Undeception

The language of this poem by George Herbert, from The Temple (1633), while slightly archaic in spelling and vocabulary, is very readable, and I implore you to make the effort to read it. It beautifully describes my commitment to an informed faith that has had the effect of redirecting my focus away from things I’m required to believe without question – what is so often falsely called “faith” – and back toward the Subject of my faith, in whom my faith, hope, and love begin and end: a God who is supremely lovely.

The Pearl (Matthew 13)

I know the wayes of Learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the presse, and make it runne;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of it self, like a good huswife, spunne
In laws and policie; what the starres conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;
Both th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and historie:
All these stand open, or I have the keyes:
Yet I love thee.

I know the wayes of Honour, what maintains
The quick returns of courtesie and wit:
In vies of favours whether partie gains,
When glorie swells the heart, and moldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle, wheresoe’re it goes:
How many drammes of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
Yet I love thee.

I know the wayes of Pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot bloud and brains;
What mirth and musick mean; what love and wit
Have done these twentie hundred yeares, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuffe is flesh, not brasse; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Then he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.

I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes
I flie to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through these labyrinths, not my groveling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,
Did both conduct and teach me, how by it
To climbe to thee.

Many thanks to my friend Peter Smith for bringing this moving, insightful poem to my attention!

When people quote 1 Corinthians 13.13, “Now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love,” the odd man out is almost invariably hope.

Preachers and other exegetes tend to read too much into serialized lists like the one there at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, imagining that the things listed have been presented by the author in a super-humanly insightful, divinely inspired order of importance; then they tend to turn those suppositions into sermons or doctrines. I, in turn, tend to cast such speculations out as the fanciful effects of a too-mystical, Bible Code-esque view of Scripture.

But in this case, I really can imagine that the order of “faith, hope, and love” was intentional after all. Paul certainly identifies the most important member of the group, which happens to be the last listed and could imply that the list is in order of “great, greater, greatest”. This would mean that hope is next to love, and that faith, without which it is reportedly impossible to please God, is somehow not as “great” as hope. But could that be?

I don’t know if Paul meant to imply that. But as far as I’m concerned, hope is at least as important as faith — in one sense, maybe even “greater”.

Love is the basis of my faith and the object of my worship. Above all, it is in Love that I trust and in whose interests I seek to act – the biblical understanding of “faith”. I find a denial of the objectivity, universality, and absoluteness of love’s existence and importance wholly unsatisfactory to my observation and experience, and I worship the Judeo-Christian God insofar as I believe He is Himself love personified. I believe that it is love in which we live, move, and have our being. So my faith is in love, specifically the sort described by followers of Jesus since the first century.

But this doesn’t mean that hope is some strange third wheel: it’s where I live. My faith – what I seek to live by – is energized by my hope in love; in other words, faith is how I live, and hope is why I live that way. I abide in the hope that way, way down there, below all those turtles, is Love. And it is hope that keeps me believing and acting out my faith. My commitment to living out my devotion to the absolute values of love and goodness is energized by my hopeful expectation that this kind of life will not be for naught. It keeps me carrying on in the darkest days of doubt.

Unfortunately, our particular set of guiding beliefs and expectations is what most Evangelicals refer to as faith. A lack of certainty is seen as an enemy of faith. In removing the intrinsically unfulfilled aspect of hope from the equation, they are left with an understanding of faith as assumed certainty. But, as Paul once wrote, “Who hopes for what he already has?” We can live in anticipation, expectation, and even confidence of something without feigning certitude of it. It is those who force themselves to come to grips with the extremely tentative nature of our beliefs, ideals, and expectations who best understand the Christian hope and, as a result, faith.

Be that as it may, all the talk about the virtue of Christian doubt among the progressive/liberal sort of Christians, myself included, understandably leaves many cold — again, myself included. Even while affirming the necessity of healthy skepticism, I have been discouraged to see a rising preoccupation with doubt among many of my fellow sojourners: doubt has become the stereotypical post-Evangelical replacement for faith. Entire blogs have turned into doubt vs. faith zones, not necessarily because the authors really think that faith and doubt are opposites (although some probably do), but because in overcompensating for the problem of a steadfastly uninformed faith, they have forgotten that doubt is not its own recipe, but merely an ingredient of a greater virtue, that “sunnier side of doubt” to which Tennyson alluded: hope.

