A Hopeful Heretic

6: Seeking Truth, Finding God

In the last chapter of his book, The Myth of Certainty, Daniel Taylor acknowledges a sad truth with which I believe many who would call themselves “emerging Christians” would agree: we live in a nearly constant state of tension between the Christian subculture and the secular subculture. It is not always an uncomfortable place to be but it is an interesting place to be.

It is also a place of great temptation. Certainly there are the temptations pulling from both sides. Anytime you’re in the middle of opposing camps there are those who would woe you or shame you into making a choice, even if the choice is based on a false dichotomy. But more than that, there is the temptation to not choose. That is, I think, the greater danger because it freezes us in place, afraid to commit to anything. This non-choice is not what God calls us to.

So what is it that we are called to? The prophet Micah offers us one of those rare experiences of simple clarity in an oft-quoted verse:

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:8 (NIV)

Humility is the central idea of the last chapter. The starting place for humility is the acknowledgement that for all our truth-seeking, the truth we perceive might actually be simply illusion. But we need not fear that our seeking will lead us away from God. If we are honest in seeking truth we can have faith that our journey will lead us to Him, although the road might take some twists and turns. After all, if we are seeking truth we should find Jesus. Did he not tell us, “I am the way the truth and the light?” If truth is a person and we seek truth we should find that person.

Humility also calls us to understand the nature of truth. Because of our finitude, we can only “see through the glass darkly.” We can only find truth in place and time and in human relationships. Taylor advises us to exercise our greatest judgment upon ourselves and our own beliefs and behaviors, essentially working on the plank in our own eye before reaching for the speck in someone else’s.

In this frame of mind, we are more likely to avoid the trap of confusing defense of the truth with defense of self. Humility also helps us recognize that the errors of one’s “enemies” do not ensure us of our own correctness or righteousness.

But humility is not the same thing as passivity or indecisiveness. Acting with less than perfect knowledge is the risk we take in being human.

Ironically, healthy skepticism might be one of our best tools for seeking truth. Taylor advises us to continually examine as new ideas are swept on and off the stage of human thought. It seems to me that the same applies to the trends and waves of ideas that seem to capture the attention of the church in our country for a season at a time.

Finally, Taylor advises some practical guidelines for living in the middle of the two subcultures, advice that the emerging church might want to take to heart. The first principle is conservation of energy. We need not enter every argument nor take on every battle. We should also avoid being trapped into positions defined by what we are against rather than what we stand for.

Best of all, Taylor advises us to develop and exercise a sense of humor. He writes that “God gave us laughter to relieve the strain of living in a fallen world.” This reminds me of what Hobbes (the tiger, not the seventeenth century philosopher) once said:

“If we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”

Seek truth, laugh at the absurdity of such an impossible mission and yet seek it nonetheless. And in that journey, find the One who Is truth.

5: The Risk of Commitment

One of the most common metaphors of spiritual commitment among evangelical Christians is “crossing the line.” The idea is that there is a hard boundary beyond which eternal salvation is assured and across which there is no turning back. Of course there is a lot of theology and doctrine wrapped up in these thoughts, the details of which are not the purpose of this post to discuss. I am only here to wonder what to do when experience does not match the metaphor.

In my own story, I cannot identify a particular moment in time when I crossed a line and “made a decision for Christ (another common metaphor).” I can look back over periods of my life and identify movement toward God but it was not my experience to have an epiphany when it all made sense to me. To be honest, it often still does not.

This is why I take so much comfort in the writing of Daniel Taylor. His book, The Myth of Certainty gives the reader permission to doubt by separating the need for faith from the need for certainty. Skepticism and doubt, he tells us, are reasonable and even required considering the treacherous ground upon which most of us travel in our finite existence. The trouble is that skepticism and doubt can paralyze us, leading us to endless cycles of questions leading to more questions.

In chapter 5 Taylor encourages us to commit. At some point in the process of reflection one must accept on faith what is not available through more questioning, he tells us. But this is not surrender to a weakness. Indeed it is a stake in the ground that says, “Here is where I lay my claim on understanding and act.”

Action is the real test, is it not? Never mind belief in God, there are countless decisions in our complex lives that require an end to reflection and commitment to action. If we required the same degree of certainty in these decisions that are sometimes asked of faith in the divine many people would never choose a car to buy, a movie to watch, a meal to eat or a political candidate to support. These decisions are arrived at not with absolute certainty for all time but with the best choice we can make at a particular time, in a particular place given the information we have. Taylor tells us that all such decisions require the risk of being wrong and faith is no different.

Moreover, “faith is not such a weak thing that it can only exist where there is certainty and proof,” writes Taylor. As evidence he points to the father in Mark 9 whose verbal slip betrays his doubts of the ability of even Jesus to help his son. To me, it is not clear whether the father comes to Jesus out of faith (albeit imperfect) or simply desperation. Perhaps the line between the two is very blurry.

But Taylor gets down to a certain degree of practicality in this chapter when he shares the three processes that make his own commitment possible: memory, community and perseverance. In memory he means both the collective memory of the faith (which some would call tradition) and the personal memory of the individual’s encounters with God. Collective memory can be an affirmation for us that we do not stand alone in faith but on the bones and bloody ground of scores of people through history who believed so strongly that they would suffer greatly for their beliefs. Personal memories are also an affirmation for us in that they can carry us through darker times when the sensory experience of God’s presence is not easy to find.

In identifying community as a source of strength to commit, Taylor acknowledges that it can be beautiful but also dangerous. It is a wonderful thing to have others on the same journey and Taylor is eloquent when he notes that others can “believe for us” when we lack the ability to commit. But community has a dark side when it moves from supporting the reflective believer through questions to pressuring him or her with legalism and coercion.

Finally, Taylor notes that faith can be simultaneously incredibly strong and terribly fragile. Sometimes it is only the stubbornness of the will that permits us to continue to believe when circumstances seem to scream at us to do otherwise. Life is a struggle for believer and nonbeliever alike, writes Taylor. “The choice is not between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We simply chose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and hopefully endure.”

I am most inspired by Taylor’s conclusion at the end of chapter five that rejects relativism as cowardice. Only with commitment, to believe or not to believe, can one begin to find meaning. Moreover, personal neutrality is dangerous and even evil in that it leads to stand by and watch while the committed struggle. This is what allows crimes as small as muggings and as great as genocide possible. It is not that those who do such things are so strong or those who oppose them are so weak but that there are so many that wait by the sidelines in debate of whether to act all.