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


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Categories : Tough Questions

Red Pen Fear

20 05 2011

When people email me, they almost always include some line that goes “please don’t check my spelling” or “I know I’m terrible at grammar” or “I hate emailing an English teacher.” It is interesting, especially considering that I have always been a bad speller myself and that the sort of work I do has little to do with pedantic proof-reading or nit-picky grammar. My family, friends and, perhaps more naturally, my students are all afraid that I’m secretly examining every word they write, every phrase that leaves their fingers. But I assure you this is not the case: I never pay any attention to spelling or grammar in the emails I receive. It seems inappropriate ― a reduction of an interpersonal exchange to frequently ossified rules about phonetics, prepositions, and punctuation ― to even think about such things when reading a friend, loved-one, or even student’s email.

Over the past three days I’ve marked hundreds of pages of student writing. As I finished the final paper and uttered a (sincere) “thank God that’s done!”, I was struck by the similarity between the fear that people have in writing me and the fear that many people, myself included, feel about God. When I pray ― and when I don’t ― I sometimes fear that God is analyzing and weighing everything I say, checking it for its spiritual grammar and its theological correctness. Many of my friends who are not people of faith express a similar fear about God: that he is scrutinizing every instant of their lives, looking for the misplaced comma, the misspoken word, the dangling modifier, or the good work left undone. And so, they avoid him like some of people I know avoid emailing me.

This fear is, perhaps, somewhat well founded. It is cliché, but no one is perfect and, so, we naturally fear that the perfect God sees our mistakes, our errors and judges them with his red pen, making note of each and every imperfection…But, that isn’t how I react to my students work or to the letters of friends. No, I rather enjoy hearing from them, enjoy the interaction regardless of a misspelled word.

While I don’t want to suggest that the extreme and staggering evil that people are capable of is the equivalent of a squinting modifier, I am reminded of Father Zosima’s comment to a young woman who came to him for confession. After hearing her confession he tells her, “If even I, a sinful man, just like you, was moved to tenderness and felt pity for you, how much more will God be.” If I (and all the other English teachers I know out there) actually don’t read emails looking for the mistakes that family and friends might be making, why do I have such an uncharitable view of God, imaging him as the divine corrector, red-pen in hand, ready to mark, to judge, to fail me.

While the Christian faith is often portrayed as an exercise in judgment and nit-picky morality, this isn’t the picture of God that the biblical text reveals. God is holy but he is not out to get us. He is deeply concerned with our lives and loves us. Such a theological statement may seem childish, but when Karl Barth, (one of the 20th century’s most important theologians) was asked to sum up the most profound thought of his 14 volume work of dogmatic theology, he paused for a moment and said: “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

Jessica Hughes


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Longing for Death

16 05 2011

Adolf Hitler spent a fortune in 1936 to buy a painting and hang it in his office. A secluded isle, surrounded by the boundless mysterious sea, is approached by a rowboat, and a figure clad entirely in white faces the water gate. In the rocky walls of the island are carved sepulchral portals, and dark cypress trees dominate the enigmatic center of the picture. Hitler had this painting in his office until the last moment, until he shot himself in his bunker in Berlin.

It wasn’t only Hitler who was fascinated with Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. Freud had a copy in his office, and Lenin had one hanging just above his bed. The painting inspired works by Munch, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, a symphony by Rachmaninoff, and Nabokov noted that the painting was to be “found in every Berlin home” in the early 20th century.[1] Böcklin himself described the Isle of the Dead as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.”[2]

What makes this painting so magnetic? Part of it is its surreal beauty: a funerary island floating on nothingness, with its massive walls unrivalled by the waveless calm of the ocean, the trees and the clouds bending to the whisper of the wind, the last rays of light that illuminate the island growing dimmer and dimmer, as the sun falls into its abyss. Part of the drawing power of this painting emerges from the questions it raises too. Who is that white figure? What is the oarsman feeling? What lies behind the cypress trees? A passage to the underworld, perhaps?

But maybe what attracts us most strongly to Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead is the allure of death drawing close. We can feel a frenzied calm taking over our hearts as “life as we know it” finishes and we are buried into some kind of mysterious destiny. We hear the silence of the moment, the serene embrace of the wind smoothing our skin, the attraction and the fear that dominate us as we approach the center of the island. Our existence approaches its twilight, and we try to take in a last flash of beauty before our eyes close.