Doubt is not a substitute for faith: it’s a corrective measure for a faith characterized by artificial certitude. Doubt has no positive existence worth celebrating; it is a side effect of humility, which begins in discomfort, settles into euphoria, but usually leaves those dwelling in it too long feeling hungry for more certainty. A healthy skepticism says, “I’ll step lightly until I know this is true,” whereas the unhealthy form of it I see too much of these days says, “I’ll go around looking for things to debunk.” Although the widespread misunderstanding of “faith” as blind belief among Evangelicals is legitimately critiqued by a humble recognition of our fallibility and potential for self-delusion, this deficiency is not necessarily remedied by either a similarly conceited disbelief or a similarly blind default stance of skepticism. When certainty eludes us, we must avoid manufacturing it in any direction; I am suggesting we would do well to remember the under-appreciated virtue of hope.

My hope, more than my credulity, is in the Christian God. Do I believe in God, Jesus, the ethic of love articulated by my forbears in the Christian faith, etc.? In a sense, but primarily because I hope in them. Hope steers my faith, not the assumption of certainty that masquerades as “faith”. My theological speculations are an explanation of how I expect my hope to be realized by love’s final victory, and my faith is merely how I go about fulfilling my theology. My hope is that which I commit to build through my life of faith. It seems to me, then, that hope is closer to love than either one is to faith.

With the tendency to conflate a reasoned and conscious hope with the make-believe of those in stout denial of reality, many who have come down this road with me have decided that they are content to rest in disbelief, a ready shelter from the turmoil of doubt. To be sure, getting one’s head out of the clouds and finding the beauty where we are on the ground is a laudable task, and I will listen to what they teach me and respectfully wish them well; but hope calls me deeper.

Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name
Is this the sweet sound
That calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same

The moment we begin our exploration of the expanse beyond the turtle our world sits upon, we become like aliens. Faith is my commitment to step out of my capsule of unquestioned certainty and into that unknown world, knowing full well that what I inhale has every chance of being incompatible with my constitution. For after all, the air where I’m headed can hardly be any more unhealthy than the air I’m leaving behind. It’s either stay and suffocate while I try to convince myself to be satisfied in this world or dare to suppose that my difficulty in breathing here is due to the fact that, in Lewis’s words, “I was made for another world.” I will embrace even the faint opportunity to fill my lungs with a purer air so that I am more fit to offer something to this hurting world.

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it
It’s something that I’m s’posed to be…

So in hope, my act of faith in a love still largely unrealized, I take a deep breath, and descend the ladder to place my foot on the back of the next turtle down…

Becoming an atheist is not in the cards for me at this point. But if ever I find myself an atheist, here’s my pledge to you.

I will not set up websites or troll others’ websites trying to get people to see why I lost my faith or why they should as well. I probably won’t even waste my time frequenting other skeptic/atheist blogs, either to shore up my non-belief, or to help me cope with my loss of faith, or to poke fun at those who still believe. If I step into the void of a godless universe, I’ll know exactly what I’m getting into (which, not coincidentally, is one reason it’s unlikely to happen any time soon).

If anything, I will spend my time trying to bridge the great divide and getting people to stop demonizing one another long enough to understand the positive aspects of the other side — and to exhort the true believer and the disillusioned alike to recognize that there are indeed positive aspects on both sides that we would all do well to cultivate. From what I’ve seen, you can remedy most of the bad aspects of the other guy’s belief system by helping to inform his beliefs more easily than embittering him by forcing your system onto his or trying to make him your clone.

I’m just so blasted tired of the bitterness and the negativity. Whether the God of love exists or theism is pure hogwash, I simply won’t live my life like that. Whatever ad hoc meaning I can contrive out of a purposeless universe will not include debunking the purpose currently bringing about good in other people’s lives. Yes, I can see myself delicately augmenting their current purpose with concepts of open-mindedness and goodwill, perhaps, but not popping their balloons just because mine got popped and I’ve convinced myself I’m happier without it.

I guess you could say that I’ll continue to serve, worship, and even proselytize for what Christianity has identified as good, right, and lovely, even if I abandon my faith in the Ultimate Basis for those concepts. So in a very real way, I can pretty much promise you that even if I lose my faith in God, I’ll never really lose my religion.

And hence, I pledge to you that my religion won’t ever grant me permission to be a jerk, a troll, or an evangelist for self-made and self-defined purpose.

What in the world am I trying to do with this site? Who am I writing for? Who do I expect to come away with something of value?

