Living the Answer Blog

From the moment of the Fall, when the forbidden fruit promised an earlier and easier entrance into bliss, growth, and knowledge, one of Satan’s favorite strategies has been to take some promised good and offer his own version; easier, simpler, and always, in retrospect, somehow diminished and corrupted. The golden calf offered Israel a safer, less demanding God. As Abraham waited for the promised son, Hagar seemed a simple solution to his wife’s infertility. Even Jesus himself was offered a far easier path to dominion if he would only bow before the evil one.

It’s not that “easy” is necessarily or even usually bad; merely that the appeal of the easy is a powerful lure into danger. One of the best ways to draw us off the straight and narrow path is with a shortcut.

I bring this up because this feeling of an easier path to a lesser good is a theme of many of the problems and potential problems in our interactions with modern technology. The whole appeal of technology lies in its ability to make things easier, whether in communication, calculation, learning, shopping, or transportation. Of course, as I said above, easier isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it’s often good, allowing us to be wise stewards of our resources by saving time and money for other uses. (I certainly appreciate being able to type these observations on the keyboard of a handy laptop, rather than pounding away on a typewriter or scribbling with a pen.) With technology as with the rest of life, the danger lies in the appeal of the easier path to draw us away from the better.

Take television, for example. It’s hard to imagine a means of entertainment easier than simply flipping on the TV after a long day–and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But what are we losing when the ease of TV watching makes it our habitual answer to moments of quiet? What about the reading and talking and walking and drawing and dancing and simply watching the fire or the rain or the stars that used to occupy a much more prominent place in our lives? The most dangerous thing about the television is not the programming that flows across the screen, but the fact that the programming flows across a screen that sits comfortably close to the couch.

What television does for leisure, video games do for achievement. For most of human history, a young man driven by the urge to achieve, to overcome obstacles and enjoy the satisfaction of hard-won gains, would have to actually do something. He could start a farm or a business, or a nation; he might lead men into battle, study medicine or the law, or simply carve out a good life for a wife and children in a world where mere everyday life has more than its share of challenges. But regardless of what he did, it would be hard.

Video games changed that dynamic. They offer a truly unprecedented opportunity to feel a real sense of achievement from doing… nothing at all. Increasingly realistic virtual worlds are populated with challenges and dangers tailored to generate a feeling of real struggle and genuine victory, creating a triumphant haze of energy and endorphins to obscure the reality that nothing is actually happening. Watching the guns-blazing trailer for the most recent Call of Duty game, the implicit message of the “There’s a soldier in all of us” slogan is clear: It’s easy to be a hero. As a soft-looking Jonah Hill charges into a hail of gunfire in the video’s finale, expertly wielding rifle, knife, and grenade against oncoming attackers, it’s easy to see why the lure of virtual valor is intoxicating. When we wonder aloud where all the good men have gone, at least part of the answer is simple–they’re busy playing Call of Duty, where, thanks to the marvels of modern computing, it’s easy to be a hero.

Even more than video gaming, perhaps the best examples of the sometimes-deceptive shortcuts offered by technology lie in the field of social media. Television makes leisure easy and video games make achievement easy, but Facebook makes relationships easy. It’s convenient, immediate, organized, and thoroughly controllable; always right there, omnipresent yet unobtrusive, providing a neat little window into our friends’ lives and offering them a window into ours.

In many ways, social networks even manage to convey a sense of greater intimacy than we feel in most face-to-face relationships. Our much-satirized tendency to overshare the mundane details of our lives actually makes perfect sense psychologically: what better indicator is there of the closeness between two people than the extent to which they know the boring minutia of each other’s existence? Nearly everyone knows I’m a teacher. Barely anyone knows how I like my eggs cooked. If I know what you had for breakfast this morning, a part of me smiles with companionable pleasure; and when I “like” your status update letting the world know that your hangnail is feeling better, you know that I really care. Sure, it’s not quite the same as actually seeing you, actually talking to you, but at least it’s something in the midst of a busy day. At least Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch.

But what if staying in touch has become so easy that it’s keeping us apart? What if the very ease of superficial connection dulls the desire for something more? Granted, very few people are going to give up an active, meaningful community life in order to become a hermit with a Facebook account, but in a world where we’re all moving too quickly to just stop and actually know someone else, surely there’s a temptation to sustain our need for human connection and companionship on a fast-food diet of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Every need or desire given to us by God draws us toward some corresponding good. Whether we’re talking about the need for food and water or our hunger for ultimate meaning, mankind was created with a set of desires that match what we most need. The counterintuitive danger posed by technology is that, by too easily fulfilling certain needs on a superficial level, we lose the drive to pursue a deeper good.

But what are we to do about it? Certainly, much technology has eased our lives in entirely unobjectionable ways. (One finds few who rail against the evils of refrigeration, anesthesia, or indoor plumbing.) The answer isn’t to simply reject technology or blame it for failings that ultimately arise from the human heart. Instead, we need a way to accept the good in modern advances without losing anything better in the process.