Curiously, after five editions of Isle of the Dead, Böcklin painted also an Isle of Life. It is filled with signs of joy and vividness: music, company, dance, intimacy, color, animals, the blue sky, friendship. Instead of the tense magnetism of Isle of the Dead, this painting produces relief. One picture gets us bracing for death, the other relaxes our muscles. In one picture we are the tragic hero; in the other, part of a joyous feast in nature.

These paintings get me thinking. What is my picture of death? What awaits me? Will beauty engulf me, or will I dance on its bosom? Will I finish by myself, or will eternity ravish me with overflowing life?

René Breuel

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1936), 56.

[2] John Culshaw, Rachmaninov: The Man and his Music (1949), 7.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

The Fear of Reentry

10 01 2011

These weeks easily have to be some of the most difficult, anxiety-ridden weeks of the year. For most of the people I know, the last two weeks of December involve taking substantial time off from work, reuniting with friends and family, traveling back home or perhaps to some exotic locale, enjoying fun holiday parties, and eating good food. But once the New Year ball drops, all these winter wonderland activities cease, and it’s time to reenter the real world of work and ordinary responsibility. Add to this the fact that many of us make wildly idealistic New Year’s Resolutions that we probably won’t be able to keep (mine involve self-taught French and banjo lessons), and it’s hard not to feel like the helpless Sisyphus perpetually pushing the boulder up the hill, only to watch it fall again at the end of 2011.

One of my friends who goes to The Wharton School in Philadelphia calls this dreadful feeling “The Fear” and says that It usually grips him on Sunday nights when a fun weekend is sadly over and a large pile of work looms in the distance. Of course, The Fear is nothing new and applies to more than just graduate students. The jarring transition between rest and work, or what Walker Percy calls “the reentry process,”[1] often causes sadness, despair, and frustration. In fact, it’s probable that Jesus experienced The Fear too. When he left a wedding at Cana in Galilee, he traveled a few days later to Jerusalem where he cleansed the temple courts.[2] One day Jesus is enjoying a festive wedding celebration with friends and family; the next he’s witnessing morally corrupt money-changers exploit others’ finances in the holiest of all Jewish settings. Such an abrupt transition must have brought about a fear of reentry and contributed to Jesus’ righteous desire to chase out the money-changers.

But where does this leave us? How can we face the invisible yet still monstrous Fear as the year starts and Monday arrives? I, for one, tend to create diversions for myself; procrastination sounds delightful when I’m on the brink of responsibility. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal explained this human tendency more eloquently: “All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.”[3]

Battling The Fear this time of year is difficult. Finding myself under its sway, occasionally I will use Augustine’s advice for help. Having spent almost his whole life experimenting with one attraction or idea after another—across several cities, relationships and worldviews—Augustine finally came to the conclusion that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”[4] This time of year we hear self-help gurus, weight-loss magicians, and modern-day money-changers promise to save us from what we fear and make our lives richer. But I would rather stick to Augustine. I would rather rest in God, knowing that with Him, even though piles of work loom large, all is well, and I can tackle one thing at a time.

Paul McClure

[1] Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), 1983. 141-159.

[2] John 2

[3] Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. #136.

[4] St. Augustine. Confessions. Book I. Chapter 1.

 


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Fear, Power and Religion

18 10 2010

Bertrand Russell delivered a famous lecture in 1927, later expanded into a book, called Why I am not a Christian. The renowned agnostic discussed common arguments regarding God’s existence and character to his London audience at the National Secular Society, such as Aristotle’s argument for God as first cause, Newton’s reasoning from natural law and Kant’s argument from morality. Then he concluded with a tentative thesis on the origin of religion: “Religion is based, I think, mainly and first of all, in fear. It is, in part, the terror of the unknown and, in part, as I have already said, the desire to fell one has some kind of elder brother who will be at our side in all our difficulties and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing: fear of mystery, fear of defeat, fear of death.”[1]

I think Bertrand Russell is just right. Religion is indeed for many people a form of divine contract: in our fear before the world, we promise allegiance to God and virtuous living in exchange for protection against harms of society and nature. We know we can’t defend ourselves; we know humanity’s wit and technology are no match for the perils of living and dying, and we set up a system of obedience and recompenses. And out of this dreadful angst to appease God lest we suffer emerge the sins of corporate religion: sense of superiority over others, exclusion of the different, legalism, rigidity, joyless obedience. It is a form of religion which crushes people.