I ask myself these questions periodically. Am I a “faith” blogger or a “skeptic” blogger? The posts I write criticizing aspects of evangelicalism are the most popular, and are quite common given that those beliefs are most often the object of my own undeception; on the other hand, I make no bones about my own abiding faith. Yet in observing those who encounter difficulties with the Bible, especially in the blogosphere, it seems things too often go in two diametrically opposed directions:

• The Disillusioned: The Bible is acknowledged to have deep flaws. Discussion develops around criticizing the Bible’s flaws and sneering at the inanities of Christians who deny them.
• The Defenders: The Bible is perfect. Any discussion of alleged flaws in it is stolidly defensive; more often, it is outsourced to apologists.

From there both camps trudge along their separate, well-worn paths. Typically the more bitter of the Disillusioned become the Deconverted. I come across many deconversion blogs, which isn’t surprising considering that disillusionment and deconversion are so emotionally repercussive. Their communities and survivors’ groups form very easily, commenting and linking to one another as a form of mutual support.

There are plenty of blogs by those militantly confident in their Christianity as well; the Defenders remain happy where they are…at all costs, seemingly.

Comparing the content of the blogs from those groups to mine, you’d see many more affinities between me and the Disillusioned. Indeed, because I spend so much time discussing the deep flaws in the Bible and in the forms of Christianity championed by the Defenders, my blog attracts mostly the Disillusioned and the Deconverted. But I do not count myself among either group. Rather, I am a part of an increasing number of believers no longer confident in either the pat answers of the apologists or the knee-jerk reactions of the self-styled enemies of Christianity. Even upon realization that our pursuit of God and His truth does not terminate in Scripture or systematic theologies, we do not find enough grounds to repudiate that pursuit.

I know that both the Defenders and the Disillusioned/Deconverted would consider me and the growing numbers of people like me to be living in an untenable state of cognitive dissonance. They would say I am the unreasonable, illusioned defender, denying the fruits of the doubts and disbelief I have uncovered and at times trumpeted. Their premise is that without an inerrant Bible that tells us exactly what to believe we have no good reason to believe in anything resembling the God of the Bible. I reject this premise as reactionary as I rest hopeful in a conviction that a good God, and one that bears more than a coincidental and passing resemblance to the God the Christians have always worshiped, actually exists. Why is this?

Please do not think that I offer the following as any sort of philosophical treatise, but as a statement of my current stance given my own analysis, based on my own experience, constantly and repeatedly judged against the various philosophical ideas I encounter in my reading. Crucially, none of it is proof: in a universe in which proof is impossible, we are all, to a person, left choosing what to believe.

I believe in God because I believe in goodness; I believe in God because I believe in beauty; I believe in God because I believe in justice; I believe in God because I believe in non-arbitrary meaning. I choose to believe in these absolutes not because of proof, of which there is none, or because of overwhelming evidence, of which there is precious little; I realize that it could just as well be that there is evil, ugliness, injustice, and/or chaos at the bottom of the universe. But I will not worship those things, even as far as to grant their absolute existence or entertain the notion that they will have the final victory. I will worship what is good and right and lovely, and grant it all the honor of believing in and even worshiping its absolute existence as the Ultimate. We are disappointed to have seen those ideal virtues violated or at least imperfectly modeled in other people; it makes sense that this is in part because there is actually a Person in whom those virtues are embodied perfectly. I find that the God of Christianity coincides with these expectations to my satisfaction.

I cannot help being convinced that certain absolute ideal principles exist regardless of any prevailing cultural sensibilities. Loving concern for a child: always right. Torturing a child: always wrong. Looking out for the interests of women: always right. Raping a woman: always wrong. Showing honor to an honest man: always right. Slandering an honest man: always wrong. These evaluations are grounded in the existence and primacy of Goodness. Evil – what shouldn’t be – doesn’t have an independent existence, but is an often quite palpable negation of what is good – what should be. The question inevitably comes: why is there any negation of should-be? Isn’t that reason enough to doubt such a thing as a should-be?

Another attribute of the Ultimate that I did not mention is also responsible for my continuing faith: it is mystery, the consort of the Ultimate’s transcendence. It is that which does not allow me to declare with as much certainty as I would like that those ideals I place my hope in truly exist; it is what does not allow me to conclude that the existence of evil, ugliness, injustice, and chaos in this world is a defeater of my hope in goodness, beauty, justice, and meaning; worst of all, it necessitates the humility that we as humans resist to the bitter end. But unlike those other attributes, mystery is not eternal: my Christian hope is in the eventual resolution of this mystery/transcendence, the closing of the gap between heaven and earth, the eventual elimination of shouldn’t-be from the midst of should-be. And it is this hope that I lay down before the perfect object of my worship, the one of whom I have been fathered from a young age and who has given me peace and joy to spare, but more importantly, a deep-seated concern and empathy for others.