While that’s a topic far too broad to be adequately considered here, and one which requires different answers for different situations, there is one generally-applicable and foundational principle. This is the rule that the best protection against desire for counterfeit goods is love of the true. Returning to the very beginning of human history, the answer to the serpent’s temptation in the Garden was not a carefully-cultivated distaste for fruit; nor, more seriously, a disdainful attitude toward the wisdom and knowledge which the serpent offered. The only thing that would have saved Adam and Eve was a desire for God so strong that even the genuine good of greater knowledge shone dim in comparison. And when the second Adam rejected Satan’s offers and passed the test which the first had failed, it was by holding fast to the words, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” As creatures created in the image of the God who is love, even false love is too powerful to be defeated by anything but a better love.

How is this relevant to the right use of technology? Simply in this: that our best protection against losing the good in the easy is to so carefully cultivate a love for what is genuinely good that we instinctively recognize and reject its diminution. If we learn to use our time well and to love the good that results, we are relatively inoculated against the danger of TV. If we cultivate a taste for actual work and true achievement, the virtual triumphs of video games will seem so diminished by comparison that we can safely enjoy them for what they are. When we know the joy of true fellowship, Facebook ceases to be an enemy and may even be transformed into a pleasant eddy in the flow of our real relationships. And if we do find ourselves losing something worthwhile in our use of these or other fruits of technology, a healthy love of what is better will make it easier to find a new balance without being drawn away by the lure of the easy.

When I teach about religious relativism, I like to summarize it with a bumper sticker I saw a few years ago. The colorful plastic declared, “God is too big to fit in any one religion.” I tell students that’s very nearly true. History is littered with the crumbling remains of great religions built and abandoned in the face of the realization that human reason, and even human faith, are insufficient to reach into the heavens and know God.

Only insane hubris would deny that the Creator of the universe is far bigger than any religion that human mind or heart could devise. And so we would be condemned to helpless striving under the judgmental stare of a conscience that teaches us guilt but cannot offer us hope, had not the King of kings chosen to reveal himself to man. For even though God is too big to conform to any religion we might build, he fit very neatly within a stable in Bethlehem in the year that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.

We’re told that the intersection between this mundane bit of government accounting and the governorship of a fellow named Quirinius marks the spot in history when God was born. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.’”

“He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”

“Jesus answered and said to him, ‘If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.’”

Every Christmas, we celebrate the moment at which God changed everything, the unthinkable instant when light blazed in the murky half-light of a fallen world. The blast of light from that manger in Bethlehem shines across the decades to a cross upon which hangs a man, and God; throwing into sharp relief the image that sets Christianity apart from any other religion. “And it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live.”

“Hipster” is a hard word to define, but a good approximation might run something like this: “An individual whose life serves as a billboard advertising self-aware distaste for the often crude and sometimes contemptible patterns of modern American life.” Coming largely from the middle and upper classes, the hipster knows well the vulgar, unaware consumerism that characterizes his social strata, and he’s embarrassed by it. He’s defined largely by what he dislikes, and he mostly dislikes the sort of things that ought to be disliked by any decent person. When he joins battle–and hipsterism is a sort of continuous, slow-motion skirmish against conventionality–irony and disinterest are his weapons of choice, as if bourgeoisie sensibilities are too loud to be fought with anything but a shrug.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with the hipster. He is not usually for anything in any definite, discernible way.  Admittedly, he is probably quite fond of certain kinds of music and art. But even here, does he really love Sufjan Stevens for being Sufjan Stevens, or does he love Sufjan Stevens because doing so makes a statement about the sort of person who prefers Justin Bieber? Granted, Sufjan Stevens does in fact make much better music than Justin Bieber ever could–as do many other things, some of which are insects–but it seems a disservice to Sufjan Stevens to love him primarily for not being Justin Bieber. It is all very well to ironically drink PBR and smoke cheap cigarettes, wear skinny jeans, and ride a fixed-gear bike, but to what end, once we get past the surface rejection of mainstream American culture?

If hipsterism were to be accused of a crime, the charge would be disloyalty: disloyalty to good things. In itself, there is no virtue in disliking bad things. Any idiot can do that, and most of them do. In fact, hating all the right things may only make the situation worse. We can all agree we ought to reject consumerism, but there are many versions of not-consumerism that would quickly make us long for the bad old days of yore (see for example any moment in the past 100 years of Russian history). Hatred of Communism gave us McCarthyism, and opposition to interminable war in Vietnam yielded the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. “Anything would be better than this” is never actually true.

Any proper hatred must begin with love if it is to be either healthy or effective. My objection to abortion is not primarily grounded in distaste for the procedure, but in love for human life. (If abortion were outlawed tomorrow, to be replaced by infanticide, it could hardly be called a victory.) I hate socialism, not because I am viscerally opposed to shared ownership of the means of production, but because I rather like people and prefer that we starve as few of them as possible, a goal which socialism is notably inferior at achieving. I reject Islam only because it directs people away from the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Our antipathy must be rooted in love–in a primary loyalty to what is good–if we’re ever going to get anything done. We cannot make progress if we don’t know where we’re going. There must be an ideal to guide, even if it’s an ideal too perfect to be achieved in a year, or a thousand. It wasn’t dislike of slavery that ended the institution; it was belief that all men are created equal. And when the abolition of slavery did not fully achieve that ideal, the push for truly equal rights was led by men who had a dream.

