Weakness as Strength

If there’s any big thing I’ve been learning about this year, I’ve been learning about love. Well, actually, I’ve been learning about weakness. But they might usually be one thing, the one way I’ve felt more and more strongly called to live. The person I’ve read this semester who talks most frequently and explicitly about weakness is Friedrich Nietzsche. He pointedly states his mind about weakness in The Genealogy of Morals:

“When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: ‘let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just’ –– this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts to no more than: ‘we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong enough’; but this dry matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects possess (posing as dead, when in great danger, so as not to do ‘too much’), has, thanks to counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weak –– that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality –– were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritous act.”

This strain of thought shows itself again and again throughout the Genealogy. He cannot stand what he sees as the twisted deceptiveness of Christianity. If anything from the book is clear, it’s that Nietzsche is not happy with Christians. As seen above, he asserts that expressions of Christian faith like non-retaliation, deference, and submission to suffering are pathetic. He sees them as devoid of any substantial desire for life and equatable to the self-protective instinct of insect. Only, it’s all actually far worse than the insects’ instincts, because the people who live like this pretend they’re living virtuously, pretend they’re better than their strong oppressors. Nietzsche accuses Christians of deception, of hiding their disgustingly pathetic and weak selves behind a charade of virtue and strength. (Ouch.)

I haven’t heard anyone make that same argument against Christians recently, but I think the question of weakness is still a live one: is weakness always necessarily a fact, or can it be a choice? Nietzsche’s accusing Christians of lying. He’s saying that Christians deceitfully claim their weakness is a choice––that in reality their weakness is a matter of fact which they can do nothing to escape. My response to this is to draw attention to Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Jesus makes the answer clear: even without counting his choice to leave his Godhead and become part of creation, he himself was a man who chose weakness. He chose to suffer false accusations, hatred, humiliation, flogging, and a torturous, shameful death. He chose to submit to all of that, fully able to escape it if he had so pleased.

So Nietzsche’s wrong about whether weakness can be a choice. But I don’t think he’s wrong about noticing that Christians seem weak. This seems especially true of martyrs, perhaps the people who most demonstrably prove the sincerity of their faith––they prove it by abiding peaceably even death. Passive––which, fittingly enough, comes from the Latin word meaning ‘to suffer’ (passio)––seems like another apt adjective for martyrs: they don’t seem to show any strength. They seem deferential to a fault, letting anyone and everyone walk all over them without once standing up or showing strength.

But the book of Revelation has a different way of phrasing it: “they have conquered [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11). What martyrs do is called ‘conquering.’ A demonstration of weakness is named a culminating act of strength. And the means by which this weak-looking strength is carried out is even stranger: Lamb’s blood and testimonial word. Hardly the weapons I would pick for a firefight. The final oddity of this description is in its final verb, which––instead of being passive in any way, like martyrs seem to be––is active: “they loved not their lives.” It rings with the sound of choice––

A choice to die, the choice characterizing Jesus’ call to follow him. The thing about Nietzsche’s conqueror is that he thirsts vigorously for immediate, pleasurable, dominating life––life that rules and rejoices in itself. The martyrs thirst for life too––the eternal kind, the kind that’s not immediate, the kind that relinquishes its desire to rule and rejoices in someone else. The martyrs thirst for this eternal life so much that they choose not to love their time-bound lives. With this love-altering thirst, they are free from the greatest fear that plagues humanity––the fear of losing our lives. And because they are free, they are strong. However weak they appear, the martyrs have already overcome the strongest foe: they don’t fear death. They are conquerors.

What if we’re not martyrs? What if we don’t face the opportunity to die literally for our king? Jesus answered that question too: “And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’” (Luke 9:23). You can’t die both literally and daily. You can only die literally once, and daily means more than once. So the call on us who believe and live to tell the tale is the same as the call on those who believe and die for it: love not your lives even unto death. For the martyrs, even unto literal death––for the rest of us, even unto metaphorical death. We’re all called to die––definitely to die to ourselves, maybe to die literally. Dying to ourselves means doing exactly what Jesus did: emptying ourselves, lowering ourselves, being weak. This weakness, the weakness of self-death, is the strongest strength.

Connecting Ourselves to Death

We live in an age of magic. I’m a wizard. I can talk to Skopjans from Laguna Niguel with no effort. I can instantaneously send my thoughts across distances my ancestors would never have dreamed to cross in their entire lives. I can examine images of the most distant celestial bodies known to man from my bedroom. I can capture my portrait and alter my own appearance with a few flicks of my fingers. It’s uncanny to consider. Our time is a time of marvels. But has this wizardry blessed or cursed us? What effect has it had on humanity as a whole? My answer to that is another question: what do 19th-century Russia and Facebook have in common? Dostoevsky. Bear with his thickness for a moment and it’ll make more sense:

“The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them’––this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs. We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display.”