And that’s the kind of criticism that Jesus levelled against religion in his own day. He censured the mindless obedience to laws and regulations without understanding their true purpose. He denounced the religious status quo that oppressed the poor who could not pay for expensive animal sacrifices, the sick who were prejudiced against, the foreigner considered to be less worthy of God, the moral deviant who were forced to become social outcasts. Jesus understood that when religion springs out of fear it becomes really a religion of power. We still approach God from a self-centered perspective and diminish everyone around us, and feel superior over them.

Yet Jesus obviously did not stop at that. He had a more nuanced view of life and God to settle at Russell’s agnosticism. He dared set out an alternative to the religion of his day and, I think, to every other religious system based on fear. Jesus’ offer of salvation and eternal life was fundamentally different because of this: it was not based on how someone would perform spiritually. It is not primarily a matter of obedience, morality, blamelessness. Jesus knew that only self-centered religion would grow from a self-centered start.

Instead, Jesus told people that their salvation depended on what he would do to them. They did not have perform anything, for he would do it in their stead, as he offered himself as a sacrifice to pay for their sins and offer them salvation. Their redemption was a gift, a pure and free gift, and one cannot feel proud or superior for having received a gift with no merit. If our salvation does not depend on our performance, there is no space for fear and insecurity either. The natural motivation that flows from such an extravagant free gift is gratitude and love. One cannot wait to express his joy in selfless acts of service to others and to God.

One option, usually called religion, grows out of fear, and sets us a contract with God for protection and salvation. The motivations that result are insecurity – we never know if we are doing enough – and superiority over people who do not perform like us or do not believe in the same things. Jesus’ alternative, his gospel, springs out of gratitude, as someone receives Jesus’ free offer of salvation. The motivations that result are love and selfless service of others.

These are two very different systems of life. They may look alike from a distance, but the fruits each produce are in opposite fields. For those of us investigating Christianity, let’s us keep in mind Jesus is not offering mere religion. He criticizes and deconstructs it, and offers an alternative radically different. And if we dare follow Jesus, and call ourselves Christians, may we not forget the base of grace we stepped into and lapse into contract-based living. For then someone else would look at our unchanged lives, at our anxious fear and mistreatment of others, and maybe write another Why I am not a Christian.

René Breuel

[1] Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 18.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories : The Heart of Faith

The Purpose of Fear?

22 09 2010

Fear can be scarier when it is shared. I can remember several moments in the past few years where I’ve felt a palpable shared sense of fear, first in the build-up to the Iraq war, then more recently with the “financial crisis.” In each case, I can remember feeling that moral dilemmas, which would ordinarily involve some fairly straight-forward thinking, have become muddled and unclear.

So I became unsure, for instance, over whether a pre-emptive military policy in Iraq really had some merit. I had been opposed to this idea for years, but such conviction was harder to maintain after the evening news was saturated for weeks with stories about the possibility of long range nuclear missiles and chemical weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Similarly, I remember that same sense of uncertainty – what might be called a cloud of fear – following me around when the financial crisis supposedly threatened the stability of our social institutions, including the viability of entire governments. Again, social fear was palpable as we assessed the limited options for economic recovery being proposed, which have now resulted in many countries propping up the very institutions and their leadership which bear responsibility for the economic crisis. Strange decisions result from strange times.

I’ve just spent the past weekend at an academic conference discussing another, perhaps even stronger, fear cloud – the threat of climate change. Speakers helpfully pointed out that climate change is but one of several issues which are accelerated by our consumptive lifestyles and disdain for the limits that God seems to have placed in the creation, as we face water shortages, peak oil, soil destruction, pollution, dead zones in the ocean, and the list could go on. I imagine we all have a personal, concrete experience with the some troubling ecological issue, whether that be a recent water shortage, the ugly smell of a nearby landfill, or extreme weather patterns.

