gospel.

As I say, I do not doubt this. Nevertheless, as a diagnosis of what ails the churches in the aggregate, I think it is mistaken.

The problem, at the macro level, is not a surfeit of strong belief. The problem is the social, moral, and theological acids corroding every belief in sight. These acids are everywhere, affecting everyone. Marx’s description of the effects of capitalism on the wider society apply equally well here:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

Fast forward to the present and it is the selfsame phenomenon. In a word, it is liquid modernity that is sucking believers down into the depths. It is not some mass illusion of stability. The ground is breaking up beneath our feet as we speak. Or rather, it’s been broken up for some time, and only now are some of us peering down to see what little remains. Individual by individual, community by community, believers are falling through the cracks.

And what do they hear from their ostensible leaders? From the books and blogs, pulpits and classrooms, profiles and influencers? They see a finger pointing in accusation; they are told that the problem is too much belief held too tightly. Nein! I don’t know a soul in the churches under 45 years old for whom such a label fits. To a man, to a woman, they’re barely keeping their heads above the waters. And all they see is tidal waves coming for their children.

What we need, accordingly, is a shoring up of the foundations, not a tearing down of the walls. What we need, as I have written elsewhere, is not deconstruction. It’s reconstruction—or just plain construction, starting with what we have. From the raw soil and the still-smoking ruins, a shelter can be built. But we have to see what’s in front of us if are going to build at all, much less wisely, and we’ll never get around to the job if we project onto the smoldering wreckage the image of an impregnable fortress. Perhaps that’s what once was there. No longer.

Perennial epigraph

Plaster this as the epigraph or foreword to every work of theology, every essay, every review, every lecture, every class, every tract, every sermon, every degree in doctrine or ministry or biblical studies. It comes from the opening chapter of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ:

Quid prodest tibi alta de Trinitate disputare, si careas humilitate unde displiceas Trinitati? Vere alta verba non faciunt sanctum et justum, sed virtuosa vita efficit Deo carum. Opto magis sentire compunctionem quam scire definitionem. Si scires totam Bibliam, et omnium philosophorum dicta quid totum prodesset, sine charitate et gratia? Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas præter amare Deum et illi soli fervire. Ista est summa sapientia per contemptum mundi tendere ad regna cælestia.

Deconstruction

My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.

That’s fair. The piece I wrote was a blog post, shot off on little more than a whim. The point of it was less why deconstruction is bad, more why my friends and colleagues who presuppose that my main task in the classroom is deconstructing my students’ beliefs are dead wrong. I didn’t intend the post as an entry in the Deconstruction Wars—God forbid—which I find to be simultaneously vicious, vacuous, and largely pertaining to highly specific sub-cultures in American evangelicalism. The soldiers in these wars seem insistent on refusing to listen or understand one another. And since I’m not enlisted in either this or any intra-evangelical war, I don’t think of what I write as ever anything more than observations from a friendly outsider who lives in, if not enemy territory, than a sort of foreign land.

Having said that, in the hopes of clarifying where I was coming from in my post and offering some of those observations, here’s my two cents on that ill-famed and contested word, “deconstruction.”

*

Deconstruction is just a word. It’s not a technical term. Like every ordinary word, you know its meaning by the way people use it. To be sure, people don’t use it in identical ways, but those ways are nonetheless quite similar, and one or two primary meanings rise to the top of common usage.

By way of comparison, consider transubstantiation. That is a technical word. It has a prescriptive meaning however you or anyone else uses it correctly. Why? Because it was a term of art invented for a purpose: to give a name to whatever it is the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church believes (which is to say, teaches) occurs in the eucharistic rite, following the fourth Lateran Council and as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent.

Deconstruction is not like that. Unless you’re exegeting Derrida—and here’s the part where I remind you that exegeting Derrida gives you quite a bit of (shall we say) hermeneutical latitude—deconstruction is not a piece of jargon, a technical word, or a term of art. Its meaning is not determined by any magisteria of which I am aware, and that includes Christian Twitter. What it means is how it means in the natural discourse of those who deploy it. Which means, in turn, that to say, “D doesn’t mean X, D means Y,” is only a rather implausibly dogmatic way of saying, “I use D differently than you do,” which is itself just a way of saying, “I would prefer to restrict the use of D to mean Y instead of X.” The first phrasing sounds like a statement of grammatical fact, and thus a sort of rebuke; the second is mere description of difference of usage; the third is a normative claim, supportable by argument if one is in a mood to supply it.

It is perfectly defensible to opt for the third phrasing. That’s part of how the meaning of contested terminology gets sorted out. The second phrasing is a way of making disagreement intelligible, though it doesn’t move the needle of the conversation one way or the other. The thing to avoid is the first phrasing. There is no eternal dictionary definition on hand to which one may refer in parsing and correcting others’ usage of deconstruction. So it’s not only silly to bang one’s fist on the digital disk, insisting, flush-faced, that the word doesn’t mean X because it only means Y. It’s false.

The good news is, when faced with a novel word trailing behind it a range of possible meanings, we can hash out together how we think we ought to use the word, and why. That’s worth doing in this case, since deconstruction is very much a feature of The Discourse today. Even if we only establish distinct meanings that different people use in various contexts for diverse purposes, we might understand one another better, which is a worthy goal in itself.

