Jesus went out from there and came into His hometown; and His disciples followed Him. When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue; and the many listeners were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things, and what is this wisdom given to Him, and such miracles as these performed by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” And they took offense at Him. Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.” And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief.
— Mark 6:1-6, emphasis mine
I read the above excerpt this evening in a renewed effort to understand who You are, God, as revealed in Jesus. I typed, “God might wonder at our unbelief,” and I realized You might be wondering at my unbelief. I am, in a way, from Your hometown: I’ve been a Christian for my entire life. And You have surrounded me with friends and relatives who have experienced You in miraculous ways. And the Internet, far from being festooned with critics and skeptics only, is full of other stories for which a naturalistic hypothesis seems farther-fetched than a divine one.
And yet I doubt. No wonder You wonder.
Today’s skeptics echo the questioners in Jesus’ hometown.
If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you about three things that happened while dining at Luna II Woodgrill this evening with Carla, Sullivan, Éa, and the Doroshes:
Sullivan learned about such Marvel characters as Mr. Fantastic, Thing, Thor, Lizard, Wolverine, and Black Cat via a coloring book the waitstaff had provided and via my answering his questions about them as he leafed through. It was strange to help him be introduced to characters. I don’t want Sullivan to open comic books and fall in like I feel like I did as a youth, but at the same time, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. So I didn’t. I did wonder, though, what effect his seeing the buxom Black Cat will have on his perception of normal busts in women as he hits adolescence.
In talking with the Doroshes and Carla, I learned that if you learn of a funeral and you know the deceased or the deceased is someone very close to someone you know, you should go. How well you know the deceased isn’t a factor in the decision because (1) your presence will add comfort the grieving, (2) it is an opportunity to bond with fellow humans, and (3) you will be reminded of your own mortality, which for me, at least, is always a healthful, inspiring thing. I missed out on this evening’s effective Antioch International Church reunion because I stayed home to tend Sullivan and Éa instead of attending Justin Carr’s funeral.
I decided to start calling the Doroshes Uncle Pete and Aunt Betsy. Éa and especially Sullivan are always eager to see Pete, and both kids were very liberal and energetic with their hugging of them both. Incidentally, I also let Pete violate my pet rule for who pays when dining out with out-of-town guests. It should be the hosts (us), but I let him pay because Carla had already accepted his offer and because, well, he insisted so nicely.
A new interpretation of Hebrews 11:6, which reads, “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him,” just came to me: The writer is saying, in effect, “You can’t do these crazy things I’m telling you about Abel, Enoch, Abraham, and so on without trusting God. It just can’t be done. If you don’t think He is and that He rewards those who seek Him, you obviously won’t be able to do the kinds of things in this list.
It’s tempting (and lucrative, for some preachers) to treat this nugget of Scripture as an ironclad promise. Whatever you ask for—promotion, wealth, the spouse of your dreams—God will give it to you.
Unless, of course, Luke 11:9 is part of a larger narrative in which Jesus has already told us what to ask for. After a brief episode in which he defends Mary over her sister Martha for choosing what matters most—being a disciple, a citizen of his kingdom—Jesus’ followers ask him how to pray. Jesus tells them to ask for things like daily bread, the advent of his kingdom, forgiveness for sin. Only then does he say, “Ask and it will be given to you.”
It’s not, “Ask for anything you want.” It’s more like, “Ask for my kingdom, and you will have it.”
— Bart Ehrman, responding to the following interview question: “In the For-All-Eternity category, what will be your final thought?”
A winsome set of last words, if there ever was one. On my deathbed, I know I’ll have hope, and I know I’ll have fear. I also want the levity I read in Ehrman’s response.
If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I would tell you that I wasted hours of my workday trawling the Internet for religious certainty.
What prompted it was, I think, my wanting to test the strength of the Intelligent Design argument after reading some of Eric Metaxas’ attempt to cast all of existence as a miracle in Miracles, his popular volume which my mother sent me late last year when she first heard about my doubts. What kept me at it for what must have easily accumulated to half the workday was…I’m not sure what: An inner drive for certainty and stable identity? A proud wish to test my faith, which was renewed through the Christmas holiday at my mom’s house? A masochistic streak?
Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t love. My willful diversion today was unloving to my colleagues at DiamondBack, our customers, Carla, the kids, our church, and God. Even if atheists are right, exposing myself to their thinking in this way, via this medium, does nothing but enervate me. Even if I end up an atheist myself, I’m not going to end up an atheist via a failure to love and a squandering of time. Atheism-by-Internet-reading—or faith-by-Internet-reading, for that matter—is on the whole too fast, too shallow, too addictive, too hung up on miracles, too obsessive to be healthy for anyone.
I confessed my sin to Carla. (She had suspected as much based on my spiritlessness. I told her that if her emotional intuition fails her next time, she can always use tea: If I am sitting with a mug of chamomile, it’s a dead giveaway that I’m doubting. I drink it ward off the prospect of anxiety-induced insomnia.) She encouraged me stop seeking absolute certainty for the whole world, and simply make a decision for myself. She gently scolded me for emailing follow-up questions to Krista about her having spoken Mandarin at a meeting in Kelowna when she was 15. We prayed. I confessed that I am powerless by myself to resist the temptation of trawling the Internet like I did today and asked for God’s help. Carla and I experience sweet human connection.
Sweet human connection is one good thing that has come and will come out of this doubt.
“In themselves and rightly used, the basic things of life are sweet and good. What spoils them is our hunger to get more out of them than they can give.”
— Derek Kidner, The Message of Ecclesiastes, hitting the nail on the head about why I need to stop turning to the Internet in a quest for religious certainty. If I don’t watch out, I won’t spoil the Internet; I’ll spoil me!
