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.