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.

4: Elusive Certainty, Certain Faith

If I were to sum up chapter four of Daniel Taylor’s book, The Myth of Certainty I would say this: the only thing we can know with absolute certainty is that there is nothing absolutely certain.

Taylor proposes that a core desire in human beings is a search for truth. This search, he writes, travels two well-worn roads: faith and reason. I would have thought that he’d had enough to say about reason and its limitations in the previous chapters but he returns to the subject here with a great deal more illumination.

Early on, Taylor describes two different forms of Christian apologetic that compete for our attention. One, he writes, rejects reason altogether, consigning it to things of the fallen human or worse, Satan. The other elevates it perhaps seeking to use the favored tool of secularism against it. Taylor suggests that a fundamental problem with both apologetics is that they fail to recognize reason as only one of many processes that shape what we believe. Still reason should not be rejected as a tool for knowing and probably cannot be because to do so would require reason (we would have to submit reasons for rejecting reason).

But it is understandable why both subcultures identified by Taylor, Christian faithful and secular intellectual, would want to elevate reason to a place of dominance. It truly has served us well in the past few centuries. With the application of scientific method, a particular kind of reasoning, human beings have accomplished some truly amazing things. Yet these accomplishments have given us an unrealistic and overly optimistic understanding of reason as a tool. Taylor wryly notes the phrase, “If we can land a man on the moon we ought to be able to…” The blank is filled in with any number of intractable human challenges. The problem is that all of these challenges, war, poverty, bigotry, materialism and many more are rooted in the flaws of human nature, flaws that reason is ill-equipped to eliminate if it can address them at all.

In the most crucial of all human activities reason does not serve us well. It cannot help us understand why we love or fail to love, why we consider some things beautiful and other things ugly, why some things are good and valuable and other things are worthless. No “reasonable” person would consider reason an effective tool to use in a relationship and this is all the more true of a relationship with the divine.

But Taylor is at his best when he moves to contrast the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of certainty. When we seek an unquestionable foundation upon which to build Christianity we set people up for failure in false dichotomies like “either you believe this or you’re not that.” Taylor pities the poor reflective Christian who seems weak compared with the false prophet who offers a path to absolute certainty.

However, knowing absolutes is something impossible for human beings because by definition absolutes “partake of infinity.” As finite beings we can only have a finite understanding of things, particularly infinite things. Moreover, Taylor writes, our knowledge of the infinite is not only limited it is distorted. It is ironic that, while some Christian apologetics are based on premises of absolutes, Christian orthodoxy holds that our very ability to perceive all that exists around us (divine and created alike) is flawed by our fallen nature. The notion of absolutes is a human attempt to explain God to ourselves, not a divine revelation.

Yet the reflective Christian should take comfort in doubt, Taylor tells us, because doubt is what gives faith its being. He concludes with a hopeful thought: while certainty is beyond our reach, meaning, something far more valuable, is not.

3: Fear and Loathing in the Subcultures

I have always been puzzled by the energy with which Christians react to interactions with our society. For example, I remember the angry rant of an otherwise sweet woman who was incensed at “yet another judge ruling against Christian’s right to pray in schools.” She said, “We need to wake up. We’re really living under persecution in this country.” I was stunned.

However, reading Daniel Taylor’s The Myth of Certainty has given me a new insight into this kind of thinking. “The secular world is not so much a threat to God and His ways as it is to us and our ways,” Taylor writes. This makes so much more sense to me. Why would we believe that God needed our defense? Maybe more important, how can we be so certain that what we are defending is really “of God?” I wonder if we would be wise to more often heed the advice that Gamaliel gave to the Sanhedrin.

Yet, as Taylor points out, our fear of the secular subculture is not completely irrational. We are, after all, strangers in a strange land, in our own land. While the secular subculture is not a threat to God it is not exactly friendly to us. Taylor’s insight on why is what I find truly illuminating.

The belligerence of the secular subculture toward faith is really based on the same fears that we experience toward their lack of faith. We stand in competing worldviews, each one a perceived threat to the other because each one is perceived to reject the central tenets of the other. The secular subculture rejects faith as “unreasonable” because faith threatens one of the central tenets of “contemporary intellectual orthodoxy,” that is: doubt everything.

What many Christians find enraging is not “attacks” by this secular subculture but rather their dismissal. Faith does not so offend the secular world in and of itself. It is when faith is seen to intrude where “it does not belong.” In particular, when one’s faith gives off the impression that you are privy to insights not available to non-believers.

But Taylor is not shy about challenging three myths of the secular intellectual world. The first is that their worldview is based on reason and analysis. This assumption asserts that all people can come to the same conclusions if they will only apply some universally available thought process. This myth misunderstands the tool of reason in a manner that any politician or high school debate team would challenge. Following any particular chain of reasoned thoughts does not guarantee that there is no other way to look at the evidence.

Another myth is objectivity. This assumes that human beings are capable of setting aside all bias and experience and seeing circumstances through the same eyes, neatly and cleanly. But Taylor clarifies that his point is not to argue that reason is useless or that objectivity is not worth pursuing. He simply rejects the assumption that these tools give the secular world superiority over the person of faith.

Finally, Taylor asserts that the most fundamental tenet of secular orthodoxy is tolerance and it is often the most violated. Pluralism, Taylor writes, is the “orthodoxy of the day.” Yet pluralists are only tolerant of worldviews that affirm pluralism. Holding out the possibility of higher truth, even if it is inaccessible to humans, is heresy to that orthodoxy.

