What if I Can’t Believe?

28 05 2012

A few years ago, The Washington Post ran an interview with evangelical mega-church pastor Rick Warren where Warren was asked the following question: “How come some people ‘get’ to believe and others do not? ” Why does God “allow” some, like Rick Warren, to believe but not others? After all, many people would really like to believe—perhaps they would like the comfort provided by religion but for whatever reason just can’t bring themselves to do so.  What if we just can’t believe?

In response, Warren says a few things about how the Bible promises that who seek God will find him, but he doesn’t challenge the root assumption of the question: God’s primary interest is that we set aside our rational objections and “believe in him.”

I think that most people who are honest about their belief or disbelief in God would admit that they are pulled in both directions at different points in their lives (or even at different points of the day!). There are times when God’s existence seems self-evident and there are times when it seems utterly impossible.  Frederick Buechner has memorably stated that “there is doubt hard on the heels of every faith, fear hard on the heels of every hope”; I would say that the opposite is also true—that the persistence of hope hounds even the most hardened skeptic. Belief and unbelief are both plausible ways of “reading” the ambiguous world we live in.

So what do we do? Just passively accept whichever way we happen to be inclined and not give the matter another thought? Try to “force” ourselves to believe or attempt to perform the necessary exercises to convince God to gift us with this ability? Or might we perhaps use the ambiguity which makes the matter so difficult to consider a different understanding of what God might be after.

What if God’s primary interest wasn’t in getting us to “believe” certain facts about the cosmos? What if he was willing to take whatever faith we could muster and use it in the promotion of his intentions for the world? What if God has created the world in such a way that living authentically human lives involves things like trust, commitment, uncertainty, and risk; what if part of what God is after is a recognition of our dependent and creaturely status and a willingness to accept and live within the parameters (cognitive and otherwise) that this entails?

The seventeenth century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal is mostly known for his famous “wager” where he tells the skeptic, in a sense, that he ought to “bet “on the existence of God because the potential gains far outweigh the potential losses of choosing incorrectly.  In the same passage from Pensées that contains “the wager,” Pascal addresses a variation of the question posed to Rick Warren above: “What if I just can’t believe?” Pascal’s answer (very loosely paraphrased) goes like this: live as if it were true and see what happens. Rather than thinking yourself into belief, try living yourself into it? If loving (or even believing in) God is difficult at the moment, start with loving your neighbour.

I don’t think that the ultimate standard by which God will judge us is the degree of certainty about his existence that we manage to conjure up before we die. I cannot imagine God asking, on judgment day, “did you manage to preserve your belief in me, despite living in a world where my existence wasn’t always obvious?” I can imagine him asking: “Did you act according to what light you were given? Did you seek me with your entire being? Did you refuse to let pride and fear overcome hope in the possibility of a future of justice and peace? Did you nourish and make the most of what faith you had or complain that it wasn’t stronger?”

Whatever might be said about these questions, they at least seem to avoid the implication that human beings are little more than proposition affirmers/deniers. At the end of the day, nobody really benefits from a bunch of people “believing” in God if “belief” is understood as something like “cognitive acceptance of the existence of a supernatural being.” It’s hard to imagine how God benefits from a bunch of people nodding their heads when asked “do you believe in God?” just as it’s hard to imagine how it changes much for human beings.

But if God has intentions for the world that go beyond individual human brains and what they find rationally plausible, and if the realization of these intentions depends, in part, on what we do not just what we think, then maybe we ought to expect a deep and indissoluble connection between beliefs and behaviour. Perhaps if we busy ourselves with doing what we’re reasonably sure God wants us to do, the “belief” in him that we struggle to maintain or discover may be closer than we think.

Ryan Dueck


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Making Our Mark

7 05 2012

“If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.”  So said German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer around a century and a half ago in The World as Will and Representation, and it is a sentiment that would be echoed by many today, no doubt.  The reality and inevitability of death haunts our steps as human beings, regardless of whether we claim to be religious or not.   Every worldview must somehow come to terms with death.