(The Brothers Karamazov 313-314)

Here Father Zosima, the mentor of the main character in Brothers Karamazov, is sharing the burden of his heart, the major problem with Russia in the late 1800s––isolation. People are believing that they should try to get whatever they think they need at the moment. The rich have increasingly greater accessibility to their pleasures, and the poor have increasingly strong motivations to believe they should follow in the self-serving footsteps of the rich. The rich’s luxurious lifestyle isolates them and breeds envy in the poor––which tends, in turn, to isolate them as well. The promises of modernization to unite all people of the world––the speedier communication of the telegraph and the virtual elimination of distance by the train––are empty, Zosima warns. In fact, they’re worse: they accomplish the opposite of what they claim to do. Increased ‘communication’ increases people’s ‘needs’ and multiplies the avenues by which these ‘needs’ can be immediately and individually satisfied––it decreases brotherly communion. It doesn’t meet needs––it creates them. The end result, he laments, is a self-propagating, increasing cycle of envy, pleasure-chasing, and self-exaltation.

Clearly Dostoevsky is critiquing the culture of his own time and place. And we may not be living in an age of increasing modernization, but we’re certainly living in an age of increasing technological advancement and exponentially expanding ‘connectedness.’ Consider social media alone, for instance. Mark Zuckerberg, the starter of perhaps the largest network in history, recently said, “In our effort to connect the whole world with Internet.org, we’ve been working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky.” (The picture above shows an internet balloon designed for this purpose.) Connect the whole world––that’s what’s being attempted. As of April 22, 2015, Facebook had 1.44 billion monthly active users. That’s more than one out of every seven people in the world. One out of seven. Magic. Kind of scary.

Maybe Americans today aren’t struggling through a class divide with serious isolating ramifications. But from the studies I’ve heard of, the ‘connection’ offered by communication technology isn’t bolstering community for us. It often seems like it’s hardly meeting needs at all. Internet advertising blasts us day in and day out with ‘needs’ we never knew we had before––while simultaneously making the satisfaction of those ‘needs’ accessible with the click of a finger. Be it the temptation of excessive online shopping, the appealing vegetative state of binge-watching media, or the twistedness of the pornography industry, the internet has bred more than its share of ills.

And notice how its evils themselves do nothing good for community––they are aimed at appealing to the part of us that wants what we want when we want it in whatever way we want it. We, we, we––us, us, us––I, I, I. There’s self-service aimed at self-satisfaction––individuals solitarily seeking their own selfish cravings. Isolation. Even amongst my own social circles, our smart phones are like whirlpools, dragging our eyes down into cyber voids and away from meeting each other’s eyes.

But I’m not saying we should trash our communication technology or dump the internet (not that we could anyway)––I’m a firm believer that it can be a force for good as well as for ill. I couldn’t write this post without the internet, for instance. And as I’ve been typing this, I’ve been messaging my brother who I rarely see (and who happens to be 400 miles away at the moment). With negligible effort, we can enjoy the subordinate good of each other’s words from opposite ends of the state. Speaking of subordinate goods, I can keep friendships formed on the other side of the globe, or ask my parents for advice when I’m away. I’m not complaining about that––that’s fantastic! It’s magic in the most wonderful sense of the word. At the same time, interpersonal communication is cheapened when it’s digitized. The delightfully irreducible nuances of in-person talk are reduced to pixels or sounds. Letters (even in digital form) may just be the second best thing to face-to-face conversation, but I believe most firmly that nothing can replace in-person relationship.

Granted––I’d like to establish a vigorous doubt that anything we could do with communication technology or social media can bring us out of isolation. But I also want to posit that ultimately not even face-to-face interaction can de-isolate us (though I’m sure it’s necessary). OK, then what can? I just asked my friend about this as we walked. We had a 20-minute conversation on it, and as we wrapped up our walk he voiced what I think must be the answer. I’m convinced that the gospel alone can bring us out of our isolation. My hypothesis is that our isolation ultimately comes from the self-worship of our sinful condition, what has been called incurvature (bent-inward-ness). The gospel calls us to die to ourselves and worship someone else. Only a meta-narrative that centers on someone other than me can save me out of myself––and the gospel is exactly this. It demands a life that consists of me dying and Jesus directing, a life defined by bringing the good news of love and reunion to my isolated brothers and sisters. Its end is the death of what leads to our death––isolation from each other and from God. The end of the gospel is the ultimate reunion, the union of human with human with God.

So ‘connecting’ clearly isn’t enough. Even getting everyone in the world on the same magic (a.k.a. online) network would not save us from isolation. Whether it’s Dostoevsky’s “transmitting thoughts through the air” or Zuckerberg’s “to beam internet to people from the sky”––which sound uncannily similar, now that I think about it––‘connecting’ will not bring us out of inward-bent selves, which is what we need to escape isolation. Only adoption into the divine universal family––often referred to throughout history as the holy catholic (universal) church––only answering the call to take up our cross and die and follow Jesus can provide us with the power to escape our incurved, self-isolating selves. We don’t need ‘connection’––we need love.