If we aren’t for something, something for which we’re willing to work and fight and cry and dance, then we’re good for nothing. One of the few songs which I actually despise is John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change.” He sings, “Me and all my friends / We’re all misunderstood / They say we stand for nothing and / There’s no way we ever could / Now we see everything that’s going wrong / With the world and those who lead it / We just feel like we don’t have the means / To rise above and beat it / So we keep waiting / Waiting on the world to change / We keep on waiting / Waiting on the world to change.” It might be the hipster anthem (if anthems weren’t such unpleasantly decisive things): He wants you to know that he’s very upset about bad stuff, but as long as that’s clear to everyone, he’s quite content to sit around in skinny jeans drinking PBR, waiting on the world to change. He has no loyalty to anything, so he does nothing.

Every time a hipster puts on an ugly shirt simply because it’s an ugly shirt, every time he gets on his fixed-gear bike and congratulates himself because he’s making a statement, he is changing the world; he’s making it just a little bit worse. He’s beating something with nothing. On the other hand, wearing an outfit simply because you like it, or listening to music simply because it’s good, or riding a bicycle (with a fixed gear or multiple gears or no gears at all) simply because doing so is a delight; none of these will accomplish very much in themselves, but they do have this one, essential virtue: they are for something. And if you only love it long enough, you can beat anything with something.

It’s Thanksgiving, so you’ve probably been thinking more than usual about the things you have to be thankful for. Most of our lists will have roughly the same shape: gratitude for life and salvation, for friends and family, for work and leisure time, for troubles lifted and prayers answered. We’ll laugh and nod as we consider all the good that we and others have received, and we’ll feel a bit guilty for failing to be as grateful as we ought during the rest of the year, when we don’t have a national holiday to help us remember, so we’ll resolve to be more aware of our blessings in the coming year. Even if some troubles weren’t lifted and some prayers went unanswered, we’ll try to focus on the good and give thanks for what we’ve been given. Yet in all this thanksgiving, we may well forget to give thanks for nothing.

Nothing is a gift we’ve all received at one time or another. It came to John the Baptist after he was arrested by Herod. The one of whom Jesus said, “among those born of women there is no one greater” lay in prison for months, stolen from his wilderness of river and desert to decay in a hole in the ground. He sent to the Messiah, the one of whom he’d prophesied, the one whom he’d baptized, and his only answer was “blessed is he who does not take offense at Me.” Nothing.

It came to King Saul as he awaited the arrival of Samuel to offer sacrifices and implore the aid of God against the assembled Philistine army. The king waited for seven days, past the time when the prophet should have arrived, while all the people trembled and “hid themselves in caves, in thickets, in cliffs, in cellars, and in pits.” One pictures the young king crying out to heaven, begging the Lord to send the only one who could intercede between God and man. And he received nothing.

Centuries earlier, God came to Abraham after years of homeless wandering in the land of Canaan and promised him a son. And then gave him… nothing. We can imagine Abraham and Sara’s initial excitement fading into grim hope, turning at last into something near desperation as the heavens remained silent for two decades, punctuated midway through with the sort of frantic mistake that comes when it seems that God needs our help in carrying out his will, as Abraham turned to his wife’s maid in an attempt to make something out of nothing.

We’ve all received nothing, or will; nothing, when it seems so clear that what we desire is right and good–just a job, or a spouse, or rest after trouble, or healing for a loved one. Nothing, when it seems the very core of us has been torn out, when we’ve clung to the promises of God’s faithfulness and goodness so hard it seems our fingers must splinter and bleed; and we wish they would bleed and perhaps finally attract the pity of heaven.

In his darkest, loneliest hour, Job cried in despair, “Have I sinned? What have I done to You, O watcher of men?” (Job 7:20). He feels the hopelessness of petitioning God for mercy from God. “Were He to snatch away, who could restrain Him? Who could say to Him, ‘What are you doing?’ For though I were right, I could not answer; I would have to implore the mercy of my judge. If I called and He answered me, I could not believe that He was listening to my voice” (9:12, 15-16).

It is God’s silence which hurts Job the most. “Call, and I will answer; or let me speak, then reply to me… Why do You hide your face?” (13:22, 24a). He cries, “Oh that a man might plead with God as a man with his neighbor!” (16:21). It is the lack of explanation, the lack of context, that makes Job’s suffering even harder to bear. “Have I sinned? What have I done to You, O watcher of men?”

Yet God was listening, and he did hear Job’s cries. And so, eventually, he appears and… doesn’t answer the question at all. He does not plead his case. He does not explain. He simply appears “out of the whirlwind” and challenges Job: “Gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct Me!” As G.K. Chesterton writes, “God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them.” Yet, oddly, “Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man… Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one, and semi-accidental suggestions, like light seen for an instant through the cracks of a closed door. It would be difficult to praise too highly, in a purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and ease with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in other connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that He was letting them out. For instance, there is that famous passage where Jehovah with devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy. One cannot help feeling, even upon this meagre information, that they must have had something to shout about. Or again, when God is speaking of snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical cosmos, He speaks of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of battle–a hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last overthrown.”

One might distill God’s answer to Job into two short words: I Am. And apparently it was enough. The man who not long before had wished, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come to His seat! I would present my case before Him and fill my mouth with arguments,” (23:3-4), now humbly declares, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;  but now my eye sees You; therefore I retract,  and I repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6). And then, almost as an afterthought, the account ends with the restoration of all Job had lost. An afterthought, because Job had met God.

Sometimes we see God best when there is nothing in the background.