One such attempt is seen in an article by Richard Handler that deals with the subject of death from an atheistic perspective.  The article is focused on atheist author and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom who, while acknowledging the fear and despair that accompany our peculiar ability as a species to foresee our own deaths, argues that the concept of “rippling” is a way of ameliorating these fears:

Rippling refers to the fact that each us creates—often without conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations…. [Y]ou can leave behind “something from your life experience, some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes onto others, known or unknown.” The key here is human connection, which touches other lives in secret and untold ways.

There is obviously a measure of truth to this. The kinds of people we are have lasting influences on those around us. We leave a mark. The problem is, that while we might prefer that those elements of who we are that “ripple” out would be positive, life-affirming things, often the marks we leave can be rather ugly ones. Even the most morally upright among us will leave, at best, a mixed legacy. The ripples that go out from our lives have the ability to affect both for good and for ill.

Handler comes close to noticing the problem:

What about those whose lives don’t noticeably ripple into a loving community? People do die without friends, alone and miserable, in prisons and cyclones. I have known people who will be missed by absolutely nobody. What rippling effect do they have?

His answer? While acknowledging that “the idea of rippling can be abstract,” in the end the best it seems we can hope for is that we “can gain comfort in thinking that one’s atoms can ripple and dissolve into the universe… All of us ripple in ways we are not even aware of.”

Far from addressing the question, this seems to simply be a restatement of the issue.  Yes, all of us do “ripple” in ways we are not even aware of.  That’s the problem! Human history is the story of both tremendous good and radical evil “rippling” down throughout history, one leaving inspiring traces of what we think we are here for, the other poisoning the lives of individuals and communities indefinitely. The problem isn’t just that some individuals and communities don’t leave much of a “ripple” or don’t “ripple” well; the problem is that some “rippling” is downright toxic.

What we need is not some vague sentiment that the best of who we are will somehow trickle down and have some marginal impact on a few people for a brief flicker of cosmic time. What we need is a vision of the future and of what it means to be a human being that can transcend and is not tied to our own inconsistent, fragile, conflicted, and transient identities and moral performances.

The beginnings of one such vision is articulated by Yale theologian Miroslav Volf who, in The End of Memory, eloquently identifies both the problem with “rippling” as a response to death and the Christian alternative:

We are neither made nor unmade by what we do or by what others do to us. The heart of our identity lies not in our hands, but in God’s hands. We are most properly ourselves because God is in us and we are in God. No doubt, what we or others have inscribed onto our souls and bodies marks us and helps shape who we are. Yet it has no power to define us. God’s love for us, indeed God’s presence in us and our being “caught up beyond” ourselves and being placed “into God” most fundamentally defines us as human beings and as individuals.

The Christian hope is that what is good, and worth preserving from human history will be validated, and rendered permanent in God’s new creation. Correspondingly, that which was false and evil, that which “rippled” down through the millennia damaging and defacing God’s good world, destroying relationships, fostering fear and enmity, and barring the way for people to experience the shalom God intended for them will be judged, healed, and forgotten. It will “ripple” no longer.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Making a Difference, The Heart of Faith

Taking Offense

2 04 2012

 A major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

Interestingly, characters within the Bible exhibit similar sentiments with respect to the self-disclosure of God.  Moses, for example, boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God was on the verge of wiping them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy to his people (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).  Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour.  We see similar themes in the book of Job, where Job protests bluntly and bitterly to God about his suffering.  Although God has some harsh words for Job at the end of the book,  he also declares that Job and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7-10).

In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the confusion and even offense that walking with him can and does cause.

In The Reason for God, Timothy Keller has this to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.  If we take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that our moral conceptions might not represent the last or best word on the question of what God is like.

In one of my university philosophy classes, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could his friend possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity?

His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong, permissible and impermissible might require modification or correction.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves.

But perhaps facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition—even when it comes to our moral intuitions—can be seen as liberating in a strange sort of way. We don’t have to pretend that we love everything in the Bible, nor do we have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world always makes obvious sense and demands nothing but our reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger—even offense—in response to their understanding of his work in the world.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Tough Questions

Grow Up?

2 03 2012

When our kids were in kindergarten, one of the moms from their class approached me on the playground one day for some “religious” advice about how to deal with what was for her son, the traumatic discovery that everybody dies (this discovery came via the film Charlotte’s Web). I fumbled and mumbled my way through some explanation of how we try to teach our kids that God is ultimately going to reclaim and redeem the world of our present experience, validating all that is good and true, and that the Christian conviction is that death is not the end.