On Precision in Language

“The sick are man’s greatest danger; not the evil, not the ‘beasts of prey.’ Those who’re failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed––it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.” (The Genealogy of Morals 122)

Do you picture gas chambers? Systematic elimination? The devaluation of the old, the mortally diseased, the stragglers, those of a certain race? Does this not echo with Nazi Germany’s holocaust philosophy? It is ‘weakness’ that must be stamped out––evil isn’t even part of the conversation. I don’t know whether Nietzsche directly influenced Nazism, but who would be surprised if this kind of rhetoric shaped Hitler’s ideology?

Not to hold Nietzsche accountable for the atrocities of Nazism. Words often get misconstrued, misheard, misappropriated. People misquote Saint Francis all the time, for instance. And Nazism’s central symbol was a re-appropriation of an ancient Sanskrit cross. I often selectively listen to others’ words and sometimes take their statements out of context to show something I don’t like about them. Indeed, much of the miscommunication that has happened in my life has been caused by indefinite language. Often I and those around me are simply unwilling to put in the effort needed to express ourselves clearly and coherently.

Other times, I and those around me are simply unaware of how potent our words are, how significant their implications could be. Lewis starts off his essay The Abolition of Man by highlighting one such instance of imprecision––in an English grammar book of all places. He references two authors who, in their textbook, presume to undertake a task different from grammatical instruction. They claim that statements of value are subjective statements about personal feelings, ultimately devoid of any objective meaning: “‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings’” (2-3). Lewis takes issue with them on several accounts. For one, they’re failing to fulfill their goal of teaching English by secretly inculcating values. And their language is loaded.

Lewis’ main concern is the tendency of their argument about values:

“I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy’s mind. . . . they have not said that judgments of value are unimportant. Their words are that we ‘appear to be saying something very important’ when in reality we are ‘only saying something about our own feelings’. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius is that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.” (4-5)

Lewis is concerned less with what they’re saying at face value than with the drift, the tendency, the implications of their words. But he’s also pretty much just semantically meddling with them––not only with the general gist of what they said, but with the specific phrasing and word choice. Why? Because their word choice, he predicts, will have immense internal repercussions in the minds of the students reading the book. The specific words have specific and serious effects, altering the students’ ideas without the students even being aware of what’s being done to them. Lewis fears that the authors’ words inculcate new assumptions into the young readers’ minds. Assumptions are dangers because they frame conversations before anyone says a word––assumptions pre-determine people’s ideas, often without their knowledge.

There are two things I take from this. 1) Words carry assumptions, be they inaccurate or true. Words are these kind of intrinsically neutral things that are fraught with potential––the potential for deception, for falsehood, for truth, for guidance, for love. They can be the vehicles that transmit assumptions. 2) Words carry meaning far beyond their explicit and direct definitions, beyond what they say at face value. This is Lewis’ issue with the English grammar authors: they don’t say that values are subjective and thus unimportant, but their words tend towards the point that values are subjective and thus unimportant. Many words together mean more than the sum of their parts.

A professor of mine recently asked me, while helping me prepare for a poetry discussion, “What is the poem saying that’s not on the page?” This same question can be asked of anything we write or speak. What are we saying beyond the words coming out of our mouths? What’s the drift of our voiced thoughts? The risks of miscommunication can be avoided sometimes by precision in language. Ultimately, however, the only way to ensure our words do not tend towards a bad end––to avoid planting bad assumptions in people or conveying detrimental ideas––is to work on our insides. Jesus put it simply: “out of the abundance of the heart [the] mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). And what comes from our hearts is dangerous. Solomon tells us that “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Our words and their tendency come kicking and screaming––with the power to kill and enliven––out of our hearts.

Lewis points out that those writing the English grammar textbooks fail to give their subjects the honor of freedom––whether deliberately or unintentionally, they slip assumptions into the students’ malleable minds without warning. It would be better to give the students awareness, to let them choose for themselves which ideas they’ll embrace as foundational and which kinds of thoughts they will form their frames of reference with. In an age when words (through communication technology and cyberspace) are literally thrown around everywhere at all times, being as precise as we can with our words will help us use words in a way that gives others freedom. Precise word usage could be a pathway to love.

How to Not Get On With Life

Unlike high school, lots of people are super stoked about being at my college. Like high school, some don’t want to be here. Many of these are seniors who were ready to be done after the first week of the semester. I’m in a class with a lot of seniors. The atmosphere is different. Perhaps once these men and women were prime students, finishing assignments early and maintaining perfect attendance. Now they’re like restless old men in rocking chairs, tired of their old house and itching for a change of scenery.