There are many who imagine that they are caught up somewhere above the mystery into the very certainty of God. Doubt, which may be thought of as an intentional filling of one’s lungs with the air of mystery, is thought by these to be a denial of the God whom they have experienced. This is how certainty is achieved for the Defenders.

There are also many who can no longer pretend that they are experiencing the certainties promised them beyond that yawning gap of mystery; these are often troubled, hurting, and angry by this revelation. It seems only natural that those in the painful throes of the transcendence of God, mistaking it for His absence, cling to the firm ground and renounce all else. This is how certainty is achieved for the Disillusioned.

And then there are some of us who seek to keep our feet planted in reality, unflinchingly seeking out truths that the Defenders disavow, but who, inhaling the mystery, strain to reach that transcendent-yet-imminent Goodness of which we catch vivid glimpses. We deny that certainty is anything but an illusion. Our faith is not about maintaining beliefs, but about fervently striving to bring the Goodness we have known closer to the waiting world. While valuing the insights into the human and divine natures the biblical authors have to offer us, and while humbly and thoroughly subjecting those insights to all of the reconstructions and deconstructions suggested by critical inquiry, we do not lean on either understanding. We trust instead in the God for whom our souls yearn and without whom all the truths on the earth would be nothing more than clanging cymbals. Our faith is realized in an ethic intended to make those virtues manifest in our own lives, for the sake of others: we demonstrate our hope for the victory of love by acting faithfully, seeking to embody goodness, beauty, justice, meaning, and above all, Love. This is what we call serving God. We are Christians because we were – and are – taught these things by Jesus.

I’m not trying to pigeon-hole every human into these few categories. There are many others: most people are happily oblivious to all these debates; others are well aware of the debates, but have become fatigued and battle-weary, wanting to hope but struggling to find the will to wade through the divide between the different dogmatic positions. I hope to have something useful to say to those in both of those categories without becoming an obnoxious crusader. Although at times my temper has no doubt flared against certain egregious examples of problematic thinking among the groups I’ve described, I do not want to demonize anyone. I write this blog to offer another way of dealing with doubts, one which has the potential to heal the often bitter and vitriolic gash separating the Defenders and the bitter Disillusioned, for the sake especially of those caught in the middle. My hope is that by sharing my search for truth on this blog, stripping away what is false and shoring up what is true, I will eventually help motivate all, whether Christian, heretic, or apostate, who share the ethic of an overcoming goodness that I call Christianity in action.

This is a companion piece to another post of mine, “We might not like it, but it’s in the Bible, so…”

Occasionally I see people back away from their theological hunches, or at least decide to remain agnostic about them, because try as they might they just can’t see “where the Bible teaches it.” The starting point for them is this: The Bible is our necessary, inviolable source for ascertaining truth about God. What it says, goes. Thank heavens we know exactly what it says! They call this a biblical faith.

My good friend Drew Smith stumbled across a post by Angela Shier-Jones at The Kneeler speaking about her philosophical faith, which resonated with me, especially given some recent conversations on this blog. This is almost precisely what I’ve been noticing about my own faith lately, with its roots in the Bible but its trunk and branches reaching and spreading into the air above it.

As a Christian who, although rejecting inerrancy, still loves and feeds on the Bible, I realize that above all it offers important glimpses into the mind of men grappling with the things of God. I value Scripture as I value all church tradition, because the Bible is simply the earliest instance of church tradition available, codified by later church tradition, and hardly less fallible. But for bringing us to meet God, the Bible is uncommonly valuable, so much so that I find it tragic that so many believers could have been led into the company of Jesus by the Bible and then found it necessary to throw out some of the insights gained by the illumination of the fire that he started, just because it wasn’t strictly “scriptural”, i.e. it didn’t sound enough like the glimpses of men of old that are recorded in Scripture. Those men may have written something deemed by later men to deserve inclusion in the Bible, and a few of them may have even known Jesus when he was here, but in their time they could not have benefited from the stream of understanding that has developed through the ages from the seed of truth they planted.