*

I’m not going to try to settle what we all ought to understand by deconstruction. That’s a fool’s errand in any case. I do want to make a few remarks on the wider cultural trend the term names and why I said about it what I did in my original post.

Lest I be at all unclear, there are many, many people for whom deconstruction describes a crucial part of their spiritual formation in which they divested themselves of wicked or false beliefs or practices and learned to amend or replace those beliefs or practices with true or life-giving ones. To the precise extent that that experience is what is meant in general by deconstruction, then it is obvious to me that deconstruction is both necessary and good, a work of the Holy Spirit worth celebrating and commending. And I personally know folks, both college students and friends in mid-life, who fit this description and who unquestionably needed such an experience—if, that is, they or their faith were going to survive.

At the same time, I do not think this is the only experience named by deconstruction. And if I’m honest, I do not think it is the primary one, common though it may be.

The primary one is what I named in my post on (re)construction:

The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

Granted that I allow myself to get carried away there a bit (though forever and always you must credit me, I demand it, for “woke goop”), the basic point stands. Deconstruction today has become a sort of brand with which a certain class of evangelicals and exvangelicals would like to be identified. It has been transformed into a commodity that confers upon the person a particular social status, a status apt to those who have passed an invisible threshold of salary, graduate degrees, and political opinions. That status we may call “not disreputable.” To be disreputable is to be associated with the wrong people, in this case the people who raised you or the people you worship with, people who lack in the extreme the right status and the right opinions. Deconstruction™ provides permission structures for you either to hold such people at arm’s length or to renounce all their ways and works. You need not be associated with them, because (you now realize) you are unlike them. And the prompt for such realization is deconstruction.

At this point I will repeat: Is this all that deconstruction is, for anyone and everyone? No! I just said above that it is altogether something different for plenty of folks. But is it also this, namely the influencer-mediated mass phenomenon of Insta-trademarked social and spiritual status marked above all by the public signaling of newly disavowed disreputable and offensive beliefs and associations (or, as it happens, newly acquired reputable and inoffensive beliefs and associations)? Yes, it is. And I don’t know that I could believe you were being honest if you denied it.

*

There’s a third style of deconstruction worth mentioning, and its complexity is found in its unstable placement between the two I’ve already described. It’s this one that I was largely after in my original post, because it’s the one I see my students most susceptible to at this stage in their lives. Recall: I’m not a pastor. I’m a professor. My responsibility is the classroom, not the sanctuary. But because I teach at a Christian university and I have students of every major in my classes, it is part of my charge to teach on this or that aspect of Christian faith and theology in such a way that I am forming my students in the truth of the gospel as an outworking of the academic task.

Among the ways by which one can approach that charge, I identified two. One is deconstruction, the other is (re)construction. Deconstruction as a pedagogical mode treats students as ill-formed fundies in need of a sort of intellectual transfusion: my wisdom replacing their corrupted upbringing. I cannot put into words my contempt for this style of teaching. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. It spits on students’ families and communities of origin. It presumes to know in advance that they come from ignorance and stupidity, whereas I represent knowledge and enlightenment.

This is an abject and risible failure of the high calling of teacher.

When I say I don’t deconstruct in the classroom, this is what I mean. I don’t set myself in opposition to all that my students have ever known or trusted, asking them to place their faith in me instead. That doesn’t mean I abjure my authority or expertise. It just means teaching does not have to be contrastive to be successful. It doesn’t have to involve evacuation of the contents of students’ minds before learning can begin. It certainly does not require covertly incepting students such that they learn from the professor that, to be an educated person, they must actively distrust the very source of their life: their parents, their churches, their neighbors and coaches and mentors—in short, everyone they’ve ever loved.

Let me give a concrete example. I am explicit in my classroom that I hope to make an anti-Marcionite of every one of my students. I suppose I could do that by telling them, in so many words, that their churches are just the very worst for instilling in them, intentionally or not, a tacit skepticism of Israel, Israel’s scriptures, and Israel’s God. Why, though? Why must I engage in “them bad, me good” to make my point? Instead, among other things, what I say is: Think through the logic of your commitments, which are by and large the commitments of your churches and families. Do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Is the Old Testament in the Bible? Do they believe the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham who created the world? So on and so forth. It’s not hard at all for them to see, and quickly, that they and their communities are already committed to not being Marcionite. The subtle question then becomes, Where and how and why did they imbibe the assumption, however deep-seated, that the Old Testament is a second-class citizen in Holy Scripture? And that’s when we get cooking.

Do you see? You could describe what I’m doing there as deconstructing my students’ Marcionite beliefs. Is that really necessary though? Because you could equally describe it as building up (and grounding) my students’ antecedent but largely implicit beliefs about the unity of God, God’s people, and God’s word. And if what I’m after here is a choice between alternative pedagogies, then the latter is not only a superior description of what is happening. It is a guide to the “how,” the style and sensibility, of my teaching. It shapes my approach and governs my words. It reminds me, constantly, that I’m in the business of building, not tearing down—all the while allowing that building sometimes involves rebuilding, or removing this slat for that one, or securing walls or foundations in a more reliable way, and so on. The end is the edifice, which is why St. Paul calls for edification. That end has an aim or goal, then. It also implies a terminus, a destination, a point of completion. Ultimately that completion is in God’s hands, in God’s time, and arrives only after death. Keeping the end in mind, though, helps the teacher, or at any rate this teacher, from supposing that the construction project is aimless or without guidance, a wholly human endeavor in the philosophically constructivist sense: something we do, on our own for our own purposes, since of all things the measure is man.