So this class already isn’t the most stimulating or motivating environment. One day, my teacher’s role question was for us to voice one complaint about life at the moment. It was mostly asked in good fun, but I was left with a few less than encouraging impressions. 1) It’s incredibly easy, almost effortless, for everyone to voice bitterness about something; 2) Everything said seems vulnerably honest, so the bitterness is real; 3) Everyone seems to have painful, hard, bleak lives; 4) Why do we even come to class? what could we do about any of this anyway?

I felt intensively skeptical of life once the clock struck 1:15 and we headed out. I began getting in a mood I’ve known before. In such skepticism, I question why I bother doing what I do, doubt whether ordinarily exciting things are actually worthwhile, and generally feel the world pressing on my weak shoulders with the threat of crushing me. I didn’t realize the real threat to me––and to my checked-out senior classmates: pessimism. Chesterton warns of it with signature wit:

“this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. . . . But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before eh begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.” (Orthodoxy 66-67)

This false position of life/world critic is different from that of my classmates who don’t want to be at school––they chose to come to the school we all go to. They pay multiple thousands of dollars each semester to go here. They’re entitled to be critical of the educational experience they chose for themselves (though sometimes the pointedness and frequency of their criticism makes me wonder why they stick around). Not so for us simply as humans in the world––we did not choose this country but were chosen by it, born into it. We belong to our motherland, whether we like it or not.

Speaking of liking, have you ever noticed how people often criticize things or other people they like, professing to help the object of criticism? Chesterton thinks they’re a little less than honest:

“What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back––his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. . . . The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises––he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.” (Orthodoxy 68-69)

It’s like what we’ve turned honesty into. The phrase, “I’ll be honest,” has been sapped of delight and turned into an irksome warning: complaint ahead. Sure, our criticisms can be heartfelt––but that doesn’t mean we have to bleed a perfectly descriptive phrase of all potential joy. What if people started saying “I’ll be honest” before announcing engagement to marriage?

The problem with pessimists is that they don’t love the world they critique. They don’t really hate it either. Both love and hatred are forms of caring. The problem with pessimists is that they don’t really care. They’re not willing to do anything about, well, anything. They see the evils of life and refuse to be troubled enough to address any of them. I do this. I call it apathy or callousness, but it’s the same indifference––it’s an unwillingness to join the battle for my motherland. Laziness? Sloth? Selfishness? The root of pessimism is a sort of hollow feeling towards life––an emptiness of passion. Chesterton identifies what the solution might look like:

“We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment. . . . No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? . . . . [we want to be] ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.” (Orthodoxy 72)

The antithesis of the pessimist’s contentment is compassion––the feeling that drives you to try to redeem what seems like a lost cause. In the New Testament, the gospel writer describes Jesus’ compassion on the crowds with the Greek word for bowels. I’ve heard it’s the same case in Hebrew. Compassion is when you feel something in your guts––the reaction antithetical to the dispassionate critique of the pessimist.

I’ve had it articulated lately that discovering the truth of the world pushes us frantically towards one of two responses: either a cold refusal to care or a warmth of heart, a suffering. Truth either hardens people or softens them––makes them either pessimists or compassionate––turns them into either critics or caregivers. Notice how compassion does not come from childish naivety––it is a response to bumping into the truth. Compassion, I think, is a decision to feel the probably painful weight of the truth you know. Knowing the truth of the world’s twistedness––or, for that matter, a friend’s brokenness––and still caring, to the point that you want to do something to help, to heal––that is compassion.

And this is our deeper desire. Instead of complaining we want to conquer. Instead of liking mildly we want to love fiercely––to be boiled into action instead of aired into complacency. The answer to the aimlessness of pessimism is to be upset with the world, to resolve not get on with life.

Art / School

If time is money, and money is money too, then college is ridiculously expensive. Because it takes both a ton of time and a ton of money. Let me show you:

Massachusetts ~ $26,106 in 2004-5 to $40,748 in 2014-15

Connecticut ~ $25,877 in 2004-5 to $40,017 in 2014-15

D.C. ~ $25,431 in 2004-5 to $39,609 in 2014-15

California ~ $24,708 in 2004-5 to $38,511 in 2014-15

Maryland ~ $23,956 in 2004-5 to $38,291 in 2014-15

[Tuition and Fees by Sector and State Over Time – Trends in Higher Education – The College Board]

These are the top five increases in tuition cost of private four-year American colleges over the past ten years. Just tuition––not to mention room or board or anything else. Home sweet California is only number four and it’s still seen a $14,000 increase since 2005. $40,000 per year is a lot––four years worth adds up to $160,000. Is an education worth all that? John Henry Newman didn’t have those kinds of prices to tremble under, but he did explore the value of the university. Specifically, he defended liberal education, often the kind that these private four-year colleges offer. Was his defense convincing? Why participate in a classical liberal education? Why even go to college, for that matter? Well, those are different questions.