Moreover, as eloquently pointed out by Thom Stark, they themselves set the precedent for this dynamic wrestling with the problematic theologies of their contemporaries and forbears that occasionally shows through in entire books of the Bible: in Thom’s words, the Bible is an argument with itself. How can we simply trust that the arguments ever got settled within the canon we have? Who settled it? Where is their consensus ratified for our use? The closest thing we have, in my understanding, is that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all,” and even that isn’t “proved” by Scripture. But the hope is sparked there, and in hope we go on to shine that light wherever something our God-seeking conscience considers darkness is imputed to God or His ways, even when that darkness is something one or more of the authors of Scripture believed.

Rather than a definitive end to theological arguments or clearly ringing pronouncement of unquestionable truths, the Bible instead sets a trajectory of understanding about God that does not land within its pages. Shier-Jones in her blog post put it this way (in the form of a prayer):

How sad that religion so often decries the great gift you give to us of collective intelligence, of the progress of knowledge and the slow but inexorable maturing of the mind of humanity. How pathetic when priests, the appointed guardians of the mysteries, perjure their calling by insisting that they already know what the truth is, that we need look no further, seek no harder. We can stop asking and stop knocking at your door because you have already said all you intend to say. The Bible says it all, and what it says is all that we need to know.

Thank you God – that you taught me better than to believe that!

The Bible is your word – but it is not your final word…

There is much in the Bible that does not teach, and even much which disallows, human evolution, which is hands-down the best explanation for the similarities and diversities in the biological forms on this planet. The same thing goes for universalism: only a few passages can be found to support it in Scripture, and there are certainly passages that contradict it, but at least in this case the germ of understanding about God and His nature that blossoms into and nourishes universalism is easily found within Scripture, and in certain places our glimpses into the heart of the Bible’s authors suggest that it had already begun to sprout there.

When I viewed Francis Chan’s recent video, I was annoyed by his suggestion that we should not try to understand God outside of strictly biblical considerations, since we are only like clay to the Potter: “Our only hope,” says Chan, “is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.” He goes on to show that he thinks God has done so, within the pages of Scripture alone. Rather than literally “only hope”, I suppose he meant, “only hope for knowing with certainty,” but the distinction between those two things are lost on most inerrantists, it seems. If that was our only hope, quite simply, we’d be SOL.

I initially decided I’d let the Apostle George respond to Chan, but a friend reading that post was not convinced. What makes us think, he wondered, that we can impose our ideals upon God? Although it may perhaps be an imposition upon God to say that He must be a certain way because we would like this or that to be the case, this is not the same as applying more factors than proof-texts to our understanding of who He is and what He is like, and weighing other interpretations of Him against those factors. Everyone applies their own reasoning and presuppositions when reading the Bible, of course, but most don’t acknowledge it, and will even condemn it when they see it in others. MacDonald’s insight was that we owe it to the one we worship to self-consciously apply the best of our experience and reason to understand Him, and not simply parrot the prevailing doctrines, even when gleaned from Scripture.

It’s the conscious application of this variety of factors that makes this approach more satisfactory than pretending we’re not “imposing” anything on God when we string bunches of scriptural testimony together, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess that settles it; I guess acting monstrously can be just, and showing vindictive spite can be the reflex of love.” We can’t just point to this or that Scripture that describes God doing manifestly evil things like ordering the violent deaths of men, women, and children or (ostensibly) torturing people for eternity and let those instances predominate over our beliefs about what “goodness” means as it applies to God. We must steadfastly avoid placing every insight from nature or from philosophy under the subjection of our even more fallible patchwork quilt of sola scriptura theology, especially when the resultant position makes God out to be essentially unworshippable.

If God has indeed used Scripture to birth something real within our hearts and minds, let’s trust Him to bring us where it leads rather than cutting it down and using it as mulch for some doctrine of our own, based as it usually is in the often underdeveloped and immature understanding of those who went before us! I’m not advocating a “chronological snobbery” (Lewis’s phrase) that assumes everything before us was wrong and everything modern is right, but neither should we commit the opposite error of supposing that “greater things than these” can never be done by those who meet God for themselves. Surely an all-out trust in God as a fundamentally good person, as best we understand “good” with all the available data weighed judiciously, is preferable to letting slavish adherence to orthodoxy stand in for a faith that could mature both our souls and our understanding of God.

This is a post in response to a blog that does not allow comments. I’d have preferred to have this discussion over there, but here we are.

Over at The Boar’s Head Tavern, the Fearsome Tycoon attempts to apply an argumentum ad consequentiam in reductio ad absurdum’s clothing to a statement in my last post on homosexuality. I wrote:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with homosexuality, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

He proffers these substitutions to show why I’m wrong:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with cohabiting before marriage, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with divorcing your spouse to marry your true love, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with not believing in the Virgin Birth, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

Note the implication that no one may begin to disbelieve anything that he accepts as axiomatic without the whole thing going to hell (literally).

