Unthinking Spirituality
12 Jan 2005
This week in my doctoral programme cohort we are reading and discussing Michael Polanyi’s ‘Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy’ and Lesslie Newbigin’s ‘ Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship’. Here is something I posted to my cohort this morning.
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I had another thought in the shower (not pretty I know) about how certaintiy leads to Nihilism and where you can see an example of that.
In the modern church by and large, we bought in the Cartesian project, the dualism of thinking being supreme above experience/matter.
We see this in the way faith is reduced to propostional statements that we have to give intellectual ascent to in order to access relationship with Christ.
So we have a faith based on rationalism and thinking yet it ends up largely unthinking. This is the Nihilsm Newbigin talks about. Ironically a faith based unpon thinking alone, within the cartesian model does not allow for questioning, and leads to this nihilsitic stagnation.
So christian sprituality is about thinking the right things, but we aren’t allowed to think too much, to question, to doubt, to use our minds at all. Seminaries become finsihing schools for what has already been learned, not to learn.
Spirituality is is based in our minds but is still largely unthinking. And when people do think, to question, to doubt, rather than seeing it as the route to genuine faith, we told people to stop doubting.
What do you guys think/see from your church experience?
Jase
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Comment by Jeff Richardson
1.31 pm on 12 Jan 2005
No doubt that modernity saddled much of evangelical Christianity with a schizophrenic nature: both anti-intellectual in its liberal-slippery-slope paranoia, and nonmystical in its strident rationalism.
Couple this with the constant struggle in any human organization to determine the proper balance between protecting orthodoxy and allowing freedom, and I think our plight is easy to understand – if not decipher or improve!
What I think we’re seeing in many places is a shift along one or both of these two axes: the rational v. mystical and the conformity v. diversity. Some are sliding along only one axis, while others are moving on two; some are sliding evenly into a particular quadrant, while others are veering wildly to the extreme on one ordinal.
Comment by will
1.57 pm on 12 Jan 2005
Jason, this is the ironic place in which the Church now finds herself. Interestingly, bringing people to “faith” may be as much of a conversation that needs to happen within the institution of the Church as without, if not more so. Certitude has become part of our cultural DNA within much of the Western Church, such that a faith-based approach to Christ and spirituality may seem most foreign to those who find themselves within this church system.
Comment by DLE
5.08 pm on 12 Jan 2005
Over at TheOoze (www.theooze.com) this was hashed out last year in “The Certainty Thread.” If you wish to track that discussion, it would prove enlightening.
As for me, I believe the greatest threat to Christianity is the current obsession with doubt. Doubt has become the new “Faith” and it is tragic to see the human toll this takes on people who will likely never grow beyond their doubts into anything that resembles mature faith. These folks will be ever needy and never able to give back to the community of faith because they cannot come to grips with certainty. They are the same kind of perpetual doubters that made it nearly impossible for Jesus to do any miracles in His hometown. If they thwarted the Lord, they will thwart our faith communities.
Job said, “I know that my Redeemer lives…” not “I have a sneaking suspicion my Redeemer lives.”
The very definition of faith in the Bible starts out, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for…” NOT “Now faith is the hope of things hoped for….”
Doubt is not rewarded by God. We know from James that the man who doubts is double-minded, unstable, and will receive nothing from God. The man who rests in the assurance of Faith IS rewarded.
Now we can quibble about what we are certain of. I do not know perfectly (the “seeing through the glass darkly” that doubt proponents love to quote) in which way God may direct me today in ministry, nor am I even certain I will be alive tomorrow, but I am certain that Jesus Christ is Lord, He is God, and the only way to salvation is through Him. He hears and responds to prayer, He will come again in glory, and He has gone to prepare a place for me. His words are true and certain, and the answers to all my questions are found in Him.
Of this all of us can rest assured and certain.
Comment by Whitewave
8.09 pm on 12 Jan 2005
Oh, my Gooness! I think I see a thread of commonality between us DLE!
Doubt of the sort that Jesus was up against was a mixture of at least two types. On the outside they look the same, but apperances can be deceiving. The difference between the two is under the surface and doesn’t lie with the issue of Trust at all. Instead it has to do with our Desire, or the reasons people believe one possible scenario or explanation over another. But since modernity has taught us to respond to and judge merely the accuracy of statements and ideas offered at face value, we are not accustomed to looking at motives. It took the post-modern thinkers to help us pull the covers.
Jesus, of course, is a pre-modern and had His own methods of exposing the motives of people. They are terrific. But if you look more closely at what He was doing to people, you can see that He responded well to doubt which truly desired to believe Him such as Nicodemus and John the Baptist at the end of his life (not to mention all the male disciples in the upper room after the crucifixion!), while He shut out the ones whom He knew didn’t want to believe. In fact, He designed his teaching methods deliberately to leave them in the dust. This is one of the ways he seperated “those who have ears to hear” from those who didn’t. That phrase is about desire, not ability and it is important that we do not create an emotional backlash by dumping shame on people who have doubt along with desire to believe.
Skepticism vs. dogmatism are old catagories which must be outgrown. I know it’s hard for the Old Guard to let them go, but we must do it because fighting that war has left us with a limited territory to stand on and there are things outside of that boundary which we are called to respond to. The doubters you and I probably both find distastful are the ones who have set the terms for that war. As long as we agree to their terms, we will lose the opportunity to respond to our call. Don’t let them push us around. There is a 3rd and better way.
