Undeception

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.

The tendency toward reductionism is simultaneously one of the most tempting and problematic aspects of the laudable task of seeking explanations. The “thrill of the hunt” is the expectation that the quarry will be found and conquered. It’s not surprising, then, that the joy of drilling down to the bottom of a matter sometimes continues quite past the bottom.

A few years ago I wrote on this blog, “Modernists feel satisfied to have discovered the natural causes, the how’s, and seem convinced that this abolishes [absolute] meaning,” or the why’s. When we repeatedly discover that there are prosaic physical explanations for things we previously considered purely metaphysical, inductive reasoning leads us to discount more of the metaphysical  than may be necessary. This is one of the much-discussed dangers with God-of-the-gaps apologetics, in which the Creator is made to stand on a shadow in our understanding such that the more light is shed in the room, the smaller He must become in order to remain in the shadows.

Mark Vernon’s recent summary of Cunningham’s criticism of “ultra-Darwinist” reductionism in Darwin’s Pious Idea makes an important distinction: “[U]ltra-Darwinism is empty because it doesn’t explain, it explains away.” Occam’s razor is a principle guiding the formulation of hypotheses, but by no means an inviolable law of logic. When some who champion science and reason triumphantly proclaim that their unsurprising observations of the cold, pitiless, and indifferent natural world are a definitive refutation of absolute meaning, they’re essentially advocating that Occam’s razor should not stop at the rope but continue slicing away at our own wrists.

I have developed an understanding of many aspects of my religion, and of religion in general, that is much more organic and natural (in all senses, I hope) than that of most Christians I know. I now realize the trial and error that got us here, and ever increasingly I am aware that very few of the “just-so stories” we grow up on in the church are really “so” at all. It is completely understandable that many who come down the road as far as I have will think they see the handwriting on the wall and jump out of the sinking ship. I get it. And at this point in my faith journey, I doubt God Himself will ultimately lay the brunt of the blame on them for it.

Yet I have found at seemingly the outermost rim of Christianity something intangible that convinces me not to stray too far beyond it. Some will cynically conclude that I have not gone far enough in my quest for the truth; I’ve allowed myself to stay strapped in by sentimental and cultural ties. But maybe some of those ties exist for a good reason: it seems to me that indiscriminately severing all ties is no less an emotional response, and is usually the reflex of the bitter (who become even more embittered upon their crash landing). Granted, there is cultural comfort here within my Christian faith, and there are external pressures that will not suffer an abandonment of faith without some unhappy ramifications, but I’ve already suffered enough ostracization for my sojourning that it’s apparent I have precious few shreds of respectability left. Whatever else I am, I’m a lover and seeker of truth, and if I ever see proof that Christianity or theism are untruths, I assure you that I will be happier to be undeceived than to remain as “deluded” as most evangelicals and all atheists think I am.

Moreover, my childhood faith has not been a hindrance for me, but has enabled me to square up my shoulders, steadfastly walk away from easy answers, and advance toward “the void”. And still I find that the relationship of my faith’s motion to the non-faith many embrace is surprisingly asymptotic (in the popular rather than the strictly geometrical sense). Perhaps a better way of expressing it mathematically would be to say that I find that no matter how many times evidence and counter-evidence divides and subdivides it, my faith never reaches zero, because I do not accept a modification of faith as a subtraction, but as a reanalysis. Perhaps this is because it’s like subtracting apples from oranges: if my faith were a conglomeration of pieces of evidence, all the counter-evidences I’ve found and am still finding could quite conceivably wipe it out. But my faith is of a different substance than mere alleged facts strung together and clutched tightly until snatched away: all doctrine and theology, which are what too many Christians mean when they say “truth” and “faith”, are merely descriptions of something Other, and I cannot discount my encounters with that Other even when the cleverest descriptions of it that theologians have extracted from the Bible crumble under critical scrutiny.

I’m fairly roundly convinced that humanity’s love interest in truth is not fully requited, but she certainly strings us along, doesn’t she? My conservative Christian friends, my atheist friends, and I will have to go on as best we can, and for that reason I hope we can all learn to step more lightly for humility’s sake. As for me, I am confident that if God does exist and He loves the truth as much I think He does, the “void” I approach is empty only of untruths and filled up with a Truth that has requited my love, and that every step I take into the void will be a step closer to Him.