No promise, no hope, can make heaven’s silence easy to bear. Yet we can be assured of this: that when the One who set worlds in motion, who created men out of dust, who plunged into a rebel world to redeem a lost race; that when that One does nothing, there is a reason. We may not know why, but we know Who. And even heaven’s silence is not without a whisper of hope. “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”

So let us thank God, even when he gives us nothing, remembering that joy comes in the morning. It may be a long night, but it will not be forever. And even the night is a gift, though a hard one, for in it we may see God, if only we cling to the One who, for our sake, came and hung upon a cross; who in incomprehensible agony of soul cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” and heard… nothing.

Every so often someone writes an article about the plight of singles in America. It seems everyone wants to be married; they just don’t want to be married to anyone they know. It’s interesting to hear the issue discussed in both Christian and secular circles. While the specific diagnoses and proposed solutions differ, there does seem to be general agreement that an unprecedented number of singles in their 20′s and 30′s would like to be getting married but, for one reason or another, aren’t.

Of course, there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but one root cause that’s often mentioned is the never-ending quest to find The One: the perfect match, the one who completes you like two strands of music that run together in a perfect harmony. I’m male, so I picture it in geometrical terms: two equations so perfectly matched that their graphs will run together, no matter how far the line extends. (What did guys do for pickup lines before Euclid?) On the most popular dating websites, eager members fill out batteries of questions that dwarf most psychological tests, all carefully analyzed by computer algorithms to find your perfect match! We’re so committed to finding the right person that we demand no less than Google as our Yenta.

My point here is not to argue that we ought to swing to the other extreme and immediately dive into marriage with the nearest breathing organism that loves Jesus and has human DNA and a complementary pair of X or Y chromosomes. Nor is it to suggest exactly what balance should be struck between being too picky on the one hand, and being discerning and careful in our choice of the person with whom we pledge to spend the rest of our lives, on the other. If we stipulate, however, at least that it seems American culture in general has swung too far in the direction of “overly picky,” I wonder to what extent such a tendency is generated or reinforced by a lack of confidence in our ability to make marriage work.

If I’m buying a vehicle to take with me to a desert island and I have none of the mechanical knowledge necessary to maintain or fix it, it suddenly becomes tremendously important that I buy one that will never break down. If I take marriage seriously, and really mean it when I say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part,” but simultaneously realize that on a very basic level I truly don’t know how to maintain or fix the life-long relationship I’m embarking upon, I’d better find the girl who’s such a perfect fit that my marriage will never break down. If those two lines on the graph start to diverge; if the tune falls out of harmony, and I don’t know what to do, that’s it. It’s over.

And so we continue our dogged hunt for something that does not exist, unwilling to accept the truth that no human hands can draw two perfect graphs or play a ceaseless harmony without error. Cinematic romances end with the ride off into the sunset because even the most brilliant screenwriter would struggle to maintain the alchemic fiction that promises lifelong happiness to those who can just find the right ingredients.

In reality, of course, the most important moment for securing the health of any marriage is this one, not some past point when the lucky pair each found their soulmate in the other. We must learn to bend the graphs, to blend the parts into harmony; to become soulmates more and more. If that knowledge has slipped from our cultural store, though–if we are no longer confident in our ability to make marriage work–then it’s not hard to understand those young singles who are reluctant to accept what must appear to be a gamble with nearly impossible odds.

Simeon and Levi are brothers;
Their swords are implements of violence.
Let my soul not enter into their council;
Let not my glory be united with their assembly;
Because in their anger they slew men,
And in their self-will they lamed oxen.
Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce;
And their wrath, for it is cruel.
I will disperse them in Jacob,
And scatter them in Israel. (Genesis 49:5-7)

With these words, Jacob cursed his sons for their treacherous assault on the Canaanite city of Shechem in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. When the rapist, Shechem, prince of the city, requested her hand in marriage, Levi and Simeon insisted that all inhabitants of Shechem must first be circumcised. Convinced, the citizens of Shechem submitted to the procedure and then, “on the third day, when they were in pain… two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword and came upon the city unawares, and killed every male” (Genesis 34).

And Jacob cursed Simeon and Levi for their wrath, for it was cruel.

It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf which they had made and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it. [...]

Now when Moses saw that the people were out of control—for Aaron had let them get out of control to be a derision among their enemies—then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered together to him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh, and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor.’” So the sons of Levi did as Moses instructed, and about three thousand men of the people fell that day. Then Moses said, “Dedicate yourselves today to the Lord—for every man has been against his son and against his brother—in order that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.” (Exodus 32:19-20, 25-29)

And God blessed Levi for their wrath, for it was righteous.

It appears the Levites were a people prone to wrath. The two major scenes in which Levi (as a man and then as a tribe) plays a starring role both feature massacres in response to evil. In both situations, Levi takes the initiative, stepping forward from the crowd–from among his brothers to avenge their sister, from among the other tribes to avenge their God–to deal violence as punishment for heinous wrongdoing. Not everyone has the courage, the strength, and the fierceness for such a role. In fact, most don’t. Levi did.

In Genesis, Levi earns a curse by responding to evil with an unjust and cruel violence, a violence few others would have dared. In Exodus, Levi’s curse is transformed to blessing by responding to evil with a righteous, obedient violence, a violence few others would have dared. Both the sin and the resulting curse, and the virtue and the resulting blessing, were the fruit of a unique personality trait: a willingness, even an inclination, to respond to evil with violence–a trait which was in itself neither virtuous nor vicious. When driven by sinful human motivations, it turned to sin. When submitted to divine authority, it turned to righteousness.

