Believing Again Part 1

I am currently reading Roger Lundin's book, Believing Again: doubt and faith in a secular age. Don't let the title deceive you into thinking this is some type of simplistic and reductionistic self-help book that offers help only by denying the reality of doubt. David Martin considers this book as the most "appropriate companion to Charles Taylor's magisterial A Secular Age." If you're not familiar with Charles Taylor you should be aware that he is one of the most powerful minds of our time, and by associating Lundin's book with Taylor's, signals that Lundin is doing some heavy interdisciplinary (history, philosophy, sociology, theology, literature) lifting. As an English professor, Lundin is able to bring his literary expertise to bear on the larger cultural shifts that have taken place since the time of Descartes: these cultural shifts often take multifarious and nefarious shapes as they stand opposed to genuine religious belief. Lundin traces how some authors, poets and writers walked "nimbly" through these challenges. I highly recommend the book.

I find that I retain the things I read when I am able to synthesize and paraphrase. Since Lundin is tracing important cultural shifts in America over the past 250 years or so, I want to develop the skill of being able to narrate these types of shifts concisely and efficiently. So this post is mostly for my own sake. But the history that he covers is important, and perhaps my retelling will help you to think through some of these issues. I will conclude with a few of my own thoughts based on Lundin's objectives for writing the book.

With the coming of empiricism and the wake of doubt left by Descartes, there were at least two different paths people chose to follow in order to move forward. One was the scientific and progressive route; the other was the romantic route. In the former, the cosmos and nature were things to explore, tame, and master. The goal was complete knowledge of how things work. In many cases, the confidence in man's ability to understand the world seemingly displaced God with man. The workings of the world are mechanistic and predictable. The latter, however, refused to grant this mechanistic world total control over the depths of the human soul. So although the milieu bequeathed to all a confidence in science, it did not lead all to affirm that it was the end all. This latter group also looked to nature and its beauty, and there they found their soul's thirst quenched: God still walks about in the garden; in fact, the line separating the garden from God gets occasionally blurry. God became a a powerful force, a life principle, and a concept. As the 19th century labored on, however, many found that these approaches failed to answer the questions of life, and eventually nature, which was once able to delight the scientist and the poet, became a frightening home. If only the strong survive and nature is mechanical, then it is possible that humanity might end up being the weakest link. If nature is a monster, then only those who fight back with power and domination will survive. This is Nietzsche's legacy.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th century, it received from the likes of Emerson and Thoreau, a spirit of indifference and unbelief that was unprecedented. One marker of this came in 1869 when Thomas Huxley brought the word "agnosticism" into our vocabulary. Although there had been many who were critical of religion up until this point, the second half of the 19th century brought about on a larger scale what James Turner, Jon Roberts, and George Marsden have called the "permanent suspension of belief." In a similar manner, Charles Taylor refers to this unshackling of religious belief as "subtraction theory." It was common to find many people "signing off" from the Church, never to return. They may still be "religious" in some ways, but the Church was too intellectually rigid for them to stay. There were some, however, who were not willing to sign off despite the onset of indifference and doubt that was their cultural inheritance. In the writings of Emily Dickinson and the Polish-Catholic writer Czelaw Milosz it is obvious that there are deep-seated personal struggles in their belief, but the prospect of signing off and abandoning the historic Christian faith was just as unsettling, if not more so. Based on his close reading of Dickinson, Milosz, and even Melville, Lundin demonstrates that for some unbelief was not actually something outside of their personal faith: for these writers it was actually a part of their faith.

This is a very brief narration of only a few of the major shifts from Descartes to the early 20th century, and much more could be included. However, for Lundin's purposes it highlights how these the unbelief and doubt these writers experienced were substantial elements to their faith. I'm only in the third chapter, but I sense that Lundin is trying to show that the nature of modern Christian faith usually includes (descriptively rather than prescriptively) some sort of doubt and unbelief. I find this personally relieving since it indicates that I am not the only one who deals with doubt on a regular basis. I would never consider doubt a type of virtue, certainly not a kind of modern Christian virtue; but it does have a funny way of keeping us Christians intellectually honest.

Japan's Earthquake and Christian Speech

Regardless of David Bentley Hart's pugnacious disposition, I have been nourished by his reflections on evil and natural disasters and how Christian's ought to respond. His book, The Doors of the Sea: Where is God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005), was a godsend to me as I wrestled with the near death of a friend in a tragic accident, not to mention the numerous international events and realities that often whittle down my faith. Many Christians feel this persistent urge to give some type of explanation as to "why" things happen, and Hart reminds us that this urge to explain, to justify God's ways to man (which is known by the name theodicy) is often misguided and leads to incoherent theological reflections that tend to do more damage than good. Responding to the theodicist who tries to find meaning in nature's revolts, he says, "there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel - and none in which we should find more comfort - than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all (Tsunami and Theodicy, in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Lamentations, Eerdmans, 2009)." In what follows, I would like to make a couple reflections of my own in light of Japan's earthquake.

1. Divine Providence

Many Christians seem to endorse a notion of God's providence that requires God to "be involved" in everything that happens. Nobody wants to affirm that God is distant and absent, but this version of providence often leads to viewing God's relation to the events of the world as Ultimate Cause of all things. The inverse of this, I presume, frightens people, for the world would be a terrifying place in which to live if we don't affirm God is guiding everything in the world. However, would denying God as the "ultimate cause" of everything in the world mean that God isn't in complete control? Hart, with whom I side on this point, would argue that it does not, and I see at least two ways to challenge this view of providence. One is pastoral: it is insensitive to say (and think, says Hart) to the bereaving neighbor that the death of their loved one was all a part of God's plan. The second is theological and philosophical: it is utterly ridiculous to say that God caused the genocide in Rwanda, the tsunami in Indonesia, the Holocaust, and now the earthquake/tsunami of Japan. Are we willing to confess that God ultimately caused these? Are we will to confess faith in such a God if he did?