Conversations with some of my closest fellow sojourners (such as Mike, Cliff, and Matthew) have often included a discussion of the following question: given our radical departure from many tenets of evangelical orthodoxy such as our rejection of inerrancy and acceptance of critical scholarship of the Bible, the theory of evolution, etc., why does our faith remain strong despite the many (if not the majority) who go along similar paths and end up losing their faith? What makes the difference?

There’s no easy answer, of course. Performing an autopsy of another person’s faith is tricky business, and will certainly require more “inside” details than our armchair analysis will be able to provide. So we usually pursue the least assuming and more promising line of inquiry, which is to examine the commonality of the experiences of those of us who hang on to faith despite its dramatically changing shape under serious scrutiny.

This is more of a “journal”, “web log” kind of post than an exposition. The following will in no way give you a complete picture: chances are that if you’re expecting this post to be an apologetic, you will be significantly underwhelmed. Nevertheless, while I was thinking about it I decided to jot down some of the factors that have contributed to my faith’s thriving (and I think many of these go for the friends I mentioned above as well, but you’ll have to ask them).  I focus here not on what makes me a theist, but what makes me persist as a Christian specifically.

Enduring interest
Obviously, an important component is that I am comfortable with (enthralled by, even) many of the teachings of Christianity, although I have since discarded so many of what more orthodox believers consider essential that they would roll their eyes to hear me say that. I have come to understand God primarily in terms of the message of Jesus, rather than Jesus’ purported actions (miracles, etc., even the Resurrection) or even in specific formulations of his message in the Gospels. In fact, I have accepted the revelation of modern scholarship that the Gospels actually represent the message of Jesus as interpreted by different and varied first century “Jesus communities”; especially considering their relatively late date (30+ years after Jesus), we have precious little reason to expect that they directly present Jesus’ message, but are, rather, later interpretations of his message.

Yet I’ve still not encountered anything that convinces me that the Gospel writers’ presentations of the man’s central message were really far afield. Indeed, despite the many differences between the Gospels, the distinctives of Jesus’ message are actually unmistakably close to one another: the first Gospel to be written already has Jesus framing his mission as the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and as MacDonald points out, what that kingdom looks like is remarkably consistent over all four Gospels (italics original, bold and bracketed remarks all mine):

What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, of truth—a rule of service. The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you.” “The Son of Man came to minister.” [both from Mark] “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” [in John, of Jesus' healing of the sick] The great Workman is the great King, labouring for his own…The lesson added by St Luke to the presentation of the child is: “For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” And St Matthew says: “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Hence the sign that passes between king and subject. The subject kneels in homage to the kings of the earth: the heavenly king takes his subject in his arms. This is the sign of the kingdom between them. This is the all-pervading relation of the kingdom.

Many now say that the Jesus of the Gospels was effectively created out of whole cloth by writers well removed from him. But this begs the very serious question never answered: why then did they all create specifically the Jesus of the Gospels? Oh sure there are differences, sometimes dramatic differences, in the Gospels’ portrayals of Jesus, but that makes similarities such as Jesus’ preoccupation with and characterization of the Kingdom of God all the more significant. One must posit a source for these traditions, and we’ve certainly no better hypothesis than that this source was someone actually teaching these things — at very least planting the seeds among his followers. Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God, which is at bottom of willful servanthood, stands as what I consider the greatest and most important philosophy in history, inspiring me and countless others to be his disciple. As I have said before, even if I found out by proof positive that Jesus never rose from the dead in any sense, I would likely still consider myself “Christian”, at least in a philosophical sense (like a “Kantian”).

Decisive experience
Ok, so I like Jesus’ teachings — so do many people of other faiths and of no faith whatsoever. Still, I consider myself a “Christian” in a more spiritual sense than that.

My childhood faith, bolstered by a community of faithful believers (and particularly my parents), was delightfully rich. Although I’ve never been one to feel or talk as though “me and God hung out today,” I have always felt “connected” with Him in a mystical sense. Somehow, He’s a person I feel I’ve met and come to know better and better, and in actuality I always feel like I’m delusional for trying to deny this even in my thought experiments, like trying to convince yourself you’re not married when you have clear memories of your wedding and subsequent marriage relationship. My experiences with God, which comprise not only emotions but also consistent and lifelong observations of positive effects of belief in myself and others I know well, have been persistently profound even though somewhat intangible. I have seen no reason not to continue using them as something of an anchor.