My response may or may not have been adequate, but the playground conversation got me thinking about children’s need to make sense of the world and the problem of death.  It reminded of some of the questions that arose when our kids encountered death for the first time. One of their preschool friends was tragically killed in a traffic accident a few years ago, and I remember being surprised by their bewilderment—even outrage—that such a thing as death should occur.

Since then, I’ve wondered about what (if anything) this intuitive child-like sense of the lack of fit between death and the world says about us as human beings. It seems to me that there are, broadly speaking, two approaches one can take to the problem of death and what, if anything, this might say about us and the world.  For me, two books illustrate these approaches well.

The first is articulated by the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his best-seller The God Delusion.  For Dawkins, religious belief in general, and certainly any belief that there is a reality beyond death, is a “mind-virus” which involuntarily infects people through the cultural transmission of “memes.”  Dawkins admits that children seem to be hard-wired to be, if not religious, then at least inclined toward a form of dualism which accepts the existence of non-physical entities and realities, however these beliefs do not point to anything real about the world; rather, they indicate that such beliefs must have provided some adaptive value in our distant evolutionary past. Dawkins is clear that the beliefs that seem to come naturally to children—tooth fairies, Santa Claus, flying spaghetti monsters, heaven, God—represent a stage in human development to be grown out of.

Another perspective on what the natural inclinations of children might point to is set forth in Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought. Neiman, a moral philosopher who directs the Einstein Forum in Postdam, Germany, takes a position quite different from Dawkins. For her, the questions that come naturally to children are more plausibly interpreted as pointing to real existential problems and needs. Neiman argues that the “childish” desire that every question—including the question of what comes after death—ought to have a sufficient answer is at the heart of reason itself:

Children display it more often than adults because they have been disappointed less often. They will continue to ask questions even after hearing the impatient answer—because that’s the way the world is. Most children remain adamant. But why is the world like that, exactly? The only answer that will truly satisfy is this one: Because it’s the best one. We stop asking when everything is as it should be… In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.

There is obviously a striking contrast between the views represented by Dawkins and Neiman regarding the significance of children’s intuitions. The former sees childish tendencies as something to be outgrown (although, interestingly, mainly those that tend towards belief in God or religion—Dawkins obviously wishes to encourage children to ask questions, just not to arrive at the “wrong” conclusions). The latter sees the “childish” demand that the world conform to intuitive senses of justice, meaning, and goodness as being at the very heart of reason itself, and providing the impetus that drives philosophy:

But the child may also be a figure of promise. She approaches the world in wonder as well as in fear. Her innocence can be a source of strength… The urge to greet every answer with another question is one we find in children not because it’s childish but because it’s natural.

When I think of a little boy’s virtual outrage that there should be such a thing as death (in Charlotte’s Web or anywhere else), and our own kids’ reaction to the death of their friend (Why? But we’ll see him again, right?), I think we ought to at least entertain the possibility that these questions and concerns might actually make contact with what is real and true about the world, and reflect some element of what they were created to be. Perhaps there are some questions and some possibilities that we are not meant to outgrow.

Ryan Dueck


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Flourishing in a Pill

13 02 2012

In the 2011 film Limitless, Eddie Morra is a down on his luck author struggling with writer’s block, unmet deadlines, losing his girlfriend, and a generally miserable life.  He is virtually at rock bottom when he encounters an old acquaintance that makes him aware of an experimental drug called NZT-48, which supposedly allows humans to access 100% of the brain’s power, as opposed to the usual 20%.  Morra is initially skeptical, but, considering things can’t really get much worse for him, he takes the pill.

Much to his surprise, it works!  Morra is instantly able to achieve a focus and intensity that would have been previously unimaginable.  He finishes the book he had been struggling with for months in four days.  He is instantly able to solve problems and to see possibilities with unprecedented accuracy.  He uses his newfound (or spectacularly enhanced!) abilities to reinvent himself as rich, powerful, and all that he ever wanted to be.  He becomes, in short, a kind of superhuman who is able to do anything and everything well.