In the world of education, especially academia, it can be tempting to believe that Protagoras is right. But he’s not. And my worst fear for my students is that they will be seduced by the most childish of all the deconstructions on offer, namely, that there are no answers, only questions, that deconstruction is a journey without a destination, that faith is only faith so long as you don’t believe in anything in particular, that what the gospel is good for is reinforcing what makes me comfortable and never demanding of me risk or loss, suffering or sacrifice, or (horror of horrors) disreputability.

I want my students to know Christ, the living Christ who is both more beautiful and more terrible than they’ve ever imagined. That means training them to ask good questions, and it certainly means crucifying their (and my) expectations of what may be true of God, what may be true of us, and what the true God may truly ask of each of us. If the result for my students is deconstruction in the good and proper sense, then so be it: you’ll get no protest or complaint from me. But if the result is the loss of Christ, if the result is an endless voyage away from God into the false self fashioned for them by the postmodern merchants of identity (whose god is their stomach, which is to say, Mammon), and if they call that deconstruction—then I don’t want anything to do with it. Such deconstruction will find no ready welcome in my classroom, only hostility and refusal.

Like everything that can be used well or poorly, then, deconstruction may be judged by its fruits. If it gives us Christ, we ought to welcome it. If it does not, we ought to turn it away. If sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, then we ought to judge case by case. At the very least, we should know in advance the good it is capable of doing and judge it accordingly. If by and large it fails to do that good, doing it only on rare occasions, then we are justified in viewing deconstruction as a general cultural trend to be something worth lamenting and resisting. And if I’m wrong, if the bad sorts of deconstruction outlined above are the exception to the rule, then God be praised: he’ll have proven me a fool again, and not for the last time.

(Re)construction

There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description.

I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?

Not because my students lack beliefs worth giving up (which, by the way, we all do, all the time). I’ve written elsewhere about what I call theological demons that demand exorcising in this generation of Bible-belt students. So it’s true in one sense that I identify and criticize particular beliefs that (I am explicit) I want my students to reject.

But that isn’t what people mean by deconstruction, either in form or in content. The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

So no. As far as I can help it I don’t add my voice to the deconstruction chorus. What do I do instead then?

I build. Which is to say, I construct, or reconstruct. It’s all foundations, floor plans, building permits, and fashioning of pillars in my classroom. We don’t tear down an inch, not if I can help it.

The reason is simple. My students don’t have anything to deconstruct. Deconstruction implies the razing of a building, the demolition of a house. But for the most part, my students don’t walk into my classes with mental palaces furnished in gold, granite, and crystal. All too often, their faith is a house of cards. One gust of wind, one gentle puff of air will knock it down. I’m not interested in that. Not only am I not teaching at a state school in a religion department. I’m a Christian theologian, a teacher in and for the church. It’s my business to fortify, to strengthen, to secure, and to ground their faith—not to tear it down. Deconstruction is a razing, as I said, but I’m in the business of raising homes to live in. I want sturdy foundations and load-bearing walls. I want to build houses on the rock.

Because the storm is coming. It’s already here. I’m given students who for the most part believe already, or want to believe. What I do is say: Guess what? It’s true. All of it. You can trust what you’ve been taught, though you may not have been given the resources to explore the how or the why or the what-for. But Jesus really is God’s Son; he really did rise from the dead; he really is the Lord and savior of the cosmos. And from there it’s off to the races: church history, sacred tradition, ecumenical councils, creedal formulas, saints and doctors, mystics and martyrs, doctrines and dogmas and the rest.

Not one word is meant to undermine the faith they brought with them to the course. It’s meant to bolster and stabilize it. The unmaskers and destabilizers, the Deconstructors™ with all their pomp will be knocking on the doors of their hearts soon enough. I’m doing what I can in the time that I have to reinforce and buttress their defenses, so that when the time comes they are ready. Not because I want them to live free from risk; not because I want them to avoid hard questions. On the contrary. I’m usually the first to raise some of those hard questions on their behalf. But I don’t pretend that it’s better to leave questions untouched than to seek truth by answering them; I don’t model for them the faux profundity of the hip philosopher who hides his actual convictions while interrogating everyone else’s unfashionable ones.

On that day, fast approaching, when my students find themselves facing an unexpected question or challenge to their faith, instead of thinking, “My deconstructing professor was right: this Christian thing is a sham,” they might think instead, “I’m not sure what the answer is here, but the way my theology professor acted, I bet the church has thought about this before; I should look into it.” I want my students to learn the reflex, at the gut level, that there’s a there there, i.e., there’s something to be looked into—not merely something to be walked away from.

That’s why I don’t deconstruct. My classroom is a construction site. Day and night, we’re building, building, building, world without end, amen.

(In)defectibility, local and regional

Churches die. Christian traditions die. Denominations die. Whole regions and epochs of once flourishing ecclesial and liturgical life die.

