Undeception

Going into this post, please be aware that I will indulge in the obnoxious habit of capitalizing Truth to distinguish the abstract concept of veritas from small-t truths that amount to individual factoids. I hope this will not distract you.

As a teenager I was once informed by a mentor that I was a “seeker of Truth.” This was a defining moment for me, not because it changed my behavior, but because it made me startlingly aware of this behavior. I have proudly owned that badge ever since, although I do generally try to keep it under my coat so as not to annoy people. This blog has been a workshop for me in my continuing mission to search for Truth, especially in places considered unlikely by others who shared my upbringing.

In the last year, however, something has changed. It’s not that I value Truth less; it’s just that I have behaved less and less as though it were my sacred calling to fight for Truth. One of the truths I have seen confirmed again and again over the last several years is that no one, not even inveterate Truth-seekers, have a monopoly on it. The greatest threat to Truth comes from those whose confidence that they have it lead them to root out everyone making a counter-claim. This conviction puts me on a collision course with heresy hunters, who in the name of defending the Truth of God have crammed it so tightly into a cage that I can scarcely imagine their having any real affection for it.

Here’s another lesson that I have been learning over the last several, quiet months, which I’ve just now figured out how to articulate: Truth doesn’t need my protection. It is larger than I am. I am not its steward; instead, I am responsible for my own character — my own actions and reactions. I can and should promote what I think is true and show what is false for what it is, with discretion and all due diligence in determining it, of course. But primarily, I am called to follow Christ, subjecting my will to the service of God and others. By far the best and most important way to serve Truth is by acting like we believe it, viz. through obedience to what we believe. I believe that the highest, most elusive truth of the universe is Love — so if my life is not characterized by Love-seeking, how can I pretend to be a Truth-seeker?

Watching the biblioblogosphere as closely as I have for the last couple of years, I’ve seen and participated in far too many ugly wars for Truth. Bitter, dismissive, and insulting diatribes put into defense of beliefs are not a bit more common among the heresy-hunting Fundamentalist types than it is the enlightened who embrace doubt and uncertainty. Friends, Truth is a sword meant to hew through the brambles of untruths, not the people trapped behind them.

If I can’t act in love during my tousles for Truth, treating the other person as a child of God no matter how obviously, infuriatingly ignorant they are, then what I am upholding and defending is not Truth but my own pet truths, factoids that I cognitively assent to, at the expense of the greatest truth I know. There is nothing more false than conflating my truth with the Truth.

I forsee the objection that impassioned debates are often necessary to ferret out the facts; besides, didn’t Jesus himself use angry words and call his opponents on the carpet? Indeed he did. But he also told us, “Be angry, and sin not.” This tells me, until you’re righteous, don’t feign righteous anger. Righteous anger is so hard to distinguish from the unrighteous kind; this ambiguity is a caution against blowing up in defense of our rightness. We need to remember what we’re fighting for.

You see, fighting for Truth so often treats it as a trophy to be won, a public reward for our diligent Truth-seeking. I want to get out of this closed circuit of seeking Truth for seeking Truth’s sake. If we don’t live up to the light we do have – and I hope we can all agree that living a life characterized by loving humility qualifies – no matter how accurately and convincingly we argue for truths, we are not lovers of Truth.

The old meaning of the adjective true, seldom used these days, was faithful; actually, that meaning is still around in our usage of it in the sense of faithfulness to reality. The Truth I seek is a more robust form of faithfulness than that: faithfulness to God even more than faithfulness to reality, which we can hardly claim to know with any certainty anyway. I want to be much more than a Truth seeker; I want to be a Truth lover. Even if I miss truths here and there, and even though I recognize that I’ll never obtain certainty in this world, Truth will continue to be my ideal and the template I use to shape my character.

If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, a castaway—no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth; a hater of the lies men speak for God, and myself a truth-speaking liar, not a doer of the word.

G. MacDonald

The subtle, silent epiphany of the last several months has been that what I must seek first is not truths – disembodied facts and undeceptions – but righteousness. One of the most profound undeceptions I’ve undergone is the realization that righteousness is not some legal decree that magically covers and converts my own rancid attitudes and actions. It’s not that simple at all. Being a true Christian in the deepest sense of that word (maybe I should capitalize it) is hard work. But the real dirty work of Christianity is not in controlling our actions, but our re-actions: how we respond to problems such as getting cut off in traffic, how we deal with those who are hurting those we love, and how we treat defenders of patent falsehoods. Seeking Truth is not enough; we must be true.

God give me a true heart.

I think this will throw some light upon the words of our Lord, “If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.” Good people, amongst them John Bunyan,* have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this saying, just as Satan sought to tempt our Lord on the strength of the passage he quoted from the Psalms. Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills; neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action. It is its noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result, when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “The Temptation in the Wilderness”, published in Unspoken Sermons, Series 1, 1867)

* From Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: “…the tempter came in with this delusion, That there was no way for me to know I had faith, but by trying to work some miracle; urging those scriptures that seem to look that way, for the enforcing and strengthening his temptation.  Nay, one day, as I was between Elstow and Bedford, the temptation was hot upon me, to try if I had faith, by doing some miracle; which miracle at this time was this, I must say to the puddles that were in the horsepads, Be dry; and to the dry places, Be you puddles: and truly one time I was going to say so indeed…”

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…

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.

“Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be forever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly – that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes – that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. But to him who has once seen even a shadow only of the truth, and, even but hoping he has seen it when it is present no longer, tries to obey it – to him the real vision, the Truth himself, will come, and depart no more, but abide with him for ever.”

by George MacDonald
from Lilith

H/T Dover Beach

(paraphrase below the fold)

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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.

“Do not confuse questions with doubts. Doubts go with certainty: if you make the mistake of being certain, you can have a doubt. Questions are part of the ongoing process of life.”
– John Dominic Crossan

H/T Mark Goodacre