He seems to infer from my statement that I think we should believe whatever it is a growing number of Christians believe. To this I say, You may be in a tavern, but get your face out of the mug, sir! Even a cursory glance through my post shows that I do not argue this or anything like it. He mistakes his own error for my own: unlike he apparently does, I do not assume that acceptance by “the right” people (be they “a growing number of Christians”, an historic council, or whomever) is determinative of the truth itself.

The following statement from his post illustrates what I mean, indicating that he digested very little of the rest of my post:

If the teachings of Christ and the commands of God don’t matter for church fellowship, then nothing does.

It appears he decided not to take me up on my suggestion to step and back and at least pretend that he could be wrong in his interpretations. The entire point of my post was that what precisely constitutes “the teachings of Christ and the commands of God” is not something we can blithely assume to be settled, indisputable, and equivalent to what we already happen to believe. This is not to say that we can’t be confident of our current beliefs but that a truly humble spirit will keep the hair-trigger heresy gun in the holster.

At one point he does indicate that he heard my point about being patient with people who have other interpretations of Scripture; it seems he just decides he’s not too keen on the idea. He sarcastically remarks that those of us who recognize that the Bible isn’t crystal clear on every important point “have decided that God didn’t really teach much we could understand, and so most of what what we believe and practice is just stuff we made up.” The reason he disagrees with this is not stated, but the thing that’s so irksome about this sort of objection is the myopic logic, “God teaches things clearly; therefore, whatever I think is clear is what God teaches.” That logic, and the assumption that “perspicuity” is a right for all believers guaranteed by God, reminds me of a statement I’ve quoted on this blog before. Ironically it comes from the very man the Boar’s Head Tavern claims as its “patron saint”: C. S. Lewis.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists’ view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done-especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wise-crack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

Lack of certainty can be a real pain, but I’d rather put up with less certainty about even things that are absolutely true than blow full-steam ahead into a presumption of the correctness of my tradition’s interpretations without the humility that God expects.

Two misconceptions I’d like to clear up. First, I was not personally arguing that capitalism was equivalent to the sin of Ananias and Sapphira, just as I was not campaigning against women in ministry or charging interest: I was playing devil’s advocate, and I’m sure I didn’t make the best biblical case against capitalism. My point remains: there are those who find ample biblical grounds for condemning capitalism.

Next, it was stated that my argument “basically boils down to, ‘If you’re born that way, we can’t possibly tell you not to have sex.’ ” I never mentioned celibacy or not: saying that someone can be a homosexual and a Christian doesn’t itself argue (and at very least, my post never even insinuated) that “free love” or cohabitation is acceptable. An acknowledgment of the fact that some homosexuals are participants in the Christian faith is no more an “argument” against celibacy than acknowledging the fact that some heterosexuals are participants in the Christian faith.

But because the Fearsome Tycoon does not suffer from uncertainty about his doctrines, he proclaims that he’d have no trouble ruling out fellowship with anyone who disagrees with him on the subject of when the Sabbath should be observed, whether charging interest is an acceptable practice, whether socialism or capitalism is preferable, or whether women can be in ministry. Still, I extend the right hand of Christian fellowship to the Fearsome Tycoon, even though he’s given every indication that he’ll consider reciprocation tantamount to accepting sexual promiscuity, divorce, and a denial of the Virgin Birth.

Sheesh. Maybe there’s a reason he hangs out at a tavern with that particular name.

Our model for intrafaith dialogue?

I’d like to call attention to a couple of blogs I’ve just recently discovered that deal with doubt and questioning problematic aspects of traditional Christian theology.

First, Questioning Christianity from Michelle, whose commitment to trusting God to lead her into all truth drives her as an act of faith to question even the Bible, despite her local community’s frustrating refusal to do the same.

Next, Chronicles of a Christian Heretic from Sandra, who has been toying with ditching one particular label that might eventually necessitate a change in her URL! My comments on that post have kick-started a conversation that will no doubt be interesting.

These are complements to more well-known sites such as Like a Child‘s insightful chronicle of her faith-shaking journey and chesha in motion. A recurring theme of late has been the struggle of doubting within a community that refuses to.

If you didn’t notice, I’ve just listed four (count ‘em: four!) women bloggers going through similar faith journeys. Is my scope just widening, or is this a trend?