It’s an intriguing idea.  After all, who hasn’t, at some point, wished that the ideal person we wish we could be were attainable through simply swallowing a pill?  Who hasn’t wished that the struggle and strain of changing things we don’t like in our lives could be avoided?  Who hasn’t longed for their own abilities and skills to be quickly and painlessly enhanced—or for the existence of new ones entirely?  Who hasn’t wished that everything important they had ever learned or experienced could be instantly accessed and productively employed?

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan recently explored similar ideas in a New York Times piece called “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality’ Pill?”  If all human decision-making is reducible to chemical combinations in the brain, then why shouldn’t we just tweak the chemistry a bit here and there to produce more moral people?  Or, undertake a massive overhaul if necessary?   We already do this with antidepressants and other drugs, after all.  Why not with morality?  It would certainly solve a lot of problems, after all.  Who cares if we have to medicate people into behaving themselves if the end result is good?

Whether we are thinking about pills to give us superhuman abilities, as in Limitless, or pills to make us moral, as in Singer and Sagan’s article, questions about the nature and extent of human freedom instantly come into view.  Is human freedom real or just a pleasant illusion that we like to perpetuate?  If we are popping pills to manipulate our brains into doing what we want, is it still us that is acting?  In what sense?  Have we crossed some kind of a line when the good things that we want in life come via a chemical alteration of our brain states?  We intuitively feel like our freedom has somehow been violated, but why?

These are difficult questions, to be sure.  The lines are fuzzy and not easy to discern.  But however we resolve these questions, from a biblical perspective it is clear that human beings are more than just brain chemistry.  We are created by God to freely reflect God’s image (or not).  Meaningful human freedom is presupposed on virtually every page of Scripture.  From Joshua’s “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15) to Jesus’ “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29), the exhortation (implicit or explicit) to choose where our allegiance lies, resounds throughout the biblical narrative.

While human freedom obviously depends upon and is exercised through brain chemistry, it cannot be reduced to this alone.  This does not do justice to our experience of freedom, our experience of moral striving, our experience of hard-won changes in our life, of skills and capacities deliberately cultivated and disciplined.  Most of us, if we are honest, think that if something is worth having it is worth pursuing and striving for.  If the kind of freedom that gives our lives meaning and accomplishment is an illusion, it is an illusion of the most necessary kind—an illusion we cannot live without.

And yet, ironically enough, the Bible also describes the kind of flourishing we seek as something that comes apart from endless human striving (moral or otherwise). In Jeremiah 31:33-34, the prophet says this to a group of weary exiles who are well acquainted with the fruits of poorly exercised freedom:

“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbors,
or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”

 I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.  Human flourishing is, ultimately, a gift of God.  It is a gift, however, that is given in concert with our own desires and efforts to align our desires and aspirations with what is good and right and true.  It is a gift that is given to those who seek to know God, who acknowledge their need of God, and who receive God’s gift of forgiveness.  It is, fundamentally, a gift that comes not via a pill but a relationship with our Creator.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Man Seeks (Straightforward) God

23 01 2012

Over the last decade or so, the conversation about God and religion in the public square has been dominated by the extremes.  Whether angry atheists convinced that religion “poisons everything” or defensive and dogmatic believers who condemn atheists in equally strong language, the impression often given is that there are two groups of fundamentally different people out there who can do little besides shout at each other across the huge and unbridgeable chasm between them.

But the picture sketched above does not tell the whole story.  In between these extremes exist more moderate atheists and believers, as well as a growing demographic of people referred to as the “nones”—a name derived from checking the “None” box on surveys asking for one’s religious preference.  Simply put, Nones aren’t sure about God and religion.  They’re not, by in large, atheists (93% claim to believe in God or a higher power), nor are they adherents of any particular religious tradition.  They’re searching, seeking, inquiring.  They’re open to God, but not in traditional forms and expressions.

Former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner speaks for the Nones in his new book Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine.  In a recent article, Weiner expresses his exasperation with the “true believers” and the “angry atheists” that have dominated (North) American religious discourse over the last decade or so.  Like many of us, Weiner sees the world as just a bit more grey than the black and whites offered by these two groups, and is open to a much wider range of questions and answers than they are.