The story of Levi reminded me of Dr. Wendy Mogel’s observation in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,

I begin by telling these audiences, “Think of your child’s worst trait. The little habit or attitude that really gets on your nerves. Or bring the medium-sized habit that your child’s teacher keeps bringing up at parent conferences. Or the really big one that wakes you up at three in the morning with frightening visions of your little guy all grown up and living alone in an apartment in West Hollywood, plotting a shooting spree at the post office…

Good. Now you’re one step of ahead of where you were a moment ago, because now you know your child’s greatest strength. It’s hidden in his worst quality, just waiting to be let out.”

Dr. Mogel’s point is that a child’s strongest traits provide the raw material for his or her greatest virtues–if properly tended. The parent’s job is to patiently work to transform bossiness into leadership, recklessness into courage, nosiness into concern for others, hyperactivity into creativity, talkativeness into eloquence, quietness into a listening ear. Of course, the talkative child also needs to learn to be quiet when appropriate, the quiet child needs encouragement to speak up at the right time, and so on, but wise parents learn the shape of their child’s soul and work with the grain, not against it. The answer to a Levi’s strength is not to hope for atrophy, but to teach him to put on the full armor of God before going to war.

So it is for each of us. No matter our condition, all we can do at any given moment is take our whole selves and lay them before the Father, ready at that moment to be used in whatever way He sees fit. Like Levi, our only concern is that, when the call is raised “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me,” we come, yielding whatever may be in us to be used by the One who does all things well. Whatever past sin might have flowed from a particular facet of our personality, only one question matters now: Whose is it? So long as it is utterly submitted to God, to be used, cultivated, changed, or even destroyed, as He sees fit, no evil can result; and perhaps great good, unexpected good, a blessing bestowed in place of a curse.

“I believe everything I believe is true”: It’s an equivocal assertion, obviously true in one sense while obviously foolish and hubristic in another. While talking it over with a group of students, I was struck by the way in which unraveling the two possible meanings of this statement brings us to the heart of the modern allergy to intellectual confidence, while throwing light on a common struggle within the church over what it means to be sure of our doctrine.

If by, “I believe everything I believe is true,” I merely mean that, given any individual belief which I hold at a particular moment, at that moment I believe that particular belief to be true and all other, contradictory beliefs therefore false, the proposition goes beyond truth to settle in the realm of the painfully obvious. When I say that I believe a particular proposition, if I do not mean that I think that proposition is in fact true and not false, then what exactly is the meaning of “believe” at all?

When I say, “I believe that guy is untrustworthy,” if I do not mean that I am convinced of the untrustworthiness of the presumably-duplicitous male in question, any and all known evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, then what else can I mean? Of course, this conviction may be only momentary. My declaration may elicit such a flood of testimony in defense of the character of the hypothetical object of our consideration that my opinion promptly changes and I am able to confidently declare, “I believe that guy is trustworthy.” But in both cases, for as long as I hold the particular belief, I believe it is true and all contradictory beliefs false. In this sense, the statement that “I believe everything I believe is true” is simply a tautology.

On the other hand, if we widen our focus from microscopic to telescopic, pulling back from our consideration of individual beliefs to look instead at the entire shifting and interconnected mass that makes up our belief system, the proposition that “I believe everything I believe is true” takes on a very different meaning. If I believe that I have achieved the Cartesian ideal of an epistemic structure so perfectly constructed as to ensure that every single component belief is in fact true, I am guilty of arrogance bordering on insanity. Obviously, I don’t know where I might be wrong (if I knew the particular belief which was wrong it would be much simpler, since the very act of acknowledging the falseness of a belief sends the prior error up in flames along with the belief itself), but surely even the most conservative gambler would be willing to stake all he had on the proposition that any given individual is wrong about something?

So we have an apparent contradiction: Viewed individually, it is insane to deny the truth of a particular belief, but, viewed collectively, it is insane to affirm the truth all of one’s beliefs.

This paradox leads to two common errors. The first is the error of the man who is so committed to avoiding the folly of universal certainty that he flies off in the other direction and winds up denying that he even believes that what he believes is true. His humility becomes nonsense and ends in incoherence (see “Higher Education, Postmodern”). The second error is that of the reactionary (often Christian) who is so eager to avoid the first error that he affirms–in fact if not in theory–the absolute truth of every iota of his belief system, resolutely ignoring the very real possibility that he might truly be wrong even about something of which he is wholly convinced. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

As is its habit, Christianity doctrine manages to embrace the paradox without tumbling off into either extreme. In the Christian model of reality we discover a solid substratum of absolute, objective truth, imperfectly known by finite and fallen men. The late Richard Rorty had a point when he spoke of a “God’s-eye view,” and pointed out that men don’t have one. Of course, Rorty went too far in the other direction and concluded that it is therefore pointless to even pursue objective truth (a proposition which he proceeded to defend as actually true, thus validating Hume’s reluctant observation that it is “impossible for [a man] to persevere in total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours”), but such a dispirited conclusion does not necessarily follow.