Intellectual disposition
One more I’m going to mention here is the influence of certain personality characteristics which may help explain my upbeat attitude toward an ever evolving faith.

An extremely important factor for me was that my experience with faith and Christian belief was always one of discovery. So when the data started coming in that convinced me of evangelical Christianity’s flaws and errors, apart from a feeling of growing isolation from my community I was more than happy to glom onto that data not so much as a challenge to but as an expression of my faith in God.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that the following never applies in the lives of the de-converted, but I know for a fact that it has influenced my lack of de-conversion. It is this: I never trusted easy answers to begin with, and so it wasn’t such a shock to have my evangelical faith overhauled by my close scrutiny. An unshakable uneasiness with simply accepting whatever was handed to me and the above mentioned thrill for the truth hunt have been prominent ever since my discovery as a seven-year-old of the discrepancy between what Genesis 1-2 says and what my book about prehistoric science said.

As Cliff is keen to point out, certainty in either direction is simply not in the cards. The dichotomy is not between doubt and faith — doubt is the qualifier that distinguishes a reasonable faith from an altogether blind faith — but between acknowledged and unacknowledged uncertainty. Christians and avowed atheists alike are simply going about their delusions of certainty in a different way. Christians who refuse to peek under the cover are not exercising faith but fear: fear of having to deal with uncertainty.  When former believers who embrace a thorough atheism as though it were the only option other than fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, they are not exercising healthy skepticism but cynicism, or laziness at best.

In any event, when I reached the fork in the road at the end of the evangelical path I had been led down, I had two choices: I could take the path of hopeful uncertainty or continue on another (very different) path of imagined certainty. The sign over the first path said, “I’m not certain it’s true, but I love it,” and the other said, “I don’t love it because I’m not certain it’s true.” For reasons such as those described above, I chose the former, “and that has made all the difference.”

As I said, this is not meant to be persuasive but as a window into some of my musings of late. Take from it what you will.

Since childhood, my personality has been marked by an undercurrent of a haunting yearning sometimes referred to in its extreme forms as “melancholy”, very much like what C. S. Lewis called “joy”. I have always chalked it up to my Scottish heritage, but I imagine a lot of other ethnicities (I’m thinking particularly of Russians) can claim the same. I’m not prone to depression or anything, but I’ve always been attracted to haunting music, mystical stories — anything that might be referred to as sad beauty.

It’s something I’d love to stir up in whichever of my children are like me. To that end, when I tuck my children in each night, I’ve begun to complement “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” and “Seek Ye First” with some old Scottish folk songs/ballads I know, such as “Loch Lomond” (stay with me — this is going somewhere):

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomon’
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’
Oh! ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’.

The allusion to death is oblique enough there, isn’t it? But the sadness that’s there is made more potent by combination with such a beautiful Gaelic melody.

Another song whose melody I find absolutely mesmerizing is “Lowlands” (the version in a minor mode), an old sea shanty that evidently originated in the foreboding dreams of sailors long away at sea that they took as ill omens concerning their loved ones at home. “I dreamed a dream the other night/Lowlands! Lowlands away, my John/. . ./And then I knew my love was dead/My lowlands away.”

Then there’s Bonnie George Campbell:

Hie upon highlands and laigh upon tay
Bonnie George Campbell rode out on a day
He sadled, he bridled, and gallant rode he
And hame [i.e. home] cam his guid horse
But never cam he.

Of course, I won’t be singing any of the later verses that speak of the bloody saddle — at least not at bedtime! But the thought of doing so does remind me that people in older cultures gained an awareness of the gruesome nature of war much earlier and more vividly than we do with our sanitized and cartoonized versions.

I got to thinking about my early attraction to the bittersweet, my acknowledgement of the inevitability of hardship, and my love for humanity’s attempts to cope with sorrow through expression as in these songs, and not through suppression or denial. Indeed, in bygone days it was much harder to deny sorrow than it is in modern day America, where a broken arm is sometimes about the worst thing a child can imagine happening to someone. But when I compare myself with so many others in my religious tradition, I see a definite contrast.