Does that sound harsh? It’s certainly cause for lament. But it’s a plain truth of history, and the church’s faith has no grounds for disputing it.

Nevertheless I have often found myself within earshot of Christians, especially pastors and church leaders, who casually suggest otherwise. They take the possibility, not to mention the assertion, that individual or local or regional churches and their concomitant institutions and organs of self-propagation and tradition might die—might even, in terms of statistical or demographic probability, be bound for death sooner rather than later—to be contrary to confidence in the gospel, and/or a denial of the faith, and/or sign of a lack of trust in God, and/or cause for despair. How could you get up in the morning, as a Christian or a pastor, believing that?

Well. The first thing to say to that is that Christians don’t get out of bed because they have reason to believe things will go well for them. On balance, the likelihood of a Christian’s suffering is directly, not inversely, proportional to her faithfulness in discipleship. At the very least, faithfulness is not a guard against bad things happening. We should expect to be Jobs, every one of us, and cry out in thanks when we are not. We follow the Lord to Golgotha. Eternal life comes after crucifixion: it does not precede it, much less avoid it.

Be that as it may. The simpler point concerns the doctrine of indefectibility. This doctrine teaches that, follows the promise of Jesus to St. Peter, the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. And that is true. The church will not blink out of existence, no matter how weak or frail or corrupt or small it becomes. The church will be here when the Lord returns. The saying is sure. Every Christian bets her life on it.

But “the church” doesn’t mean your church. It means the church catholic. Leave aside whether that honorific applies to one institutional form or ecclesial tradition in particular. What it doesn’t include is the local parish or congregation to which you belong. It doesn’t include all the churches in your city put together. It even doesn’t include all the churches on your continent put together. Nor, finally, does it include your denomination or stream of ecclesial tradition. There may come a day when there are no more Moravians or Wesleyans or Baptists or Stone-Campbellites or Calvinists or Lutherans around. There may come a time when North America is a burnt-over district for faith (to use a phrase from the late Robert Jenson)—when not one community of Jesus’s gospel remains in these ancient lands. That is a possibility. Perhaps they will lie fallow, the people left behind growing weary, eventually panting after Christ. We may trust that such a thing would be superintended by divine providence. Perhaps it would lead, decades or centuries hence, to a great revival. But for the time being, and indeed into the indefinite future, we aren’t promised one single thing about survival: that is, the survival of our communities, our institutions, or our regional and national denominations, however strong or weak they may appear at any one time.

That may be a hard pill to swallow. Better to accept the truth, though, than to live by a lie. More to the point, it reminds us that our trust, finally, is in God alone. The only history with a side worth being on is his. Vindication won’t come short of glory. But it will come soon enough.

Cheering for Monty Williams

While you, like me, are enjoying this year’s NBA playoffs, and while you, like me, are cheering for a Suns–Hawks Finals, remember what kind of man is coaching Phoenix. Just under seven years ago Sports Illustrated wrote an extensive piece about Ryan Anderson, who at the time played for the New Orleans Pelicans. The story was about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Anderson’s girlfriend, and the personal and emotional fallout afterward. Monty Williams, now coach of the Phoenix Suns, was the New Orleans coach that year. Here is how Williams, a devout Christian, responded to Anderson’s crushing shock and grief:

Pelicans coach Monty Williams hurrying in with a team security guard and finding Ryan slumped on the carpet, his back to the door, unable to rise. Williams dropping to his knees and hugging his player, the two men rocking back and forth. . . .

As a crowd milled outside the apartment complex, Williams and the security guard hoisted up Ryan, who was limp and drenched with tears and sweat, too hysterical even to walk. They dragged Ryan to the elevator and then into a waiting car, the tops of his feet, still wedged into flip-flops, scraping the asphalt so hard that his toes still bear thick white calluses more than a year later.

As they drove in silence, Williams kept thinking that it was fine if he blew a game, but he couldn't mess up now. Once home, he huddled with his wife, Ingrid, and Ryan in the family room, praying. Ingrid's brother had committed suicide recently. She knew not to say it was going to be O.K., because it wasn't. "This is going to be hard for a long time," she told Ryan.

That night, as the family pastor came and went, Ryan cried so much that it felt as if he were dry heaving or bleeding internally. Each convulsion ripped his insides apart.

Around 1 a.m., at Ingrid's urging, Monty brought one of his sons' mattresses down to the living room. There the two men lay through the night, Ryan curled on the sofa and his coach on the floor next to him. When Ryan wanted to talk, they talked. Otherwise there was only his muted sobbing. Finally, just after the sun came up, Ryan fell into a fitful sleep.

At the time, I learned of the SI piece via Deadspin, which similarly quotes this excerpt. Go read the rest here. (And read this, too, if you can stand it.) And as you’re following the conference finals, and when you notice that poised, intelligent, humane man on the Suns sidelines, send him a cheer or a prayer or good vibes or what have you. This Spurs fan is hoping he reaches the finish line.

Scialabba, Jacobs, and God's existence: where the real problem lies

Alan Jacobs is right about George Scialabba's latest review essay, in this case of John Gray's new book, Seven Types of Atheism, for The New Republic. Scialabba is always great, but his theological instincts fail him here. As Jacobs observes, Scialabba wants to speak up for nonbelievers who wish God—if he does in fact exist—would simply make himself known in some inarguably clear way. But since, apparently, he does not and has not, that in itself is evidence that no such thing as an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful deity exists; or that, if he does, our knowledge or beliefs about or relationship with God is a negligible matter, and all will be sorted out in the hereafter.