One can (or should) be able to see how this "all or nothing" approach to God's providence breaks down quickly. We must be more precise in our language; especially in our theology (theos + logos), our speech about God. Some type of distinction needs to be made between God's relationship to the world as the Creator and Sustainer of it and his relationship to its grisly realities. We need to carefully define what we mean by providence. Does making a distinction between God's "causation" and God's "permission" help us? I'm not sure, to be honest. It may always seem like "all roads lead to God," either directly or indirectly. Does it help to say that somethings are outside of God's power? That doesn't help us much either. We seem to be stuck between the Omnipotent Despot and the Impotent Deity. There must be some middle ground. Perhaps we would be wise to reflect on the implications of these insufficient positions. They both are rightly reacting to real problems, but they both fail in their presumed solutions. Perhaps reflecting on God's mysterious nature will help us forward.

2. God is Mysterious

As I have read various books and articles about God and suffering, there is one thing that everyone must account for in their different arguments, and that is the mysteriousness of God. The thing that separates various explanations of God and suffering is where they locate God's mysterious nature. Similar to God's providence, all Christians will affirm that God is mysterious. But how and where this affirmation fits into their broader understanding of this relation affects their logic greatly. Some say that God causes/wills ALL things for his glory, and the mystery of God is located in his Will. He causes/wills everything that happens, and His Will is entirely mysterious. Some proponents of this view have described humanity's perspective on suffering as very limited, like one who is only able to see a small tile of the mosaic. It will only be in the consummation that we will have the full mosaic of God's purposes in view. While this mosaic simile is enlightening to a degree, it still assumes that every piece of the mosaic is there for a reason, and that the suffering of the world somehow fits into God's plans. Do all the heinous things in history have a rightful place in God's overall mosaic? Does God actually ordain atrocities in order for him to accomplish his purposes and to be ultimately glorified? It sounds awful when it is phrased this way, and many Christians would probably deny that this is true, but think to yourself about how you normally try and talk to people when pain is present in their lives. Even if we don't say it, aren't we thinking, "I know this hurts, but you are experiencing this because God has a bigger plan for you , etc."? What do we mean when we say such things? Are we not granting that their pain is actually a part of God's plan? We need to be more precise even in our sympathetic language, and this leads me to briefly discuss a helpful distinction.

There's a slight but all important distinction between God causing all things unto the good and God working all things unto the good. The verb in Rom 8.28 is one that normally denotes assisting or working with someone or something (cf. 1 Cor 16.16; Js 2.22 faith works with his deeds; although the grammar in these two passages is slightly different from Rom 8.28, I think Paul's choice is telling, nonetheless). Paul does not use verbs that are normally associated with "production" and "causation." This might be a minor point, but I think it supports this distinction between God's causation and God's powerful ability to take awful situations and use them for his purposes. He is free from causing the evil, but he is also entirely free to turn evil on its head for his purposes. In both cases he is free.

Rather than see God's mysteriousness primarily in his all encompassing will, other's have argued that God's mysteriousness lies primarily in his creation of human beings with free will, which includes all the evil possibilities that we know and experience. It is the nature of humanity to have a free will, which also means that having a free will that can potentially choose what is wrong is not a bad thing. Evil is always the abuse of good things. While I would never say that God's will is not mysterious, I would balance God's mysterious will with the mystery of God's gift of free will. Doing so not only frees us from attributing evil to God, but it also is consistent with how God has worked in the world throughout history. Even God's "mighty deeds," as one famous, Old Testament scholar has put it, are worked out with and through human beings. God sends the plagues through Moses' and Aaron, God parts the Sea through Moses, God has the Ten Words inscribed into a human language, God himself takes on human form, God has instituted and chosen the Church to be his vehicle of reconciliation and healing in the world. There is no answer to the question of why God works this way. In my opinion, this mystery of free will enables a more coherent theology that can simultaneously deny God's complicity in evil and affirm his mysterious and redeeming power. Understanding God's mysteriousness in this way actually allows us to recognize God's odd will, not as the ultimate cause of everything, but as the one whose will to heal the world is the same one who has willed to change the world by using people.

I have not solved anything, and I certainly have not raised any new issues. But I have tried to show how important it is to be precise in our language and to pursue coherent theological explanations. I have not tried to create a false disjunction between those who locate God's mysteriousness in his will or in his giving of free will. Both are very mysterious, and it seems to me that those who argue for God's mysteriousness as primarily his all encompassing actually make him less mysterious. God is neither Omnipotent Despot or Impotent Deity; but he is both omnipotent and divine. Our understanding of omnipotence must seriously grapple with the nature of the world in which we live. It often makes absolutely no sense. There is beauty and redemption, but there is also an overabundance of damnable destruction. Somethings are not redeemable, but damnable. I have personally found it more helpful and coherent to accept the mystery of God's gift of free will and to go from there. It doesn't solve all the problems, and I still lose my faith a few times a year because I don't see how God is "off the hook" when I consider the tragedies of our day. But a doctrine of providence that hasn't been "earned" through honest reflection on the world and God's relation to it is no doctrine at all.

So what do we do about Japan? Personally, I do not think that God is behind such tragedies, although I recognize that God is free and cannot be limited to my own conceptions. God is always one who hears the cries of his peoples, and sees their distress. May the same God who came down to deliver the Hebrews from Egypt come and deliver the Japanese people. When he does come, he will come with human hands and feet as the Church unites its will to the Father's. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Not my will but yours be done.