According to Weiner, Nones

don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people—more loving, less angry—then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.”

Nones are, apparently, characterized by an extremely pragmatic approach to issues of God and religion.  The fundamental question, according to Weiner, is not, “What is the good, the true, and the beautiful?” but “what works for me?”  Of course, there are numerous unstated assumptions about the nature of the good and beautiful embedded in Weiner’s assertion that if a spiritual practice makes us better people it is “true,” but this is, nonetheless, an undeniably human-centred approach to questions of God and religion.

A little later, Weiner makes this even clearer:

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

“Straightforward,” “unencumbered,” and “absolutely intuitive.”  These are interesting adjectives to place alongside of the quest of faith, to be sure.  Historically, the pursuit of God has been one of great joy, self-discovery, and peace, to be sure, but also one of self-denial, struggle, and even periods of great doubt and suffering, as countless people of faith down through the ages would attest.  A prominent image of the path to God is one of ascent—an image evoking the long and arduous process of climbing a mountain.  There is exertion and pain and struggle on the path to the top.  Indeed, Jesus himself said that “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).  Evidently, faith isn’t supposed to always be easy.

We have just made our way through the Christmas season.  If the Christian story is to be believed, the light of the world entered the human predicament in a most unusual, unexpected, uncomfortable, and possibly even embarrassing manner.  Jesus’ arrival on the human scene did not nicely align itself with what human beings thought ought to be the case, with how they thought divinity ought to look, with the way in which they imagined a rescue operation ought to be undertaken. It still doesn’t, for many of us.  We have all quite likely imagined other, more “straightforward” ways for God to save than the way represented by the birth and career of Jesus.

But perhaps the truth isn’t always comfortable or unencumbered or straightforward or intuitive. Perhaps, in addition to our capacity to interrogate reality, the truth asks questions of us.  Perhaps it is we who must conform to what is real and true and good and beautiful, rather than adapting and adjusting these concepts and behaviours to fit our preferences.  Indeed, if truth really is something that exists outside and independent of human minds and hearts, then perhaps the first question to ask—for Nones and for all the rest of us—is not, “what works?” or “what seems to make the most sense to me?” or “what do I prefer?” but “what is true and how do I align myself with it?”

The Christian conviction is that the struggle of faith—with all of the wrestling and sorting through our embarrassment and confusion and discomfort as we align ourselves with what is true—is worth it.  And that the view from the summit of the mountain is spectacular.

Ryan Dueck


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Hope for the Marathon Life

20 01 2012

At a recent dinner party there was, unfortunately, far too much testosterone in the air when several ladies collectively expressed doubts as to whether the men present could run a 42km marathon. One man retorted “Well, of course, we could run a marathon, isn’t that right fellas?” The bro-code demanded our quick affirmation. The fallout: three men standing ill-prepared at a marathon starting line two months later.

The beginning of the marathon felt great! Onlookers lined up to cheer, free drinks were passed to us along the way, and every runner felt strong and cheerful! I felt like the boxer Rocky Balboa running up the stairs to sound of the “Eye of the Tiger” song. Yet it wasn’t long before the good cheer and humor ran short. My facial expression exposed my struggle as I raced past my wife three times on our circuit: First pass: happy face. Second pass: sad face. Third pass: “Call an ambulance” face. As the kilometers clicked by old Rocky Balboa (me) had taken a few hits. At the finish line I had run out of steam, my spastic legs worked independently though in a forward motion…some reported it looked like a really bad break dancer generally moving in one direction. Limping across the finish line I was embraced into the arms of my proud wife!

Upon completion of the race it occurred to me how many of our lives are similar to a marathon. We begin with strength and hope, loved ones cheering us forward. Yet as we go along we start taking a few hits. We slow down, burn up, tire out, and life can feel burdensome. By the end we may even look like Rocky after a long fight. Our eyes are red, bodies tired. Those around us shout demands to expedite their expectations. So many begin strong but the struggles in life add up and we find ourselves limping over the finish line hopeful for rest and peace.