Since the latter is broader, I’ll start there. Why college at all? There are plenty of reasons: because it’s what people do, because I want to acquire particular skills, because I want a degree that will get me to a certain place, because I want to learn to live independently, because I’m drawn to a particular place or program, because I’m looking for an experience, or maybe because I don’t know what I’m doing with my life (guilty as charged). These are just the first that come to mind––if you ask undergrads why they came to their school, I don’t doubt you’ll get any number of different answers, far more than these few possibilities. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of my peers came to college seeking certain skills or credentials for their future careers. I’m not the biggest fan of that reason for choosing college, but it seems to me that the various answers could all be good in various situations. Because of this, the question requires us as Christians to approach such decisions with Holy-Spirit-guided discernment.

But regarding the first question––why participate in a classical liberal education (like the one I’ve been partaking in)––Newman and I have much to say. There are a few main answers to the question, a few main reasons why classical liberal education is worthwhile.

The first is perhaps the most widely-appealing reason: usefulness. Liberal education, Newman argues, is highly practical––but not specifically practical. It gives someone the internal equipment to do any job excellently:

“…general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study… the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer… or an engineer… but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings… with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger.”

(The Idea of a University, 118)

Liberal education makes the mind stronger, healthier. Newman talks often about this “culture”––he uses the agrarian word deliberately––we’re meant to think of growing, flourishing plant life, a fruitful crop. Culture of the mind produces a kind of versatility, a broadness of mentality that allows me to adapt to various environments and do many different kinds of work well.

This is the kind of growth that the great books program I’m in fosters. We’ve spent countless hours reading the classics, discussing them, and writing about them. How is that useful? Well, discussing lots of old books that often have only very distant bearing on today has really challenged me to listen. These are not instruction books––they are not giving me any information that appears immediately useful––and my peers discussing them with me are no experts. Most of our interpretations are usually lacking in lots. We often miss the mark. It’s been a challenge for me to consider the potential in what my peers observe and assert, how their thoughts may be more accurate than mine.

I came into college convinced that my particular framework for interpreting the world and the Bible and literature was the right one. I thought that any deviations from my views, any other possibilities that others might voice, were essentially misguided, often laughably so. But when you’re forced to listen to a diverse array of people talk about their interpretations and ideas for more than six hours a week––not to mention being confronted with the ideas of a brilliant author whose work has stood the test of time––you start to healthily question your own ideas. At least I did. And from that place of questioning I began to plant my old flags (or new ones I had developed from the questioning) deeper and firmer. That rootedness enabled me to start learning how to articulate my own values and beliefs and thoughts. Liberal education trained me to hold loosely the non-ultimate ideas and to hold fast the essential ones. It taught me to listen first and speak second.

Speaking of second, the second reason liberal education is worthwhile is contingent on the setting in which it takes place. Newman’s university was––and my own liberal education is––a communal endeavor. Newman makes clear that what he calls a ‘living education’ can only exist through community. He casts this vision epically:

“When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day. . . . I am but saying that that youthful community will constitute a whole, it will embody a specific idea, it will represent a doctrine, it will administer a code of conduct, and it will furnish principles of thought and action. It will give birth to a living teaching, which in course of time will take the shape of a self-perpetuating tradition.” (Idea of University, 105-106)

Verbosity aside, Newman has a point: young people coming together to learn under the guidance of teachers will also learn from each other, perhaps in a richer, more dynamic, longer-lasting way. While I don’t remember even close to half the lectures I’ve heard at college (and I’ve heard some pretty fantastic ones), I won’t forget the ways my peers have taught me––their stimulating influence has become ingrained in my mind and heart, shaping me intellectually and personally, even spiritually.

The third reason is perhaps the hardest for many of us to consider legitimate. Newman, however, definitively names it one of the pillars of the university:

“Knowledge is capable of being its own end. . . . further advantages accrue to us and redound to others by its possession… but, independent of these, we are satisfying a directneed of our nature in it very acquisition… Knowledge… is valuable for what its very presence in us does for us after the manner of a habit, even though it be turned to no further account, nor subserve any direct end.” (The Idea of a University, 78-79)

He asserts that knowledge is valuable in and of itself. This idea is not a particularly strong selling point for southern Californians I know, maybe not even for many Americans in general. But, to generalize even further, it might just be a human thing. There don’t seem to be too many things people do for their own sake: food, friendship, painting, music. I’m sure there are more, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the things we generally tend to think of as ends in themselves could be counted on one hand. And Newman’s saying knowledge is one of them. It’s valuable, and not because it helps you do something else or because it gets you anything––it does get you lots of things and helps you do much more than you’d be able to do without it, but that’s not what makes it good. It’s inherently good. Intrinsically valuable. Why pursue knowledge? Well, why play a song? It satisfies an innate human need that nothing else does.