The broad community of evangelical faith with which I am most familiar does not duly acknowledge sorrow and suffering. They regularly deny it and suppress it: this is evident in their contemporary Christian music stations advertising their wares as  ”positive, encouraging” music. I understand that they offer this as an alternative to hopeless, purposeless music that they find destructive; without hope, suffering can indeed be devastating, and wallowing in it is not going to help anyone. But what I find is that they actually miss out on engaging negative topics by offering stock slogans as their solution. Another evidence is that they’re suspicious of down-to-earth efforts at meeting needs, spurning social concern because they think that the black in this world is challengeable only by their white: the gospel.

Now, I do think there is relief for our personal struggles to be found in turning to God, but the impression given by so many of these believers – which they themselves seem to accept – is of a dramatic “before Jesus” and “after Jesus” photo that is not commonly fulfilled in a way relevant to most people’s life experiences. Many if not most of these believers end up in practice denying the potency of problems such as uncertainty, fear, and suffering rather than acknowledging them as mainstays of our existence with which we need help and for which we need to offer help beyond the formulae and platitudes. When they chalk up everything unpleasant to a Fall long eons ago it has the effect of filing it all away for a fix long eons away. Just “praise the Lord” and get on with it (where “it” means praising the Lord and trying to get others to.) The Ned Flanders stereotype came from somewhere, you know.

But the denial of problems doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s typified most obviously in the blind trust they place in the Bible and in their tradition’s interpretation of it. They steadfastly renounce all who would peel back the veneer for just a moment to admit that, by any reasonable definition, there are problems with their inerrant answer book; to do so would mean that they’d have to live in a world that’s not black and white. This is clearly intolerable.

This leads me to consider that there’s no coincidental correlation among those of us most mesmerized by haunting beauty and precious sorrow, those who truly come to grips with difficulties, suffering, and hardship as integral to the human experience and make the best of them, and those of us who are willing to grapple with a living faith as it exists in a grayscale world, with no hope for certainty, no inerrant guide to the world, and only a mystical inkling that, at bottom, things might really make sense after all.

All of this is closely intertwined with what Keats called “Negative Capability.” As Keats described it, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” he might be described as having negative capability. He associated it with great poets, for whom a deep-seated sense of beauty permeates all they do, such that beauty is evident, or even most evident, where there is pain. Negative capability is often used these days to explain someone who is content to find value in life even while embracing uncertainty in the most fundamental aspects of our existence, and who will be satisfied to enjoy the journey even when guaranteed no safe arrival.

Here I think we see another commonality between the atheists who suffer no exception to their rationalistic epistemology and conservative Christians who will countenance no challenge to their epistemology founded upon the divine perfection of Scripture. I could never be comfortable either place.

My thoughts turn yet again toward Abraham (regardless of questions of his historicity), whose patriarchy I claim. He was called out by a mysterious deity and followed Him with implicit trust from a familiar land to a strange land. God’s test of faith during the Mount Moriah incident should scandalize the conservative Christian because it consisted of challenging Abraham to trust Him even when it contradicted systematic theology. Keats described the great poets as the exemplars of negative capability for whom “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” The faith of Abraham was this: he never let Beauty leave his sight despite the changing scenery, uncertainty, doubts, and conflicting information he was given. I gladly call him Father Abraham.

I wonder what other correlations that can be drawn. For instance, I’ll bet that many of us who continue on our religious journey even after having our systematic faith exposed as a paper mâché bulwark are likely to be the type most enamored of fantasy and science fiction. Thoughts?

My regulars know that I like podcasts, so I thought I’d give everyone a heads-up on a reboot of an old podcast (on which I once appeared) from LFAM.

The new version is called At the Well Radio. In this incarnation, the regular hosts are the podcast’s founder, a young Christian who’s traveled a path similar to my own, and a Canadian friend who self-identifies as agnostic.

The goal of this podcast is to help Christians and other seekers to navigate a “third way” between mainstream evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity and an absence of all faith in God, encouraging its audience to step back from unexamined dogmas and look at what — besides condemnation — our faith has to offer the world. By partnering with an agnostic, Travis is able to use this podcast to strip away the artificial barriers between those with faith and those without faith that unnecessarily exacerbate the Church’s isolation from our mission field (the world) which obstructs our accomplishment of anything useful in the world.

The show takes the approach of looking at a number of news items with their commentary. At times they obviously enjoy tipping evangelicals’ sacred cows, but not for the pleasure of it so much as to make those evangelicals aware of the dangers of having sacred cows in the first place.

Do check it out.