Jacobs takes Scialabba to task for both the unthinking glibness on display (frivolous speculation about our ancient ancestors; writing contemporary mystics and charismatics out of the picture; etc.) and the more serious inattentiveness to what a truly incontrovertible divine self-revelation would mean. Jacobs uses the work of David Bentley Hart to remind us just what we mean, or rather do not mean, when we use the word "God," and how Scialabba is functionally reverting to a mythical picture of god-as-super-creature who yet inexplicably remains opaque to us here below. Jacobs then (being Jacobs) draws us to a speech of Satan's in Paradise Lost, bringing the existential point home.

Let me piggy-back on Jacobs' critique and suggest an even deeper problem with Scialabba's musings, one I've reflected on before at some length. The problem is twofold.

On the one hand, it cannot be emphasized enough that the kind of skeptical atheism that Scialabba sees himself standing up for here is vanishingly small in human history, both past and present. So far as we can tell, nearly all human beings who have ever lived have taken it for granted that reality is more than the empiricists suggest; that there is some Power or Goodness or Being that transcends the visible and tangible, preceding and encompassing it; that human life, though brief and sometimes terribly burdened, carries more weight and has more depth than those features would suggest on their face, and that it may or will in one way or another outlast its short span on this earth. Even today, the overwhelming majority of people on this globe "believe" in what we in the West call divinity or practice what we in the West call religion. The anxious queries of skeptical atheists, while worth taking seriously at an intellectual and emotional level, could not be less representative of humanity in general's relationship with "the God question."

In short, the sort of defeaters Scialabba offers as evidence of God's lack of self-revelation bear little to no relation to the average person's thoughts or experience regarding God's existence. Most people don't need God to write his name on the sun. In a sense, he already has.

Such a response doesn't go very far, though, in responding to Scialabba's true concern. Perhaps most human beings, past and present, are just not philosophically rigorous or serious enough to ask the tough questions that inexorably lead to atheism. Or perhaps it's not "religious belief" in general but the challenge of revelational certainty, i.e., which religion/deity to believe in, that's at issue. Here's what's most deeply wrong with his argument then.

The Christian tradition does not teach, nor has it ever taught, that the most important thing to do is believe that God exists, or even that the Christian God exists. Instead, the most important thing is to love this God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength. What God wants from you—demands, in fact—is not affirmation of a proposition about himself or mental assent to the facticity of his being. Rather, it is the totality of your being, the absolute and unconditional lifelong allegiance of your very self. What God wants is faithfulness.

And it turns out, according to the painfully consistent testimony of Holy Scripture, that faithfulness is a lot harder than faith. By which I mean: total devotion to God is far more difficult than belief that God exists. As the epistle of James says, the demons believe that God is one—and shudder. Israel at Sinai doesn't lack the belief that YHWH exists; there's evidence aplenty for that: lightning and thunder and a great cloud and the divine voice and Lord's glory; everything Scialabba wants from God! But what do the Israelites do? They make a golden calf and worship a false god. In doing so, they do not subtract belief in YHWH; they add to that belief "belief" in other gods. Which is to say, they add to worship of the one God the worship of that which is not God.

Our problem, therefore, isn't belief that God exists in the face of a thousand reasonable doubts. Our problem is idolatry. When the one true God comes near to human beings, when they hear his voice and see his face, they know it to be true—and they turn away. They know God—and sin. They believe "in" God—and disobey him. They lack doubt—and hurt others.

For Christians, this problem is illustrated most of all in the Gospels. Time and again the apostles see with their own eyes the identity and deeds of the incarnate Son of God, and time and again they misunderstand, mis-hear, mis-speak, fall away, to the point of deserting him in his hour of need and even denying ever knowing him.

Scialabba wants God to make it impossible to disbelieve in his existence. But even if God were to do that, it wouldn't change the fundamental problem—our sinful, wicked hearts, prone to evil and violence from birth and a veritable factory of idols—one bit. Or rather, what we would need is the kind of belief, the sort of knowledge, that went to the root of that problem, transforming us from the inside out. Making true worship possible; ridding us of idolatry; supplying us the power to do what we could never do for ourselves; making faithfulness a reality, that we might finally and wholeheartedly love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Christians believe God has done just this for the world in and through Christ. No dispositive evidence will persuade a Scialabba that this is the case. But the gospel isn't meant to answer such a request. Contained within the solution it offers is an entirely different diagnosis of our situation and thus of our greatest need. If the gospel and the faith it proclaims are to be rejected, those are the terms on which to do so.

Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?

The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.

Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.

But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?

I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.

I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.

But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.

Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.

A coda on doubt

I forgot to include one thing in yesterday’s post about doubt. The unqualified affirmation of doubt, combined with the extension or requirement of experiencing it to all, is a problem also on pastoral grounds. Namely, the goodness of the good news depends on the ability to proclaim it without reservation or condition. The gospel announces an unrestricted promise of divine grace and love: “God has come near in Christ Jesus—repent and believe the good news!” The creeping, casual generalization of doubt to all believers and all belief as such has the effect of nullifying the force of this proclamation. For it is not only the unconditional quality of the message but the divine subject of the evangelical predicate that makes the message a matter of glad tidings, an announcement that is much more than a strong suggestion, but rather a word that of itself has the power to change lives, because it has already changed the world.