Ironically, these two different subcultures have a great deal in common in that neither will seriously consider the other and both are tremendously confident. As Taylor writes, “The end product of ignorance plus confidence is smugness, and both subcultures are bountifully supplied.” Unfortunately, reflective Christians often find themselves damned in both subcultures. Believe me, between is just not a fun place to be.

2: Navigating the Christian Subculture

When Daniel Taylor writes about “the church” he admits that his own experience is with the modern, western, primarily evangelical and fundamentalist brand of Christianity. That is an important context to hold in reading his book, The Myth of Certainty. In this, Taylor admits his own bias. He recognizes the “great plank in his own eye” as he examines the specks in the eyes of others.

But that said, Taylor points out that the church, although “God-ordained and God-inspired” is nonetheless prone to act as nearly all other human institutions. This is particularly true when it comes to responding to questioning. For members of an institution, questioning the institution is synonymous with attacking it. When it comes to questioning the church it is often seen as questioning God.

Like Taylor, I find this odd. It is as if defenders of God believe that He requires their defense. Now that’s just plain silly. However, Taylor notes that it is not really God they are defending but rather their own worldview. Recalling his discussion from chapter one, this is a necessity for the purposes of personal security.

The trouble is that the church generally responds to questions (read attacks) from within like any other human institution: with power. In this context, power can best be defined as the ability to impose sanctions. When sanctions are imposed the reason given is often the pursuit of unity. Yet, as Taylor points out, there is a big difference between unity and unanimity. The former is mystical, internal and perhaps, beyond the capacity of human beings to achieve on their own. The latter is measurable and enforceable. The goal of unanimity is correct behavior while the goal of unity is a right spirit. Taylor acknowledges that only the most extreme elements of Christianity require uniformity but the entire subculture insists on it to some degree. Taylor points out that an institution that seeks unanimity through authoritarian measures will naturally view every question as a “mini-crisis.”

But Taylor turns his own arguments upside down when he notes that the questioners can become like the Pharisee in Luke 18 who looks at the tax collector and thanks God that he isn’t like him. This is something deconstructionists (myself certainly included) must bear in mind. We cannot stand in criticism of the subculture as if we were not part of it and, therefore, bearing at least some degree of responsibility for its excesses.

Taylor closes with advice to reflective Christians that is worth repeating and remembering. We should whole-heartedly embrace the elements of church that appear to be sincerely doing God’s work, at least as we understand it. Yet we should feel no remorse about shying away from the “inevitable distortions that come from any collection of human beings.” The challenge, of course, is to know the difference. But that is what reflection is meant to help us navigate, is it not?

1: How We Believe

I am going to embark on a multi-part series blogging through Daniel Taylor’s book, The Myth of Certainty. I’m doing this in part because I’m lately I’m having a hard time being disciplined to read because of some new and rather pleasant distractions in my life. But it’s also because I’m finding myself facing a massive writer’s block (maybe for the same reason) so I am welcoming an opportunity to synthesize and analyze someone else’s ideas instead of trying to squeeze a few of my own out of my head.

I picked up Taylor’s book after reading it recommended on another blogger’s site (I don’t remember which) and it sat on my desk for a couple months while I finished some other projects. Now that I’ve started reading it in earnest I’m wishing I had done so years ago. I think it might have save me a great deal of angst.

I suppose that I like to think of myself as one of those “reflective Christians” about whom Taylor writes. This has caused me no small amount of trouble over the years and I’m fairly convinced that it has cost me a couple job opportunities. When a friend questioned me about my choice of titles for my blog I had to confess that I don’t enjoy being a “heretic” and I take no pride in it. I just can’t help questioning things that others seem to accept with so much certainty.

However, I’m not sure that my questioning rises to the degree that Taylor describes. For one thing, I’ve never reached a place of “paralysis” through ambivalence. I do find that I am able to commit to ideas, faith in Christ being undoubtedly the most important. On the other hand I can completely relate to the desire expressed by a young woman Taylor describes in the first chapter, a desire to return to days of ignorance and naiveté even though I recognize as she did, there’s no way to “unlearn” what we’ve learned.

But what I find most captivating in the first chapter of Taylor’s book is his discussion of the psychology of belief. There, he focuses not on what we believe but on how we believe. Human beings, he writes, are “explanation generators.” We develop worldviews because we need to in order to survive. Apparently we have a basic instruction set programmed into our being that requires each of us to make sense of the world around us.

Moreover, Taylor says, we do not do so in vacuums. Generally, we subscribe to worldviews of subcultures which are essentially sense-making communities. Once in operation, our worldviews become the lenses through which we process all information. We keep that which verifies our outlook and defuse or ignore that which does not. For the reflective person this process is less prevalent but it is still present.

The really interesting part is Taylor’s that subcultures are frontloaded with defenses against competing worldviews. This is a matter of security because the existence of competing belief systems threatens the security of our own. Their mere existence is an accusation that our own worldviews are based on falsehoods, illusion and ignorance. When people defend their world view they are not defending God or truth or some abstract system, they are in fact defending their own sense of security and self respect.

Taylor concludes the chapter by noting why it is important to understand the psychology of belief: it is to assure a reflective person that he or she is not crazy. When reflection drives us to question the beliefs of the subculture to which we belong the subculture does not suffer this quietly. Rather, there are all kinds of attempts to bring us back into the fold, to convince us of “the truth” or, failing that, to expel us using whatever means necessary.