“Rooted in hatred of the light, our blindness is not exculpatory, but blameworthy. It does not remove our guilt. It is our guilt.”
— John Piper, in a tweet that sits very well with me. I am such a chimera: I love so much of what Piper brings to the table, but hate so much of it, too. I think he’s right about human blindness, but I think he is wrong about it, too. Does the above formulation strike me as true and good merely because it’s what I’m used to, merely because it feels like home? Am I, are we, indeed guilty for not being able to see Him?
After an evening at Happy Valley Brewing with Ethan & Jason, I sent them this:
I couldn’t try
to measure the pleasure
of spending my leisure
with you, whom I treasure.
—
And in case you feel like this brushes too closely to our discussion of the homosexuality, please see the photos of platonic male affection included in the article entitled “Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection” on The Art of Manliness.
“To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then ‘written up’ out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; an he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy [1955]).
He may have missed the potential parallels skeptics would surmise between the news and the Gospel accounts, but nevertheless, it is good to find a kindred spirit in my eschewing of the news.
“A wise enemy will attack you on two fronts: exploit your weaknesses, and undermine confidence in your strength. Don’t be surprised when there is much ‘push back’ against you from all quarters (natural and spiritual) when you set your mind to be authentically who you are in Christ and bless the world by expressing it. Our adversary and Christian religion will tolerate you listening to sermons and singing worship songs, etc. Set your sail to be authentically you in Christ, and war is on.”
I know what’s behind all my doubt-borne anxiety and obsessive, sinful trawling of the Internet in search of God (or not God): It’s a fear of being wrong. And a fear of uncertainty.
Father, I want to reorient the things I do, the things on my list, toward this: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). And toward this one, too: “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14).
I have decided how to deal with my existential doubt about God: Consider myself married to You.
I have several marriages. In order of strength of commitment, I admit that I am married first to Carla and the kids. But right after that comes You. But despite that order, which is the inverse of how I would have ordered it at this time last year, I am privileged to live in a pluralistic culture where it is hard to imagine those two marriages ever coming into conflict. So we might almost consider these marriages functionally tied in importance, if not in their priority.
After that—and this will help with my concentration problems at work—I am also married to my colleagues at DiamondBack. Then to Houserville. These two marriages are more dissoluble without fault.
But the first two, they are not dissoluble. I tell You, O Lord, the same thing I told Carla and she me: I will never divorce You unless someone can prove Your non-existence. Folks may be able to make strong inferential, probabilistic cases that You don’t exist, but they can never disprove it. And there remains enough evidence out there for a reasonable person to make the inferential, probabilistic conclusion that You are.
Can Your existence be deduced or induced with certainty? No. Even the least explainable miracles, such as Vonna Wala’s healing, can be dismissed by appealing to the possibility of future, non-theistic explanations, and even though that may be unwarranted extrapolation and a fallacious argument to the future, such dismissal can carry weight and eliminate theistic certainty. Short of an intense encounter with the metaphysical, which I hope for but don’t count on, I can never return to thinking Your existence is certain.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t live as though it is certain. And that is my plan.
My notes from talking with Dave Palmer about my doubt
It’s about time!
This doesn’t happen quickly. It’s going to be take time.
It’s not gonna help to be impatient.
God is doing something in you that will good fruit will come.
“Though the mills of God grind slowly / Yet they grind exceeding small / Though with patience he stands waiting / With exactness grinds he all“ (Longfellow)
If you ask a believer to focus on God in prayer, the part of their brain responsible for attention and concentration becomes very active. If you ask an atheist to do the same, the characteristic patterns of prayer don’t appear because there’s nothing for the atheist to focus on. Science tells us that the way humans understand God is more a feeling and experience than an idea or set of beliefs. For atheists, the pattern of connections across the brain that create this experience aren’t there. There is no God in their brains. It turns out that some belief in God is vital for people to experience and know God. In some measurable way, you have to leap before you look.
That seems foolish to many people, and I’m one of them. The Bible constantly extolls the virtues of faith and belief in things unseen. I think that reflects an intuitive understanding of what we’ve learned about the neurology of belief in modern times. Many of best things about Christianity only happen after you know God, but God can’t be proven. That’s why faith is extolled as such a virtue.
If my intellectual faith—that is, my confident intellectual assent that Jesus is alive, or even that God exists—dies, I do want to keep what faith I can muster along the Richard-Beck definitions supplied below aligned with Jesus. He will always be a great totem, and this way I can continue to celebrate Him with my family.
Sacramental faith:
A faith with and through the body. This is the faith of the book of James, the faith of obedience. It’s the faith of discipleship, moving one’s body through life the way Jesus moved his body through life. It is the faith of orthopraxy (“right practice”). The first Christians were called followers of “The Way.” This is the faith of the path, what Eastern religions call the dharma.
Doxological faith:
The faith of worship and allegiance. The early Christians confessed that Jesus was Lord, a radical political claim That is, regardless as to whether you believe in the Incarnation or the Resurrection, a Christian confesses that Jesus is Lord, the telos of her ethical and political existence. Doxological faith is the claim that, at the end of the day, the teachings of Jesus are the authority in my life, what monastics call the “rule.” Everyone has to make choices in life, big choices and small choices, and we make those choice in light of some conception of what is “good” or “best.” Doxological faith makes Jesus that criterion.
“If I had to distill it to one issue, I would say it’s that the visible church seems to care more about ideas than people.”
— Derek Webb, in reply to “Is there one thing you see as the biggest issue/blind spot for the church, an area where Christianity is failing to live up to its promise and purpose?” on Rachel Held Evans’ blog
In context, Webb is talking about Christians letting disagreement trump relationships. In true reader-reception form, his offering is broader and more convicting: I care more about having the right ideas than I do about actively loving people. Christianity is less about about having good theology and more about acting like Christ.