For example, the gospel does not say “You are forgiven.” It says “In Christ God has forgiven you.” It does not say “You have worth.” It says “You are made in the image of God.” It does not say “You have the power to do the good.” It says “God has given you his Holy Spirit, who will empower you to do the good.”

Moreover, such claims lose all power with a question mark placed next to them. “God loves you—maybe.” “God’s grace covers your sins—possibly.” “God’s Spirit will not abandon you—hopefully.” The gospel is a promise, and for the promise to take effect, it must be believed. It can be believed because of its speaker, the creator and redeemer of all, the One who keeps his promises. The irony is that, in seeking to be responsive to pastoral needs, those who absolutize doubt as an inevitable and even healthy mark of mature faith in the modern age rob themselves of the greatest pastoral resource available to them: the power of the gospel.

On the contrary, then: Do nothing to qualify or undermine the liberating promise of God’s good news in Christ: as the power of God for salvation, it places a question mark next to all human endeavors—not the reverse.

Against universalizing doubt

"Everyone doubts." "The question isn't whether you doubt, but when." "Faith without doubt is blind." "Doubt is universal."

Such phrases have become commonplaces in Christian discourse today. The context is usually pastoral, personal, or theological: responding to those grappling with doubt, sharing one's own experience with doubt, or reflecting on the nature and significance of doubt within and for Christian faith.

The object of doubt is not always specified, but in general it seems to be the existence of God, or some particular feature of faith's claims (about miracles, say, or the resurrection of Jesus, or an event in salvation history), or simply the whole ensemble of the spiritual world: reality beyond the empirical, life after death, angels and demons and heaven and hell.

The reason for doubt is often, though not always, the perceived difficulty of believing in God in light of some other thing understood to be in tension with faith, whether that be modern science, religious pluralism, historical criticism, ecclesial disunity, human suffering, or some otherwise specified personal experience.

The social background to doubt is often—more or less always?—the felt sense, usually informed by the family or church setting in which one was raised, that Christians as a whole look down on doubt, indeed, positively repudiate doubt as inimical to true faith; that this view is theologically misguided and psychologically repressive; and therefore that Christians who doubt should both "out" themselves as doubting believers and encourage fellow doubters in the integrity of their experience.

So far as I can tell, this last diagnosis of the atmosphere in many church communities is accurate (though I should say that it does not describe my own experience). To the extent that those who write about doubt in the Christian life succeed in (a) softening those subcultures of ecclesial self-deception and overwrought assurance or (b) creating spaces in which those who experience doubt can verbalize their thoughts and questions without fear of punishment or excommunication—keep up the good work, and may their tribe increase. Like many good things, however, talk about doubt, in pushing against one extreme, has ended up affirming another. My modest suggestion is that, by moving to the middle and accepting a more moderate position on doubt and faith, those who write and think about the topic have everything to gain and nothing to lose, whereas their current approach, so exclusive and totalizing, threatens to undermine their goals and alienate potential allies.

Because the simple truth is that not everyone doubts. More to the point, not every Christian doubts. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Christians who have ever lived have not experienced what people today call "doubt." The same goes for the majority of contemporary Christians around the globe.

This is difficult for many to get their minds around, but the apparent questionability or ambiguity of the reality of the supernatural (or spiritual, or divine, or whatever) was not a given social fact for people who lived before a couple centuries ago, nor is it a fact for most people living outside the industrialized West today. "Does God exist?" was not an existentially paralyzing question for the average Italian Catholic peasant in the year 950. Nor does it dominate the daily lives of the inhabitants of present-day sub-Saharan Africa. And this is not merely the absence of education, as if knowing more about the world (its cosmic history, its molecular makeup, its vast teeming diversity, or what have you) leads logically to questioning God's existence. A certain kind of education under certain material, social, and societal conditions does indeed have the likelihood of increasing theological doubt. But there is no good reason to generalize from one particular kind of education to all education as such.

And that raises the larger point, beyond the inarguable fact that the great majority of human beings, past and present, have not doubted and do not doubt the existence of God (the supernatural, the spiritual, the non-empirical, etc.). That point is this: People who doubt and who write about doubt feel the need to universalize their experience of doubt, and so inadvertently mirror the position they seek to oppose. Instead of disallowing doubt, they disallow lack of doubt. Instead of repressing lack of certainty, they repress lack of uncertainty. Instead of requiring assurance in all things, they require assurance in nothing.

But there is no warrant for universalizing doubt. Though well meant, it is little more than projection of one's own experience onto the canvas of humanity, the generalization of the parochial. But doubt need not be common to all to be legitimate for some. Nor does doubt confer some kind of moral or spiritual superiority on those who experience it versus those who do not. The one who believes without doubt is not ipso facto less sophisticated, less thoughtful, less theologically adept, less sensitive to the ambiguities and shortcomings and evils of fallen human life than the who believes in the midst of or in spite of doubt. Doubt is not the mark of maturity. It is not the mark of anything except itself.

