Celebration of Fools
Several weeks ago, I ordered something that will probably seem silly and superstitious. It’s a holding cross made out of olive wood, maybe 4”-5” long.
My husband teases me, saying it looks like a souvenir from a mushy evangelical retreat. Yeah okay, he’s right. Still, almost every night over the past few weeks, I’ve fallen asleep holding it. And almost every morning, I’ve opened my eyes to find my hand still grasping it tightly.
I don’t know how this sort of grasp is possible. I’m not a tidy sleeper. I dream hard, wrestle, and thrash. Something deep in my subconscious must be telling my muscles to cling to this object, even as it is sifting through a thousand words and images, trying to make sense of a chaotic world.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this bit of wood has any power in itself. I don’t think it is a mystical portal or wand. But just like a wedding ring is a reminder of a vow that I’ve made, this little cross reminds me of a vow I’ve made to hope and trust. More importantly, it’s a reminder of the vow Love has made to me.
So many of the big things I’ve prayed for over time haven’t come to pass yet. I’ve seen atheists mock studies attempting to prove the efficacy of prayer, and though I don’t agree with their posture, I have to agree with some of their conclusions. I’m not always able to see empirical evidence that my requests before God result in change on earth. Sometimes I’m maddened by the way this all works. I know God’s not a vending machine, but some of the things I pray for aren’t about me. They are about other people who need help.
If I could design a God, I wouldn’t design one who made people filthy rich at a prayer. But I would have him shake the lost awake so they might know him. I would have him stop the silences and sufferings that are so intense, people lose heart. I have no idea how the God Who Is will repair all of this.
I grew up inside of a Christianity that had answers for pretty much everything. We were going to win the culture war of our faith by proofs, arguments, or science. Not until I studied (and taught) Western philosophy did I realize how humanistic this approach to evangelism and cultural renovation truly was.
You can laugh all you want at philosophy students. Admittedly, they’re a weird bunch. But you know, what they study matters, as it’s the foundation for everything you take for granted as true. It takes some guts to yank back the curtain and see what sort of little old man is back there pushing buttons and pulling levers. I’m always surprised that this discipline doesn’t have a higher rate of mental breakdown.
The church piddles with such things. However, they mostly skim the surface of how we know what we know—meaning the most “advanced” apologetics offered by many churches attempt to commandeer humanistic methods without even acknowledging the framework. Those books and seminars may seem Christian to you—but what happens when we look straight at the form used and question if it should be our starting place at all?
I know few people who are concerned about this, so it’s been a lonely decade or two, watching a huge segment of modern Christendom persist in co-opting humanistic strategies, cringing because I knew why these could fall like a house of cards if faced with the right questions. There’s so much about faith we will never be able to prove because without humanistic assumptions, proof itself is a myth. And inside of a true framework built upon humanistic assumptions, a lot of the Bible is ethically difficult—no matter what the latest hot take defending the Old Testament tells us.
So, what a relief it’s been to find Lesslie Newbigin, former missionary to India. In the first chapter of his The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, Newbigin puts his finger straight on the issue.
He writes:
“It is often said, or implied, that the dominance of the Christian worldview in Western European society was overturned by the rise of modern science, but this seems to be an oversimplification. Graft Reventlow, in his massive work The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, shows how the attack has its origins far earlier than the rise of modern science, in the strong humanist tradition which we inherit from the Classical Greek and Roman elements in our culture, and which surfaced powerfully in the Renaissance and played a part in the Reformation. This humanist tradition is itself composed of many elements which can be grouped into two main strands. There is the rationalist tradition, drawing especially on Greek and Stoic sources, which affirms human reason as the organ through which alone truth may be known; and there is the spiritualist tradition, drawing on sill more ancient sources which Europe shares with India, the tradition which affirms the capacity of the human spirit to make direct contact through mystical experience with the ultimate source of being and truth. “
“Graf Revenlow’s study shows how, during the latter part of the seventeenth and through the eighteenth centuries, while ordinary churchgoers continued to live in the world of the Bible, intellectuals were more and more controlled by the humanist tradition, so that even those who sought to defend the Christian faith did so on the basis that it was ‘reasonable,’ that is to say, that it did not contradict the fundamental humanist assumption.”
“What is striking about the books which were written, especially during the eighteenth century, to defend Christianity against these attacks, is the degree to which they accept the assumptions of their assailants. Christianity is defended as being reasonable.”
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There you go. Do you recognize this pressure from the evangelical world? Christianity must be reasonable.
Whether we are taught to color code key terms, or form outlines, or utilize “ologies” to fortify our belief against a hostile, non-believing world—we are first convinced that we must have a belief system that is reasonable.
Progressive and conservative believers are equally guilty here. We each have our favorite, “Well, God couldn’t possibly mean...” because we don’t want to look like dunces or savages.
Newbigin confesses a similar tendency. He writes,
”It was only slowly, through many experiences, that I began to see that something of this domestication had taken place in my own Christianity, that I too had been more ready to seek a ‘reasonable Christianity,’ a Christianity that could be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual formation as a twentieth-century Englishman, rather than something which placed my whole intellectual formation under a new and critical light. I, too, had been guilty of domesticating the gospel.”
”Christianity began with the proclamation of something authoritatively given. Paul presents himself not as the teacher of a new theology but as the messenger commissioned by the authority of the Lord himself to announce a new fact—namely that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus God has acted decisively to reveal and effect his purpose of redemption for the whole world.”
”This proclamation invites belief. It is not something whose truth can be demonstrated by reference to human experience in general. Rather, it is that by the acceptance of which all human experience can be rightly understood. It is the light by which things are seen as they really are, and without which they are not truly seen. It rests on no authority beyond itself.”
I would have hated this book at 25 when I knew all the arguments. I wouldn’t have been ready for it at 35 when I was still so enamored with the powers of my own intellect. But at 48, I’m weary of the apologetic babble.
It’s not that I have no historical, rational, empirical evidence for my faith. It’s that I believe less and less in the objectively historical, rational, or empirical. Those systems are internally stable with legitimate checks and balances of their own. But each system is self-confirming and insular. None can obtain or withstand the scrutiny of any sort of external objectivity.
Ultimately, I believe because know Christ is real, and faith in Him is the only system of “knowing” I’ve found that provides the ability to know the rest of the world consistently. I was disappointed when I read C.S. Lewis’s statement confessing the same decades ago. The older I get, though, the more it rings true. Call it the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, if you need a label. But it’s more tender and alive than this. It’s also far simpler.
Like the fool in King Lear, I am increasingly content with my own lack of respectability. The great ones will establish their gauntlets, bestowing praise and land, accepting flattery within the microcosms of their own honor. Pomp is indefatigable.
As Amor Towles writes in _A Gentleman in Moscow,
“For pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too. How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two. Or, having served him at the formal dinner, it wonders aloud if a taller chair might not have been more fitting for a man with such responsibilities.”
Whether communists are overtaking aristocrats, or capitalists are overtaking monarchists, or progressives are reforming, or conservatives are taking up arms, or some new wave of humanism is superseding its own last trend, pomp will rise. It is the one of the only sure things.
If you still believe wholly in logic or empirical truth (Christian or non), I won’t blame you. Any man trying to survive a drop in the middle of an ocean will cling to a floating log.
Meanwhile, I sleep holding my own bit of wood. It’s just a knickknack, but it keeps me above water. Let it make me fool to the best of Kings. He is risen. He is risen, indeed. And because of this, I see.