I mentioned that this might be the hardest of the reasons for us to accept. Part of this may have to do with southern Californian culture––I think we tend to gravitate to things that serve ends we think are worthwhile. Maybe this is even true of western culture at large. To put it crudely, we like things that get us what we want. And we may not put a lot of stock in knowledge if it was useless. Since it’s not, we do put some stock in it. But if we do this, we’re still missing what Newman highlights as the primary worth of knowledge––its ‘useless’ goodness, its value in and of itself. If we put stock in knowledge because it gets us other things, we’re not viewing it rightly, according to Newman––we’re not seeing it as an end worth pursuing for its own sake.

I wonder whether this takes the kind of simple, intuitive understanding that can’t be taught. Here’s where I’ll hypothesize. Recognizing knowledge’s inherent worth may not be something we can be taught. Just based on my own experience, I think it may be the kind of truth that has to be felt. I can verbally assent to its truth, but ascribing certain words to it is mere expression––I want to say that the substance is my excitement about it. I just want knowledge. Why? Because it’s good. I’m sure there are arguments for the idea that knowledge is a good in and of itself, but Newman simply asserts this is the case more than he provides rational arguments for why it is. And I approach it similarly in my own scholarship: I don’t know how to explain that knowledge is good in and of itself or why it’s an end worth pursuing for its own sake, but my guts and bones tell me so.

Knowledge, for Newman (especially the liberal kind), is not a means to an end––but it also kind of is. At least, it’s a means to an end in the same way that art is a means to an end. Hear Newman’s metaphor:

“Why do you take such pains with your garden…? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies… not as if you meant to make an orchard of the one, or corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is a special beauty in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole. Your cities are beautiful, your palaces, your public buildings, your territorial mansions, your churches; and their beauty leads to nothing beyond itself. . . . in like manner there is a beauty, there is a perfection, of the intellect.” (The Idea of a University, 90)

So it’s not only knowledge that’s intrinsically good––it’s beauty of intellect too. But the way to a beautiful intellect is the path of knowledge. Except that, even to say that acquiring knowledge is “the way to” intellectual beauty might be misleading––for Newman, the two might even be the same thing. Why seek knowledge? Well, why tend a garden?

On Articulacy

What do you do when you feel the ground crumbling out from under your feet? I’ve felt this way quite a bit lately. T.S. Eliot has helped me. Please bear with this more literary and personal blog.

selections of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .

Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

Let us go and make our visit.

. . . .

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

. . . .

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair––

. . .

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

. . . .

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question. . .

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor––

And this, and so much more?––

It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

Prufrock wrestles with many things––the reader gets to feel these conflicting feelings and thoughts along with the narrator. There is an overwhelming question being led up to, an overwhelming question that he dearly wishes to avoid being asked. I think he does not want it because he cannot bear to answer it. Either that, or he does not want to be asked it because he knows he cannot answer it, or at least cannot answer it well.

Next his hesitation is expressed––and immediately his self-assurances that there will be time, time enough to prepare to meet other faces, time to make decisions and revise them, all the time in the world. Perhaps he thinks there is time enough to figure out how to say what he wants to say, or adequate time to say and re-say it enough to make it adequately express what he wants to express, perhaps to make himself able to answer the overwhelming question.

He starts asking himself if he dares, dares to go back the way he has come, dares to speak to the women in the room he refers to, dares to start a conversation. For him, this is like daring to disturb the universe. This wondering whether he dares such a feat is immediately followed by a self-assurance that there will be time, in a minute. But he recognizes that this self-assurance that there will be time will itself be undone, because the window of opportunity will close with time passing on.

The poem continues with a revelation from Prufrock: he was scared and missed his opportunity to speak, lost his chance to act. The rest is questioning whether it would have even been worthwhile after all. And one of the recurring reasons he keeps feeling burdened by is his own inability to express what he wants to. For him, it’s like squeezing the universe into a ball––how feasible is that? The reader is smacked directly with the feeling in Prufrock’s final frustrated exclamation: it’s impossible to say what he means. The expression of impossibility, however, does not mean resignation––on the contrary, Prufrock is frantic, perhaps even desperate, to get out of the wordlessness he finds he has sunk into. He can’t express himself and he can’t escape it but he wants to get out of it with all of his being. This feeling changes later for Eliot:

East Coker 

V

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years––

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres––

Trying to learn how to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate––but there is not competition––