If reality is indeed designed, created, and governed by the Logos of which our intellect is a tiny droplet, it follows that we can know real truth, though the limitation of our minds and the corruption of the Fall should make us humble about asserting with certainty that we do know real truth. Even that which is explicitly revealed by our Creator may be imperfectly understood, as, for example, the Messianic prophecies were for hundreds of years. Like an apprentice painter copying the master’s work, we should always try for as much doctrinal accuracy as possible, and we can and should critique the work of other apprentices (while welcoming their critique of our own efforts), but the standard for such critique is the original artwork, not our copy. Even when our version appears to accurately represent the true model, we must remember that our eye is not sufficiently keen, nor our hand sufficiently skilled, to ensure that all the beauty and nuance of the master’s work is reflected in our own model. “For now we see in a mirror dimly… now I know in part.”

Thus Christian humility embraces the burly confidence that belief may be true, alongside the clear-eyed recognition that a belief may be false. The beliefs which I hold about worship style, church government, baptism, or predestination, I believe are true. And if you disagree, I believe you’re wrong (unless and until you convince me otherwise). But I must disagree with an awareness that we both see through a mirror dimly; that we both squint at a reality imperfectly understood, and neither of us has the right to claim perfect certainty until that day when we shall see face to face, knowing fully just as we also have been fully known.

It is a commonplace among conservative evangelicals to bemoan the state of the church at large—and certainly there is much to criticize: failures of evangelism and discipleship, enthusiasm for compromise (except on unimportant issues), doctrinal error, lack of commitment, lack of faith, lack of love. With so many easy targets, it is easy to dwell on the problems and failings, allowing them to consume our focus and feed that grimly enthusiastic resignation that is always waiting for news of trouble so it can shuffle out to declare, “But of course.”

While introspection and self-critique are certainly important within the body of Christ, it’s easy for our concerns to become morbid and counterproductive. We have a tendency to act as if folly, selfishness, and lukewarmness have only just now erupted within the church, placing us at a unique disadvantage never before faced by our spiritual ancestors. Surely the purer church of past generations did not have to deal with dishonest and selfish members (Acts 5:1-11), holier-than-thou attitudes (Acts 11:2-3), legalism (Acts 15:1), personality conflicts (Acts 15:36-39), petty quarreling and disunity (I Cor 1:11-12, 6:1-8), spiritual immaturity (I Cor 3:1-4), acceptance of blatant immorality (I Cor 5:1), dishonor of the Lord’s table (I Cor 11:17-22), misuse of spiritual gifts (I Cor 14:21-23), false teachers (II Cor 11:13, II Pet 2), backsliding and heresy (Gal 1:6-9), hypocrisy by church leaders (Gal 2:11-14), betrayal by fellow believers (II Tim 4:14-16), disproportionate respect for worldly wealth (James 2:1-4), or faith without fruit (James 2:14-20). And all that during the period when believers were actually taught by the apostles themselves!

But, of course, once the early church matured we were able to move on to a higher plane of holiness during the next millennium, where we could discuss questions like whether Jesus was really God, whether he was really human, whether the path to holiness lies in renunciation of all connection with the world, whether we should torture folks over theological disagreements, and whether salvation can be purchased through works or good, hard cash. But fortunately the common folk, at least, were known for their theological maturity and wisdom, since hearing the Scriptures read in a language no one actually understands is well-regarded as an effective means of growth and sanctification.

Finally, of course, the Reformers genuinely did usher in a period of greater spiritual zeal and growth… along with bitter internecine backbiting and conflict, plus some of the most murderous wars central Europe had ever seen. After about a hundred years, as much of the new Protestant church grew increasingly dead and corrupt, the Pilgrims and Puritans departed to the New World to establish a new, more God-centered life for themselves. And, within a generation or two, they had developed a “vigorous popular culture exhibiting the following characteristics: high mobility of adolescents and young adults, a popular culture centered on alehouses rather than church and relative freedom from parental control,” according to Else Hambleton in Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth Century Essex County, Massachusetts. We remember the First and Second Great Awakenings but forget what it was that the early American church required awakening from.

My point in all of this is not that we should throw up our hands and declare the fight a lost cause. A thousand times no! Quite the contrary. The fight is a won cause; a cause that has been won by the grace of God during every year of every century through which the fallen, foolish, feeble creatures that make up the church have stumbled. We serve the God who declares, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (II Cor 12:9). Surely when God set about recruiting “the poor and crippled and blind and lame” from “the streets and lanes of the city… the highways and along the hedges,” he anticipated that the results might be a motley crew? Are we really surprised that the membership of an organization that is only open to sinners consists largely of sinners?

Of course, we ought never be content with the present state of the church, any more than we can ever be content with the present state of our own sanctification; certainly God is never content with either. Heaven forbid that we rest comfortably, as individuals or as a body, anywhere short of the mark set by Jesus’ command, “Be ye perfect.” The Corinthians needed Paul’s vigorous rebuke, as did the Galatians, as did Peter. The danger lies not in seeing the failings of the church, but in failing to see anything else.

What we’re looking at, what we’re focusing on, matters a great deal. Speaking of his own process of sanctification, Paul declared, “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:13-14). As individual Christians, we are not to focus on what we were or were not. We are not to focus on what other people are or are not. We are only to focus on God: our goal, our pearl of great price, the author and finisher of our salvation.