One of the most useful interactions I had at this conference was a theological discussion on a proper Christian response to fear. What resources and guidance does our faith provide in seeking to respond to ecological or financial crisis? A frequent exhortation that appears in the Bible is to “fear the Lord.” Indeed Psalm 111:10 suggests that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” The hebrew word used in the Psalm for fear, yārēʾ, actually encompasses a wider range of meaning, including fear, reverence, to honor, worship, or be afraid of. There is some wisdom embedded in the language itself here, I think; it suggests that what we fear, we may also grant overriding control over our moral lives. Thus, if I fear the financial crisis, i.e. my own financial ruin, at the root of this fear is my own love of money and the economy which secures my wealth. Similarly, fears of environmental destruction may reflect an underlying worship of the patterns I am familiar with, such as a ready supply of tropical fruits or an abundance of consumer products without any indication of their source or true cost. In short, my fear may reflect an underlying reluctance to see change, whatever the source.

A Christian response to such fear, I think, is the act of repentance. In this, we identify the underlying idolatries (or distorted loves) that generate our fears and express regret for the destructiveness these misguided attachments have caused. Next, we detach our loyalties from them, and place our trust instead in the only thing which can correspond to our highest aspirations: the personal God who created us. This redirection offers an entirely new orientation by which we can respond to bad news and conceive of our life within changed circumstances. This orientation holds, even if the pennies are few and the winter comes too early.

Jeremy Kidwell


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : On Anything and Everything

The Right to Despair

17 09 2010

Elie Wiesel, writing from inside the barbed fences of German concentration camps in his autobiographical Night, recalls a piece of advice offered by a fellow prisoner: “We have no right to despair!”[1]

I love his resilience. But is it genuine? It’s hard to believe his statement isn’t just a half-hearted plea for optimism. If anyone has the “right” to despair, it should certainly include the Jews of the Holocaust. They were surrounded by death, even breathing in the smoke of their burning friends and family. What hope can survive in a place like that?  In my mind, circumstances so laden with death and horror gladly serve up the right to despair. Despair lets sufferers off the hook of hope.

If, however, the prisoner’s statement is honest, it creates quite a quandary. How can anyone declare hope when there’s no visible reason to hope? The possibility of hope in such a dark place grates against logic. I want to understand that a circumstance is either hopeful or hopeless, black or white. But here, the two collide. Living in circumstances that are, by any account, utterly hopeless, his hope somehow remains. How is this possible?

Logically speaking, it’s not possible. We cannot be with and without hope simultaneously. So if this man really can maintain hope in the most hopeless of situations, we have to conclude instead that his hope never depended upon his circumstances. His hope must lie elsewhere, impervious to the changes he experiences. He can invoke that they have “no right to despair” because his hope, even here, is not thwarted by their surroundings.

But what about you and me? While we’re far from concentration camps, we are nonetheless threatened by despair through our own circumstances. Is there hope for us? We face enough grief or troubled relationships or paralyzing insecurities that despair is often an easy alternative. In fact, despair is always readily available. It’s hope that’s so hard to find.

But the Jews found it. Their hope was absolutely unshakable. But how? How did they—and how can we—maintain a hope that cannot be eclipsed by despair?  

Our first task is to know where we’re placing our hope. These beliefs can then direct our actions. Like the Jews, unshakable hope requires belief in an external and transcendent Force, outside the realm of corruptability and circumstance. Even more importantly, unshakable hope requires that this Force is already involved in redeeming the world.  In the throes of despair, we do not have the energy to convince this Force of the need for goodness. If we cannot join in a preexisting mission, our hope is lost. 

What this suggests is that this Force cannot be an unnamed phenomenon or a jelly donut. Our hope must be fixed upon an actual Person who is capable of and in the process of improving the world. I, for one, know of no other Person like this than the God of the Bible. 

Having lined out our beliefs, what remains is to allow this hope-giving God to affect our circumstances. If the beliefs above draw the general shape of God, our daily task is to fill in the details. We walk with God, search for God, cry out to God, and revel with God. As we grow to know God intimately, our hope is strengthened because we realize just how faithful, how good, how powerful God is. We grow to trust in God.

Eventually, the potency of God grows more convincing than the potency of our visible circumstances. From the perspective of this unshakable hope, we learn to recognize the fleetingness of everything else, like watching busy traffic from a peaceful perch. Nothing can uproot us, because we are rooted in the Unchangeable. We unknowingly shed our ”right” to despair because we no longer have a need for it.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31) 

Brandon Gaide currently resides with his wife in Sacramento, CA, working as a recruiter.  He recently finished his MA in Theology, and seeks opportunities to teach what he loves: the hope of the Gospel.

[1]    Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 42


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Making a Difference


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 635 other followers