Like a marathon story, the birth of Jesus began with hopeful promise and support of many around him. Many cheered, others jeered, but everyone seemed eager to see him meet their expectations. By the end Jesus, too, had taken a “few hits” in life. Jesus was abandoned by his closest friends, stripped of his clothes, beaten, mocked, and finally crucified. Upon the cross Jesus cried out lamenting his struggle while people spectated on the validity of Jesus’ claims of hope[1]. He then crossed the finish line of His mission with the words “it is finished”. [2]

Is there hope within our struggles today? The promise that Jesus made to his listeners is that there is hope. Limping across the finish line Jesus was embraced by God the Father, as the resurrection account concludes. The promise offered to all those who follow Jesus is that no matter what struggles add up in life we can run with hope. When we cross the finish line with we too will be embraced by the Father with the affirmation “well done”. That’s the Christian hope for our marathon life.

Ryan Vallee

[1] Luke 23.

[2] John 19:30.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Newness

12 12 2011

A few years ago, our Christmas holidays were spent enjoying the BBC’s wildly popular nature series, Planet Earth.  These films are quite simply a magnificent window into life on our planet. They are spectacularly shot, well narrated, and offer some truly rare glimpses into the lives of animals and their environments.

One thing that strikes me, however, whenever I watch Planet Earth is the limited nature of life on earth for non-human species. Despite the overwhelming beauty and marvelous abilities of, say, the snow leopard, the wild bactrian camel, or the hammerhead shark, their entire lives seem to be comprised of a struggle to accomplish two tasks: securing food and mating.

These creatures’ entire existence seems to be dictated to them in advance. There are no “new” options open to, for example, the Walia ibex whose lives consist of struggling for food in the African mountains, avoiding predators, and mating. The beauty of the wildlife portrayed in Planet Earth was sometimes, at least for me, tempered by the harsh and unforgiving nature of the lives of so many of these creatures.

Perhaps bare survival is enough for non-human species. It seems doubtful that too many of these animals spend their wandering days ruminating upon the limited options available to them, or lamenting the biological “determinedness” of their lives.

On one level, of course, our lives are not much different from the animals seen in Planet Earth. Our days are spent securing the resources necessary for survival, and we, too, have an instinct for passing our genes on to the next generation. Just like the animals, our bodies will wear down and, eventually, cease functioning. In many ways we are no different from the wonderful variety of species we share this planet with.

But we are also gloriously different. We have the ability to introduce novelty to the cosmos—to create, to imagine and work toward better futures for ourselves and those who will follow us. Our decisions and actions, individually and collectively, can make a qualitative difference in and for this planet. The New Year’s resolution may be among the most hopeless and poorly grounded of gestures, but the fact remains that we can make changes; we can decide to live better, more human and humane lives. We can do our part to improve the quality of our relationships, we can become more responsible stewards of the time and the gifts that God has given us, we can venture out and take risks, explore previously untried opportunities.

In all of these endeavors failure is, of course, a real possibility but this does not detract from the uniquely human potential for newness. Human beings, like no other creatures on the planet, have a unique God-given ability to freely decide to contribute (or not) to the flourishing of all that God has made.

And this ability, Christians believe, can be even expanded when we come to see  Jesus Christ, God Incarnate who, in the ultimate expression of new possibilities, entered the human condition, began its transformation, and promises to continue to “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). From a Christian perspective, “Happy New Year” can and ought to be more than a hollow wish for a vaguely benign next 365 days; it can be a profound expression of hope and trust in the God who creates, recreates, and allows those who bear his image to participate in the newness.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Making a Difference

A Beautiful Life

28 11 2011

What if I’m wrong?

Whatever space we happen to inhabit on the worldview continuum, this is a question that is bound to occur to all of us.  As human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we would like prior to deciding upon ultimate matters.  And I suspect that the “what if this is all a colossal mistake?” question occasionally occurs to even the most settled of minds.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.”  After coming to agreement that the life of Jesus was good, beautiful, and worthy of emulation, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange around what would he do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night—and my sober observations!—are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good?  And what, if anything, does our answer to this question have to say about the worldviews we adopt?