Similarly, it is hard to see the value in squinting back over our shoulder to compare the state of our fellow believers today with those who came before. “Looking behind, we press on toward the goal of our idealized image of what the church was, in better days.” Because surely the lame man is best served by worrying whether he can hobble as fast as his fellow cripples, rather than casting himself at the feet of the One who can heal and crying, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Should we learn from the past? Certainly. Should we appreciate our history? Absolutely. But we must carefully avoid the self-pitying illusion that our generation is somehow uniquely handicapped with a worldly church, prone to theological error and lukewarm conviction. Doubtless the church has been stronger at times; doubtless also, weaker. But ultimately, that’s a “God’s-eye view” question which is not our concern.

For the church, as for the individual, there are really only two facts that matter: what we are right now, and what God is. It doesn’t matter where we came from or what lies behind, good or bad; all that matters is fixing our eyes on him and being transformed by him, pressing onward toward the goal. Folly and weakness and sin will challenge us as we walk together toward that goal, just as they have challenged Christians of every age, and ultimately our only hope of overcoming is to fix our gaze on our Savior; just as it was for Christians of every age.

God uses faith “to shake us out of our logical thinking,” declared the pastor at a local church I visited a few weeks ago. I recently heard another pastor explain that we can only grow in our faith if we stop listening to our reason: either we listen to our reason or we listen to God.

I think any Christian can relate to the basic idea being expressed here. Faith often demands of us things that do not “make sense” in the colloquial sense of the phrase. Military strategists may disagree about the best tactics for an outnumbered insurgency with limited weaponry battling an overwhelming occupying force, but as a general rule they would agree that dismissing 98.7 percent of your manpower is not a brilliant first step; so of course that’s exactly what God told Gideon to do. Building a floating castle in a land without rain makes little sense, and marching in circles tooting horns is an unconventional approach for capturing your region’s most powerful city. But that’s exactly what God commanded.

So it is certainly accurate to say that faith rarely “makes sense” in human terms. But if we go beyond this point to conclude that faith is illogical or somehow opposed to reason, we end up in an error with potentially serious consequences.

Because, indeed, faith is at its core entirely logical. The logic of faith is deductive, and begins with a simple premise: God is faithful. When Abraham sacrificed Isaac, it was an entirely logical thing to do. He knew God. God had promised, “In Isaac your descendants shall be called,” so “He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead” and prepared to sacrifice his son. The whole thing reads rather like a syllogism: If God allows Isaac to be destroyed, He will have broken His word. God cannot break His word. So God will not allow Isaac to be destroyed, all suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding. If, instead, Abraham had merely woken up one morning and decided it would please God if he set out to kill his son, that would have been decidedly illogical. And that would not have been faith.

Why did Gideon dismiss all but 300 men? Why did Noah build the arc? Why did Joshua march around Jericho? Because God told them to do so, and they knew that God is faithful. Had any of them acted without the assurance of God’s command and of His faithfulness, that would not have been logical. And that would not have been faith.

Yet logic is not the heart of faith. If it was, then a purely rational, emotionless artificial intelligence of the sort sometimes imagined by science fiction would be an exemplar of faith, when in fact such a creature could never actually know faith. It is interesting that faith is never mentioned in connection with angels, beings to which the Church has long attributed pure reason. It would seem that faith is irrelevant to a creature which sees things as they truly are, for whom no contrary passion or momentary appearance can shake the knowledge and assurance of the I Am. For faith is born out of a limited perspective; it grows out of the words “all suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The writer of Hebrews refers to “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We may take it as a given that these “things” do in fact exist; otherwise we would be defining madness rather than faith. We may even take it as a given that those of whom faith is expected have good reason to believe in the existence of these things. But knowing, for the queer mixture of dust and spirit which is a human being, is not always enough.

Numbers 14 records God’s appearance to the Israelites at the height of their panic over the strength of the country they had been commanded to subdue. They were literally about to stone Joshua and Caleb for urging the people to trust in God and carry on, when “the glory of the Lord appeared in the tent of meeting to all the sons of Israel,” declaring himself ready to dispossess and destroy them. (It it worth noting that theophanies are rarely comfortable. This one perhaps even less so than most.) God’s complaint against the Israelites was simple: “How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have performed in their midst?” (emphasis added). These were the same people who had just witnessed a series of ten plagues that would resound through Middle Eastern history for centuries (I Samuel 4:8), who had just watched a sea open up before them and then return to consume the world’s mightiest military in their wake, and they were completely unmanned by a walled city full of unusually tall people.

A similar charge underscores Jesus’ question in Matthew 8 when he asks his panic-stricken disciples, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” as he calms the stormy sea. These were men who had ample reason to trust in Him. Without even leaving Matthew 8, we see Jesus cleanse a leper, heal a Roman centurion’s paralyzed servant, and restore Peter’s mother-in-law’s health. And then he gets into a boat, the wind blows, and his disciples straightway forget all this and are terrified by a sea full of unusually tall waves.

We might laugh at the obviousness of the error, were it not for an uncomfortable awareness of how easily our own attention is drawn away from “things not seen” by unusually tall things of one sort or another. We, like Abraham, Gideon, Noah, Joshua, the Israelites, and the disciples, have every reason to believe that God is “able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” But all we can see is the fact that things aren’t working out, or it’s taking too long (Father Time is remarkably tall sometimes), or the task is too big for us or will hurt too much. And we forget what we know, that God is faithful. Faith is nothing if not logical, but faith is far more than logic. True faith is found in holding fast to things unseen, clinging to what is real even when the truth feels far less substantial than the tall and dancing shadows that surround us.

