I think Joni Erickson Tada might be an interesting person for Jordan to learn about. I’m a bit of a natural skeptic myself. I always have been. And Jordan certainly has faith, the sort of faith that Kierkegaard espoused. It’s a choice to will a life “as if,” while recognizing that there is no “must” to carry you across. I struggle with that constantly. But you can test your faith, even in the extremes of suffering. You can ask for grace. You can’t prove that you got it from God. But you can throw yourself onto him and see if anything catches you. Maybe nothing will.
I’m a firm believer in cause and effect. But even I can’t deny that there have been some cases in my life where I saw myself in a hopeless situation. And I never came up with a plan of how to develop what I needed in myself to be able to come out of that hole. And I don’t mean the problem just going away, I mean my ability to be able to handle the problem. And some sort of me didn’t even want to. But I had one small corner of me that wished to be free and wished to be otherwise. And sometimes I have suddenly found that I had it. Maybe that’s merely coincidence. I also find Christians to be an insufficient witness to the supposed power of God to change people. But sometimes you need to watch someone die and see how they face it. And sometimes you need to see how terrible a person they could have been or were or are underneath and how much that journey, if not the present person themselves, has altered. I don’t know.
I don’t think, even if the gospel is true, that it’s meant to be inherently compulsory from a purely factual or rational standpoint, any more than anything about ultimate reality is. In some sense all of life is a risk, a chance you take on a practical, not only theoretical, basis. You choose to live as if a certain story were true. And we want to know what story really is true. Especially if we’re going to commit our hopes and fears to it. And the gospel lies at such a fundamental level of explanation that its hard to comprehend what it would mean for us.
The same could be said of many religious beliefs and secular religious beliefs across time and culture. There’s a sense in which none of us take any of our beliefs as seriously as one might expect us to, whether that’s reincarnation or materialism. We struggle to live fully in any narrative, maybe because to do so would exhaust us, maybe because the narrative lacks depth or coherence, maybe because we live as humans across more than one narrative and level of being.
In all truth, I completely sympathize with Jordan’s struggle over the historical question of Christ. Why must I believe that? Why is the mythological level not sufficient or not the most plausible? Why is it not enough? And there are arguments about that. I think the answer that the struggle of the lives of men is mythological, but not merely mythological, and the problem of life and connection to the great ultimate reality is not just a theoretical or abstract or archetypal problem, it’s an actual personal and historical problem. So it had to have an actual incarnated moment of being addressed. It had to be acted out, to become actual, because we are actual. It had to come to action, as our beliefs in our lives come down to action in time and space.
But I don’t think you can compel belief in that why. I don’t think you can lock it up and put it in your pocket and create a machine of compelling thought that will carry you across that gulf. To take that step is like stepping into death. Into an infinite unknown with no guarantee. That’s why baptism is its symbol. And we look at others and find them insufficiently regenerated to convince us that they have drowned and been brought back to life.
That’s hard to get past. It makes it impossible to take the leap. And there are some people who like to withhold themselves so they can always have a clear vision of everything. If you give yourself up you may lose that objectivity. You will have laid your bets and joined the table. You can no longer merely advise on the game, because you’ve staked yourself in it. I feel that reluctance too.
I also struggle mightily with going to church. Partly because I don’t like joining things, I like being outside them so I can analyze them, partly because I don’t like taking on obligations to people who may disappoint me and confound me, partly because of my own past disappointments and exhaustion and unwillingness to commune and sacrifice and wrestle with such a broad and unselected group of people. Partly because I’m lazy, fearful, resentful, superior, jealous, and selfish. Churches, as the manifestation of the work of God, can be very disappointing, because they’re full of people. And I can be very reluctant to participate, because I’m people too.
So what should I do? Give up on the idea of the community of humanity united by a shared recognition of their sorry state and a desire to be regenerated and seek the truth and live it out? That seems like a pretty damn cynical thing to do. But I am that cynical. I feel sick just thinking of being in a church these days. Is that partly because I lack the courage and faith to believe in people and love them the way that I’m told God believes in them and loves them? I think Jordan worries, in his question, whether he is lacking courage.
To which I can only say that I lack it too. And that I can’t see much recourse from going over the arguments, or distracting myself with all the little facts and references and thoughts I have. At some point it comes down to action. Acts of faith, disciplines of faith. But they’re terribly difficult to take. Maybe courage like that can only come from desperation, ignorance, or the gift of God. And maybe someone who flies so high and powerfully needs a lot of be brought that low, and cannot be made that ignorant, or finds it hard to ask for the gift of God.
One thing I will say that you miss by avoiding church is the opportunity to actually see the work of God, see better examples, little glimpses, in the lives of others. You will surely see a lot that is terrible and banal and disappointing. But I’ve seen men and women face death with courage, seen people live lives of service, I’ve seen a weeping father still lift his hands in worship after his son had been killed, I’ve seen goodness that really cost people something, and I’ve seen forgiveness granted and accepted that seemed impossible. Maybe you can find that anywhere. Maybe those are all the work of the same God in all lives. I don’t know. But I recognize that by depriving myself of facing the difficulty and disappointments of the congregation of believers, I also miss out on all the grace I could gain from them. Maybe I think I don’t need it. Maybe I doubt it.
Also, I think the answer to problem of how you pursue utopia while avoiding rhe pitfalls of limiting it too much (an insufficient heaven), or of making a false idol or false heaven that becomes a hell (a tower of babel) is to locate its boundaries outside your own life. Maybe the afterlife is a way of conceptualizing that. Maybe it’s the literal answer. But I think the solution offered by Christianity for avoiding (or minimizing) these problems related to pursuing Heaven is to locate it in a place beyond the boundaries of your own temporal and individual life.
And of course the other great strategy is to maintain focus on Christ and honoring and representing him. So both your ideal and your results are located outside your own temporal and identity limits. Of course neither of these are foolproof strategies. You can’t make a foolproof system without removing freedom or complexity, without removing humanity itself. But they are ideological safeguards placed on the project.
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