Some would suggest that our worldviews are simply the result of the culture we happen to have been raised in.  We are all socialized into and inhabit a particular “plausibility structure”—a taken-for-granted way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions. At its most extreme, this view sets forth a kind of sociological determinism where our cognitive and behavioural options are completely determined by our social environment. Is it even possible to just accept a different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Obviously it is.  People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith.  But when they do, it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life that proves most compelling, as opposed to the comprehensiveness of their facts or the logical rigour of their argumentation. People respond to well-lived lives—to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of human lives can and do lead people to the conclusion that the foundation upon which such lives are based just might be true.

What is the connection between truth and beauty? However we answer this question, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty—between our deepest aspirations and intuitions and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Don’t Take Your Religion So Seriously!

24 10 2011

A recent review of American Grace, a sociological study of religion in America, came to the conclusion that in an ethnically and ideologically diverse culture where religion is increasingly seen as a matter of personal preference as opposed to fixed identity, our survival as nations and citizens depends upon the following maxim: “Don’t take your religion too seriously.” Intense, sectarian devotion is dangerous and suspicious. Peace and harmony in the twenty-first century depend upon adopting a “bland is beautiful” approach to religion.

Better yet, why not just stop caring about religion at all? Canadian journalist Neil MacDonald coined the term “apatheism” to get at the idea that given the political reality in the USA (and Canada), apathy toward the divine is the best approach:

I have no religious beliefs.  None…. There’s a better word for what I am: an apatheist.  It’s a neologism that fuses “apathy” and “theism.” It means someone who has absolutely no interest in the question of a god’s (or gods’) existence, and is just as uninterested in telling anyone else what to believe.

Well that certainly sounds tolerant and politically astute, not to mention admirably humble. MacDonald simply doesn’t know and doesn’t care if God exists and wouldn’t it be great if everyone else could just find it within themselves to adopt “apatheism” as a way of approaching questions that we can’t be certain about or agree upon?

Yet is “apatheism” even coherent?  Does MacDonald really have no interest in telling anyone else what to believe?  Presumably he might have a thing or two to say to those who are interested in telling others what to believe or how to live.  Presumably his apathy would become a bit more strained if, say, those convinced that God has commanded them to act violently toward those who do not share their beliefs begin to threaten his nation or his person. “Apatheism” seems like an approach that could only work in a very specific set of cultural circumstances and parameters.

MacDonald “apatheism” simply turns a political strategy into a more explicit worldview pronouncement. While he lives and works in America, MacDonald’s home and native land (Canada) has officially advocated “multiculturalism” as a political strategy since 1971. In order for multiculturalism to work “on the ground,” the government has to bracket the question of whether or not any one culture or religion has access to some kind of singular “truth.”  All are granted political liberty to practice how they see fit (within limits); all religious claims are relegated to the realm of “things you can believe if you want to as long as they stay mostly private and aren’t socially/politically disruptive.” At a political level, this is necessary to allow people of radically different views on (what they seem to consider to be) important matters to exist in the same space peacefully.

MacDonald just turns this into a worldview. “Apatheism” is “why can’t we all just agree not to care about god(s) so much” writ large. What MacDonald seems to mean when he says he is an “apatheist” is that he is apathetic about the question of whether or not a private God who meets individual psychological needs and makes no difference in public life exists, and will continue to tolerantly, if condescendingly, allow others to believe in whatever publicly irrelevant god they happen to prefer.

In a sense, MacDonald’s apatheistim is a logical outcome of spying some of the limits of multiculturalism as a political strategy. Forty years into the Canadian multicultural experiment, some are seeing potential hazards. Can a nation that allows people of radically different beliefs to live together really survive and thrive? Are there some worldviews that cannot be accommodated into the “official” Canadian metanarrative of peace and tolerance and “niceness?”  What happens when worldviews simply prove fundamentally incompatible, politically and ideologically?

MacDonald and, to a lesser extent, the writers of American Grace offer one response: Just stop caring so much. Adopt a worldview of apathy about the divisive questions like whether or not God exists. Yet apathy and (limited) tolerance as a worldview seems unlikely to inspire broad allegiance as a framing story. Aside from its obviously limited value in addressing some of the deep existential needs of humanity—needs for hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and salvation, among other things—having no interest in the beliefs of others only works if the beliefs of others make no difference in the world.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

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