The Christian Imagination

Any of you grow up in a Christian family? If you did, how much did they live up to what you think a Christian family should be? My dad was a preacher. My mom was and is a woman of faith. There are things I’m greatly thankful to my parents for. But there are also things I’m not thankful for. We grew up Pentecostal, met in lots of houses and churches. Gifts of the Spirit. Holy Spirit working and speaking into our lives. I remember hearing about dead churches and what other churches weren’t doing right. I had some people tell me, in essence, I was a second-class citizen if I didn’t speak in tongues. I heard lots of things, lots of words.

In recent days, I’ve been dealing with, still, my inclination to worry about other people’s expectations, what it means to be emotionally honest, and how I just try too hard to be a good Christian. And these things, in part, come from my upbringing and early church experiences. While I’ve known and felt disappointment about the imperfections of my family, it wasn’t until last Sunday that I had a conversation that made it all feel more real. It was both freeing and disconcerting. Despite all the words and expressions of faith, there is still pain, still failure, still disappointment, and even when we all believe God can make it right, He doesn’t bow to our wishes, and we don’t know why.

I’ve watched as my trust in God has gone up and down over the years, and this week, had to wonder if I trusted Him at all. In something I read recently, the example was given of two types of Christians, one who is trying hard to follow and hard to feel close to, and one who has a humble simplicity and what it’s like to be around that kind of person. I immediately thought of examples of both. Too often I have been the first, and in my heart, I desire to be the second. When Christianity becomes a bunch of methods, it really becomes a burden. And when I worry about how good a Christian I am, it becomes a burden. It’s freeing when I learn that my will is weak, and that I have to repeatedly approach God humbly and weakly. I’ve started to read The Cost of Discipleship, and he talks about trust/faith and obedience being intertwined, and I think he’s onto something. For if we don’t obey, do we trust?

We can say we trust, but we don’t always, and when we pretend, it is death to life. Coming to God with our lack of trust is a step towards trust. In the end, though, I choose to trust with all my heart, to trust like a child who believes that his parents will take care of him, that they’ll seek good for his life, that there will be food on the table, that there will be shelter. Trust. Trust doesn’t mean that I’ll always understand. I won’t. But it’s not about understanding, it’s about trust. And if I truly trust, I’ll worry less, and move towards simplicity of heart. So that’s where I’m at right now. Wounds are part of life, and I’ll respond by either allowing them to bring me closer to others or by keeping people at a distance. I pray to feel deeply and love.

Today is the day that we celebrate the incarnate Lord resurrecting from the dead three days after being crucified. Resurrection. Imagine watching someone be nailed to a piece of wood, have their legs broken, be speared, and essentially suffocate from exhaustion. Then see them well three days later. It’s crazy. It’s supernatural. It requires faith. Faith in the supernatural. Imagining the unimaginable. And if Jesus can rise from the dead, and if we really believe that he did, then what else is possible that we think isn’t possible?

The late Francis Schaeffer, in one of his books, had the audacity to suggest that it wasn’t so much that America’s forefathers were Christian, but that they had a world view highly influenced by Biblical thought. They were also highly influenced by the Age of Enlightenment.

I agree with Schaeffer. There were a number of our founders who were Christian. However, not all were as Christian as we think they are, and some weren’t really Christian at all. Some of them believed in a measure of Biblical truth, and the idea of a God, but nothing more. Further, being a Christian and basing ideas on Christian thought doesn’t mean they were ‘right’ in every instance. There are dangers to the idea of Manifest Destiny, after all.

The Enlightenment heavily influenced Western culture, and what is now known as the United States. We owe the philosophy a great deal for the good it has produced. But it is a man-made philosophy, and not all of its effects have been good. The tragedy is how seamlessly we’ve incorporated some aspects of Englightenment thought into Christian thought, to the point where we think they are one and the same.

From the Wikipedia article:

Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, and carried into the governmental sphere, in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages.

The continent of Europe had been ravaged by religious wars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When political stability had been restored, notably after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom.

The Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of “knowledge.” The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza’s Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere (deism).

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism…The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism.

The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general…In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and (through the domination of instrumental rationality) tending towards totalitarianism.

We hear a lot about holding to truth and absolutes. I believe in absolute truth, but I don’t think it’s as easy to discern as we make it out to be. Multiple communities come to different absolute conclusions at times. Reason seems to be a convenient excuse to not use reason. We, as Christians, often believe in truth that we a) haven’t reasoned out ourselves and b) have ceased to accept new input on.

Even in the scientific method, there are variables that pertain to the basis premise, the phrasing of the hypothesis, how the data is collected, and how the data is analyzed. And if I am to be intellectually honest, then if new data appears, I can’t just say, “Well, I’ve already decided what’s true.”

But I’ve also seen in my life how I can ‘believe’ something, but not live as if I believe it, and I’ve seen that in others. What’s troubling is that we get to a point where we don’t feel we can express the ‘wrong answer’ even if it’s really how we feel. Yet we have the Psalms where David expressed a number of things that weren’t true about God. And we have the Bible, which in a number of ways, cannot be reduced to pure reason (read the Book of Acts). Yet, we take this powerful, poetic, supernatural book and reduce it to a book of principles about how to live. In the process, we try to ‘reason’ and ‘will’ ourselves to obey God, despite our inclinations for sin, self-deception, and selfishness, and then lament how the world isn’t following God’s principles.

I think people like Richard Foster, whose writings I will be commenting on soon, are on to something when they talk about the weakness of the will, and how important it is to recognize our poverty before the Lord. Like the rich young ruler, we want a set of principles and formulas to follow, and while those can assist, most of them don’t require we humbly encounter the Living God. I don’t need principles. I need a savior. And my need doesn’t end there…