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Instead of wordlessness being an inescapable horror, some kind of prison in which we’re trapped, lacking speech is more peaceful—or at least not worth our desperation. Instead of kicking and screaming for his inarticulacy to be heard, like Prufrock does, the narrator of East Coker is reconciled to his inability to express. For him, there’s nothing frantic about it—no need to fight, no need to rage. This resignation exists in the midst of a sense of inadequacy: there are other men who have conquered in ways he does not aspire to, men who have already made the conquests that can be made. What is there left to discover? Nothing, it seems. What is there left to fight for? Well, there we have a goal: he strives to regain what has been lost. Is he hopeful about his inarticulacy? The narrator does not express strong hope, nor anything like a resolution. Rather, he questions whether there really was ever any competition at all, whether it was ever legitimate to compare himself to the men who conquered—maybe it wasn’t, maybe it isn’t. He starts to approach the struggle with neither hope nor desperation, instead asserting that the trying is all that really matters, all that we should be concerned with. The conquests of others, the feeling of inability to articulate words when we want to and how we want to—all of that is not our business. Our business is to try.

Why bother with all this close reading of difficult modern poetry? My one word answer would be this: articulacy. Over the past few years I’ve often been at a loss for words: I longed to be reunited with people I loved, I felt the pain of severed ties that once were strong, I buckled under fears and doubts and seemingly unanswerable questions. And it’s never been a contented loss for words—it’s been a longing, sometimes almost a rage for description, occasioned by my choking inability to put speech my feelings. I’m wracked with doubt and fear and grief and desire—there are things I just couldn’t go without saying if I wasn’t forced to leave them be. But I am forced to go without saying them—forced to go on without being able to put words to them by virtue of my own inarticulacy.

This sense of inability grows the closer I get to the end of this semester. This mainly hurts because I’m finishing the classics program I’ve been engrained in, raised in, nourished in since I set foot on my college campus. All of my classes and many of my responsibilities have changed drastically from semester to semester—but amidst the fluctuations I’ve been discussing books with the same group of people almost every week since two and half years ago. Next week I’ll have my last discussion with them ever. I’ll finish my credits for the program and leave behind the constancy I’ve enjoyed since day one of college. My summer plans are uncertain. My dear friends are graduating and leaving me in a matter of weeks. And my idea of what I’ll do after graduating in December is hazy at my best moments. I don’t know what will happen or what I should, can, or will do—and it often freaks me out. I don’t know how I ought to feel, or how I can best seize the time I have left. The pangs and cries my heart beats out are incoherent, imprecise—and how can I make them clear? And the questions reverberating around my mind about what comes next in my life seem unanswerable—how can I decide?

Thanks be to God for T.S. Eliot. He reminds me that he too struggled and strove to speak, often without success. He reminds me that that’s not the point—that it’s not a game to win or lose. He reminds me that the imprecision remains. And the main thing he reminds me is that I can try—try to speak, try to step, and see where the words and the roads lead. Each new effort is a new failure—but at least it’s one failure closer to articulacy.

Knowledge As Trust

Everything you think you have done is an illusion. Your will is a fond figment of your imagination, your decisions, direct results of your environment. Maybe you’re part of the Matrix. Marx thought as much:

“Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential content is determined by the material conditions of existence of your class” (The Communist Manifesto, 21).

These words were written over a century ago, but they describe the world we live in today. The “material conditions” of our environment are the ultimate reality, according to this view. Everything real is material. So who do we turn to for reliable answers? Theologians? Pastors? Philosophers? No––we look to the guys who study materials, usually raw materials like rocks or cells or plants. Scientists are our gurus, the wise men who we seek if we want to find out the truth––they are the ones who really know things about the real world. It’s a question of knowledge primarily, and, by extension, a question of authority. Knowledge can be firsthand––observed or experienced directly by me––or secondhand––received from someone else who has gained knowledge either directly or secondhand themselves. The first we usually just call eyewitness experience or something along those lines. The second we call trust, taking something on authority.

The spread of the naturalistic worldview Marx held has long since reshaped the western conception of how we can know truth. Today, our framework is generally what his was: things discoverable by scientific research and experiment can be truly known––things not scientifically measurable are essentially subjective opinion. I think there’s a problem with this understanding of knowledge. And it’s not logical consistency that’s the problem: if there really is nothing beyond what we can see and touch and measure, then it makes sense to think that truth can only be found by studying natural phenomena directly. I think the problem is that there is something––a lot of somethings, actually––beyond what we can see and touch and measure.