Jase,
I’m writing right now about the philosophical commentary tracks on the Matrix dvds. I don’t know when I’ll dump it on the world, but I will eventually.
You know what’s really not pretty? I get so many thoughts in the shower that when I’m experiencing a particularly intelectually fertile period, I avoid taking a shower because I am afraid I’ll lose the ideas if I can’t write them down! Just say, “NO!” to web-cams!
Luther and his buds stole the fire of assurance from the gods of the Church Gate Keepers and gave it to the people for good reason. However, now that we’ve travelled with this hot stuff for a long ways, we’ve begun to see why it’s such a danger to us. After we’ve fired our bricks and used them to build our structures of Faith, the earthquake brings all that unreinforced masonry down on top of us and the Church hierarchy can no longer be called to come and put Humpty Dumpty back together again!
While it may be suggested that “assurance” and “certainty” aren’t the same thing, the common threads are that 1) we Protestants now have permission to aquire it without the help of the experts and 2) those two things are the twin pillars of our Dogmatism that opposers have been trying to pull down for a long time. Most pithy gospel tracts deal with those two issues directly and together.
Time and time again the Bible tells stories of heavenly beings telling us to not be afraid. I think we can deduce that there is something about the human experience which frightens us. Whatever that is is beside my point for the moment. Our frantic and desperate attempts to escape it are numerous. Each one is a device or tool to manipulate our experience of fear. In every field we do it. Especially religion. But while our instincts are right in sensing that there is a place without fear, we must accept that this world is not it.
What that means for us is that as humans we must live with Risk. If there is no sense of risk, then we are denying some fundamental part of reality, and we can safely guess that we have invented some technology to try and eradicate it. That technology will probably come and bite us in the ass eventually. We might as well stop it now and accept risk.
One last thing and then I’ll shut up. These two links are better than yours about the Polanyi book:
http://www.erraticimpact.com/~20thcentury/html/polanyi_michael.htm
and
http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Polanyi%20Personal%20Knowledge%20Science%20&%20Technology%201962.htm
Nyah. Have a good one. ;)
Comment by Sivin Kit
2.49 am on 15 Jan 2005
I was at a after seminar at a local Assembly of God Bible College. The speaker (a philosophy professor from USA) was teaching us Malaysians about apologetics and postmodernism. Nothing good was said about postmodernism :-) and his ideas was to return to some form of pre-17 century epistomology.
Anyway, as he was hammering on the theme of “certianty” my mind was drawn back to this book by Newbigin which brought so much life to me and direction in my own discipleship. Tell you more another time about my thoughts on the talk.
Comment by David Malouf
7.02 pm on 19 Jan 2005
In the southwest US, I see what you and DLE see. Either Doubt is hailed as the sign of spiritual maturity, or doubt is seen as rejecting God.
I heard a sermon, “It’s not ok to worry.” Two points later, “It’s ok to worry, but not to doubt God.” Yick.
Ask my 7 year old daughter if she doubts my love for her. Answer, no. Ask her if she doubts what will happen when I bring out the tweazers to get the splinter in her foot… she gets Gollum eyes! Doubt? Oh yeah! Crisis in our family. Nah. Are we actually better off having worked through the doubt…
My question: can’t we have both? Can’t we have both rational AND experiential AND mystical? For me, I would propose that the key is oing to be in knowing each other. I know my wife is way more mystical than I am (I am very rational). But I know her! I know she dances with God in ways I long for. I know that I provide insight into God in places she would never go.
My two cents (after a night of no sleep, btw),
David Malouf
Comment by Whitewave
7.27 pm on 19 Jan 2005
Trust is meant to be given to a Person, not an object or idea. Jesus “cleared the temple” of all the objects and ideas and made room for the Person to be the focus. We keep trying to put more objects and ideas back into the temple, crowding Him out.
Comment by dh
7.56 pm on 19 Jan 2005
DLE, I liked what you said. David: I would say that your daughter probably trusts you to pull the splinter out but her reaction is one of future pain not doubt in your ability to pull it out. I know that is what it was for me when my dad would pull the splinter out when I was young. I know there is much I don’t understand about God and Jesus but I wouldn’t call that doubt. Although, I feel my Faith is strong in God (trinity). I do know “the secret things are the Lords.” I wouldn’t call this doubt I would call it a lack of understanding. Talk about mystical, I do know that we will know fully when we “see Him as He is” at the second coming of Christ and when we obtain our glorified bodies in heaven. Worry operates at different levels than doubt. Is worry doubt? I would venture to say not always. I may worry about the pain but have Faith to know that after the pain I will be better than before (analogy of how we die to the sin nature the moment we become a Believer). Is this doubt? no I will agree though that both doubt and worry are situations where there is some amount of lack of Faith. Hence, the response by the pastor referenced. I think that it is probably semantics the reason for the differences we both see.
Comment by Garth@emergingBlurb
1.49 am on 9 Feb 2005
I like your “finishing school seminaries”. All that can be known is known idea and that a mark of spiritual maturity is how well you explain it. Just grab a bible, a good commentary and perhaps a Greek dictionary and you too will soon be ‘mature’ in the faith. The Word became flesh and we turned him back into words.
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