Too often the underlying dynamic at work is that of the ex-fundamentalist. Once a fundie, always a fundie: so that, if I once was taught and myself believed that absolute certainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian, then it follows that, once I am liberated from that sentiment and the community that engendered it in me, absolute uncertainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian. But it doesn't follow. Abuse does not invalidate good use. The lack of doubt can be and is a good and salutary thing in many believers' lives. The presence of doubt is a reality in other believers' lives, one that sometimes proves to be a painful struggle and sometimes proved to be a boon to deeper, richer, more authentically personal faith. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these two statements.

My sense is that many who doubt find it psychologically or intellectually implausible that there are those (at least in the modern West) who sincerely and honestly do not have doubts. But this is small-minded, vain, and ungenerous. Without question there are some believers who deceive others or themselves about their doubts, and there are still other believers who repress questions that might challenge their insecure certainties. But not everyone is a Socrates. Not everyone is an academic. Not everyone labors, beleaguered, under the naturalistic nihilism of scientistic modernity. God is "just there" for many people, present in grace and power, available in prayer, a source of judgment and consolation alike, an unavoidable but unintrusive goad to the quotidian tasks of daily life.

Moreover, is it a problem that such people lack doubt? Are their lives diminished without our politely informing them that, as a matter of fact, everyone doubts (didn't you know?), and until they admit that they do too, they're merely infants in the faith? Or is it a matter of false consciousness—such people's "God" is too anthropomorphic or literalistic or unsubtle? I am a theologian; naturally I think teaching and learning is crucial to the life and growth of faith. But it is narcissistic in the extreme to suggest that everyone must come to the very same conclusions that I have, in the very same ways that I have, or else their belief is somehow lesser than mine, impure or syncretistic in a way that mine is not, having passed through the crucible of doubt.

The impression I get when I read the more intellectual versions of universalizing doubt—for example, Christian Wiman or Peter Enns—is that, at bottom, they think God is the sort of thing that must necessarily be believed in only provisionally, and further, that not to do so is a kind of moral failure, inasmuch as it is a category error of sorts. "Religion" does not admit of certainties, and therefore anyone who trades in religious certainties is theologically unserious and morally dangerous: such a person wants to use God for some other, very likely bad, end.

Such a worry is warranted, but, once again, in universalizing a specific concern and thereby requiring it of all rational, respectable people, it undercuts its own force. All good things can be made a means to evil ends. God (or "religion") is no different. But implicit in the assumption that God is not the sort of thing one believes in without doubt is a whole theological epistemology that gives priority to other ways of knowing over against faith. But rarely is the position argued on those terms—and for good reason, because there is no epistemic position not subject to the very same debilitating challenges addressed to faith. The lesson of modernity, in other words, is not that faith in God is subject to doubt, but that everything is subject to doubt. You don't have to play that game, but if you do, you don't get to pick and choose which sort of knowledge is sturdy and which is shaky. The problems go all the way to the foundations.

But that is a secondary matter. Here is the primary issue: If what the gospel says about God is true, it is not the sort of thing best assented to halfheartedly. We don't talk about other important issues this way, as if the commitment to one's marital vows or the belief in the equal and intrinsic worth of all human beings or the unwillingness to harm children were a provisional matter improved by qualifications of doubt. Such things are improved by unwavering allegiance.

So with God: If faith produces good fruit, then we should not want less of it as a matter of principle. Ambivalence in faith does not issue in martyrs and saints. One does not suffer torture and death or give away all of one's possessions to the poor for the sake of a vague notion half-believed in. (Not to say a certain kind of doubt is absent in the saints: Mother Teresa, for example.) True, the church should neither condemn nor exclude those whose faith is held feebly, or those who by temperament or conviction cannot or will not claim the high confidence of their sisters and brothers. But the church should nonetheless encourage and bolster faith that walks unbowed into the Colosseum, the faith of Ignatius and Polycarp and Perpetua, faith that is wholehearted, unqualified, and inextinguishable.

For the great challenge is not faith. It is faithfulness. Doubt is often over-intellectualized: "How, in 2017, can anyone believe such-and-such?" (Not for nothing are doubt's champions mostly, or formerly, Protestant.) But Christianity does not consist in believing 20 absurd things before breakfast. Kierkegaard was right: your faith would not be greater if you had seen Jesus in the flesh. The disciples were living exercises in missing the point, and the greatest of them denied him in his hour of need. The risen Jesus appeared to the disciples on the mountain—"but some doubted." What did they doubt? Not whether or not there is that than which nothing greater can be thought. They doubted Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the Shema applied to a human being: Love God, that is, this scorned and tortured Rabbi, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Trust him with every atom of your being, give to him every ounce of trust you've got, cast your burdens onto his black-bruised shoulders: and he will lift you up.

Christian faith is hard, and necessarily so, but not because God is a metaphysical conundrum, or because demon possession is anachronistic, or because the Bible isn't inerrant. It is hard, for any and every Christian, because following Jesus is hard. The obedience of faith is taxing, exacting, ruthless, unyielding. The flesh is weak, and doubts creep in. For some, those doubts will be theological in character: Is this whole God thing plausible? For most, though, those doubts will be more like the voice of the serpent in Genesis 3: Did God really say such-and-such? Can I really be expected to live this way? Can I really trust God at his word?