Commenting on the process of inspiration by which the Bible came together, C.S. Lewis writes in Reflections on the Psalms,

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table…

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given to us in that cut-and-dried, food-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wisecrack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject.” If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam…

Since this is what God has done, this, we must conclude, was best. It may be that what we should have liked would have been fatal to us if granted. It may be indispensable that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness (to our systematising intellect) should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.

Accepting as a premise this view of the “intentional elusiveness” of much scriptural teaching, it is worth considering how it affects the Christian walk, and in particular our relationships within the Church. As is often the case, we seem to have a tendency to slip away into one of two opposing errors. On the one hand, a right and praiseworthy desire to find out the hidden things of God, to learn His ways, discover His truth, and provide guidance for His flock, leads us to create systems out of the unsystematized, striving as best we can to reflect the Truth in our doctrine. And thanks be to God for those teachers who “feed the sheep” in this way. The danger comes, however, when we easily and unconsciously draw the authority of the Word up into the human constructs which it nourishes; when we forget (in practice, if not in theory) that disagreeing with us is not the same as disagreeing with God.

And so we fight to the death over questions of doctrine upon which reasonable people may reasonably disagree. Is there a difference between baptism by immersion, baptism by pouring, and baptism by sprinkling? Yes. Is it possible that one method is preferable to another? Certainly; in fact, I would make that argument. Can I prove it from Scripture, beyond reasonable disagreement? No. And neither can you or any other Christian. But this now brings us to our first error’s opposite.

Having seen the divisiveness and sin that have followed what one imagines to have been roughly one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-odd years of still-unresolved doctrinal disputes, it is tempting to give up any attempt at systematization or orthodoxy as hopeless and even harmful. If Scripture intentionally does not provide the objective black-and-white schema we would need in order to formulate final answers for so many theological concerns, why even attempt an answer to insoluble questions?

The first and most obvious answer to this objection is found in Christ’s words to Peter immediately before His ascension: “Tend My sheep.” Why is it important to search out (begging divine assistance for our own flickering reason) the principles and truths concealed within Scripture’s intentional elusiveness? “Tend My sheep.”

Returning to the question of baptism as an example, if there is in fact a form of baptism which is more in keeping with the purpose and significance of the act, then it follows that the Church benefits and God is glorified when his people conform more nearly to His ultimate design. If there are ways of worshiping, praying, organizing a church, caring for the poor, engaging the world, or structuring the family which better conform to God’s nature and will, what a poor shepherd he would be who didn’t attempt, to the best of his ability and relying on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to discover those truths in the light of Scripture.

Jesus Himself did not condemn the master-systematizers of His day, the Pharisees, for attempting to extrapolate rules of behavior from the Bible. Instead, He criticized them for failing to reach the right conclusions, and He offered a better understanding of the principles to be drawn from Old Testament teachings (e.g. Matthew 12:1-7, 12:10-13, 19:4-9, 22:29-32). The Pharisees’ error lay not in studying the patterns of revelation in an attempt to sketch the truth behind, but in becoming so caught up in their own rough sketches that their eyes strayed from the truth they were attempting to approximate.

But the Pharisees return us full circle to be reminded of the danger of our first error, for what Christian has not at one time or another been reminded of his close spiritual kinship to that group of Hebrew theologians whose name has become a shorthand for blinkered legalism? History and our own experience show how quickly we conflate our rules with His, demanding that our brothers bow down and worship before the images we have constructed upon His altar. If love of God and love of His people demand that we search out the elusive truths within His revelation, how can we best avoid the attendant dangers?

The first step, of course, is to beg Him for humility. To pray that our motivation would always and only be love, for the truth we pursue and for the fellow-searchers with whom we seek it. To cultivate an awareness of the distinction between His truth and our extrapolations upon the basis of His truth. To remember that even the most indubitable premise cannot guarantee the truth of a conclusion on the other end of a chain of human reasoning. And to remember that those who doubt our doctrine but love our God are guilty of, at worst, mere misunderstanding, and may only be guilty of arriving first at a truth which we have yet to see.

Beyond this point, however, it is worth returning to Lewis’ final paragraph above, in which he guesses at the reason why we might have received the strange gift of so many dim and elusive truths, “that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness (to our systematising intellect) should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.”

How are we to achieve the right balance between a love of the truth on the one hand and a humble recognition of our own fallibility on the other? How are we to learn, to instruct, and to avoid error as much as is possible for imperfect human creatures? By so “steeping” ourselves in the Word that our very being is, both consciously and unconsciously, shaped into conformity with the One Who we begin to know as we know ourselves. We must absorb, and absorption is a gradual process. To see is not necessarily to know: Many skilled artists have studied and beautifully reproduced Raphael’s paintings, but only his greatest pupil was able to complete his Transfiguration so that one cannot tell where Raphael’s work ended and Giulio Romano’s began.

For of course the ultimate goal is not merely to know the truth, but to know the Truth. If much of Christian doctrine is given to us as a puzzle in this life, we might find a hint of explanation in watching a child’s total absorption in putting the jigsaw pieces together and watching a picture emerge. We may have been given a puzzle, but it is a puzzle the ultimate purpose of which is to show us the nature of the puzzle-maker, and which, like a sort of reverse mirror, impresses His likeness upon us the longer we gaze into it.