The struggle is universal, but the nature of the struggle is not. Insofar as doubt's sympathizers bear up under it as part of faith's larger struggle, helping themselves and others to stand, waver though they may—blessings upon them. An overweening emphasis on the supposed necessity and universality of doubt, however, will inevitably result in unintended consequences: riding roughshod over the actual experience of fellow believers; denigrating the simple surety of faith native to so many; and distracting from the real struggle, namely, a whole lifetime of uncompromising discipleship to the crucified Christ, a calling from which no one is excluded.

Not one, just he: Barth on the universal promeity of the gospel

"It happened that in the humble obedience of the Son He took our place, He took to Himself our sins and death in order to make an end of them in His death, and that in so doing He did the right, He became the new and righteous man. It also happened that in His resurrection from the dead He was confirmed and recognized and revealed by God the Father as the One who has done and been that for us and all men. As the One who has done that, in whom God Himself has done that, who lives as the doer of that deed, He is our man, we are in Him, our present is His, the history of man is His history, He is the concrete event of the existence and reality of justified man in whom every man can recognize himself and every other man—recognize himself as truly justified. There is not one for whose sin and death He did not die, whose sin and death He did not remove and obliterate on the cross, for whom He did not positively do the right, whose right He has not established. There is not one to whom this was not addressed as his justification in His resurrection from the dead. There is not one whose man He is not, who is not justified in Him. There is not one who is justified in any other way than in Him—because it is in Him and only in Him that an end, a bonfire, is made of man’s sin and death, because it is in Him and only in Him that man’s sin and death are the old thing which has passed away, because it is in Him and only in Him that the right has been done which is demanded of man, that the right has been established to which man can move forward. Again, there is not one who is not adequately and perfectly and finally justified in Him. There is not one whose sin is not forgiven sin in Him, whose death is not a death which has been put to death in Him. There is not one whose right has not been established and confirmed validly and once and for all in Him. There is not one, therefore, who has first to win and appropriate this right for himself. There is not one who has first to go or still to go in his own virtue and strength this way from there to here, from yesterday to to-morrow, from darkness to light, who has first to accomplish or still to accomplish his own justification, repeating it when it has already taken place in Him. There is not one whose past and future and therefore whose present He does not undertake and guarantee, having long since accepted full responsibility and liability for it, bearing it every hour and into eternity. There is not one whose peace with God has not been made and does not continue in Him. There is not one of whom it is demanded that he should make and maintain this peace for himself, or who is permitted to act as though he himself were the author of it, having to make it himself and to maintain it in his own strength. There is not one for whom He has not done everything in His death and received everything in His resurrection from the dead.

"Not one. That is what faith believes. . . .

"When a man can and must believe, it is not merely a matter of an 'also,' of his attachment as an individual to the general being and activity of the race and the community as determined by Jesus Christ. In all the common life of that outer and inner circle he is still himself. He is uniquely this man and no other. He cannot be repeated or represented. He is incomparable. He is this in his relationship with God and also in his relationship with his fellows. He is this soul of this body, existing in the span of this time of his. He is this sinful man with his own particular pride and in his own special case. For all his common life he is alone in this particularity. It is not simply that he also can and must believe, but that just he can and must believe. And if the being and activity of Jesus Christ Himself is the mystery of the event in which he actually does so, then we must put it even more strongly and precisely: that in this event it takes place that Jesus Christ lives not only 'also' but 'just' as his Mediator and Savior and Lord, and that He shows Himself just to him as this living One. He became a servant just for him. It was just his place that He took, the place which is not the place of any other. In this place He died just for him, for his sin. And, again, in his place He was raised again from the dead. Therefore the Yes which God the Father spoke to Him as His Son in the resurrection is spoken not only also but just to him, this man. In Him it was just his pride, his fall which was overcome. In Him it is just his new right which has been set up, his new life which has appeared. And in Him it is just he who is called to new responsibility, who is newly claimed. It is just he who is not forgotten by Him, not passed over, not allowed to fall, not set aside or abandoned. It is just he—and this is the work of the Holy Spirit—who has been sought out, and reached, and found by Him, just he whom He has associated with Himself and Himself with him. God did not will to be God without being just his God. Jesus did not will to be Jesus without being just his Jesus. The world was not to be reconciled with God without just this man as an isolated individual being a man—this man—reconciled with God. The community was not to be the living body of Christ without just this man being a living member of it. The whole occurrence of salvation was not to take place but just for him, as the judgment executed just on him, the grace addressed in this judgment just to him, just his justification, just his conversion to God. The gift and commission of the community of Jesus Christ is personally just his gift and commission. And all this not merely incidentally, among other things, or only in part for him, but altogether, in its whole length and breadth and height and depth just for him, because Jesus Christ, in whom all this is given to the world and the community, in whom God Himself has sacrificed Himself for it, is Jesus, the Christ, just for him. That this shines out in a sinful man is the mystery, the creative fact, in the event of faith in which he becomes and is a Christian, so that he can and must acknowledge and recognize and confess as such what is proper to him as this subject.

"What do I acknowledge and recognize and confess as this subject? That Jesus Christ Himself is pro me, just for me."

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 629–630, 754–755