But even if the natural world is not the only sphere that exists, it is still real––which means the natural sciences can give us true knowledge about reality. The question is not whether we should trust science at all, but whether it should be the only thing we trust, like Marx did. Generally speaking, it seems to be the only source of knowledge we westerners trust. If your worldview is naturalistic, this stance makes sense. But my concern is that I see Christians thinking this way––which doesn’t make sense. Or at least shouldn’t. Christianity is not a naturalistic worldview: we believe in God, the Father everlasting, a non-material, non-scientifically-measurable person. It makes no sense for us to only trust science to tell us truth about reality. We have other, some would say higher, sources of authority––other ways of apprehending truth about reality––because Christianity says reality is not limited to natural phenomena. Last year a Christian musician made some comments on authoritative sources of knowledge:

“…not too many people today are going around arguing that God is a geologic entity that lives in the sky that created a flat square of land surrounded by ocean with heaven above us and Sheol below us… Why not? BECAUSE SCIENCE SHOWED US THAT THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE. So we rightfully re-read and re-interpret the Bible, just as people have done for thousands of years.” (I’m With You, Michael Gungor, 8/6/14)

He’s arguing against a hypothetical hyper-literal hermeneutic. The interesting part is how he affirms reinterpreting Scripture based on what science reveals. This kind of thinking seems to prioritize scientific authority over Scriptural authority. Instead of arguing from Scripture we are to argue from evidence found in natural phenomena. I think to do so is to prize one too much over the other. We should certainly recognize the truth to be discovered by scientific inquiry––we believe that nature attests to the higher, deeper reality we affirm as Christians. But what is revealed in the natural world should never authoritatively trump the written words revealing truth about both the natural and the spiritual world.

The question gets complicated, though, when we’re talking about which authority we should take when it comes to knowing about natural phenomena: should we take scientific authority, whose domain it is to deal with nature, or Scriptural authority, whose domain it is to deal with… what exactly? Does Scripture deal solely with the spiritual? Ought we trust Scripture to tell us truth about the natural world more than we trust science to do so? The study of natural phenomena, while informed by Scripture, is probably not the main kind of knowledge Scripture is concerned with. So Gungor’s distinction is understandable––Scripture is not a collection of scientific data, per se, and we should interpret each book with its individual genre as well as the context of the whole Bible in mind. This can be a slippery slope, though: if we invalidate the historicity of the Genesis origins account, for instance, our theology will be thrown out of whack. Science can tell us directly and explicitly about natural phenomena, but only Scripture can tell us that directly and explicitly about God and his works. And the creation of the universe is a very special work of God, its theological significance rooted in historical facts.

It makes sense to trust that God’s explicit words to us in his special revelation will tell us more truth about reality than what we seek to discover on our own resources (granted, the resources God gave us to do so––like the ability to do scientific inquiry). Why? Because reality is not only material conditions. It makes sense to look to the author of Scripture for the most definitive, reliable knowledge about reality because he is also the author of all reality––he spoke it all into existence, speaks it all together for sustained existence, and will speak it all anew one day. It’s his direct Word we Christians should trust above all other sources of knowledge––his Word is the ultimate authority on reality.

Recess Rules and Poetry

3/21-29/15

Have you ever tasted and seen the astounding joy of a swing set? Or felt the harrowing thrill of plunging down a tube slide? Unless it’s a blindingly bright day, semi-darkness swallows you for a few seconds as you spiral down and down, feeling the electricity building from your friction. Or, if it’s an open slide, you get a royal view of the park or your backyard before gliding gently to earth. Florence Joyner park had a towering open air spiral slide from the top of which you could survey most of the main playground like a king. Although it didn’t have walls or fences dividing it from the rest of the park, it was never hard to tell where the sand pits ended and the picnic area began. This is just like Christian ethics, according to Chesterton. Leave it to Chesterton to connect Christian doctrine and playgrounds:

“…the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and simply discover that they don’t. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.” (145) 

We Christians might be tempted to think of rules as roofs: they protect us from certain large rocks or cold rains that might befall us if we ventured out from under them. We Christians might be tempted to think of moral rectitude as shelter. We fear that if we broke the walls around Chesterton’s island, we would fall off the cliff to our demise. And the fear is justified. I won’t have casual sex outside of marriage to avoid STDs; I won’t get drunk so I don’t hurt anyone I love or kill my brain cells faster; I’ll be kind to my housemate so we can get along and live together easier. It seems that we generally understand sin to have consequences and thus might be tempted to avoid it like we would the flu––because it would be bad for us.

[A side note: I have been discouraged from sinning by many chapel talks and sermons for the reason that sin hurts people. Now I definitely do not want to hurt people, and avoiding the damages (foreseen or unforeseen) of sin to my own and others’ lives is even a good reason to flee from sin and fight it. But shouldn’t the main reason we seek to obey God and avoid sin––the main reason we want to live within the walls of the playground––be that we fear and love God for himself, not merely because we want to avoid the troublesome consequences accompanying sin? Are we merely trying to dodge sin to escape its dangerous results instead of seeking to be holy as he is holy? Christian morality is not primarily about avoiding pain, even the pain that goes along with sin––everyone is averse to pain. Only God’s people, however––whom he has redeemed and on whose hearts he has engraved a new and old commandment––seek to follow his rules because it is he who made them, seek to live within his playground because he made it for us. It’s about him, not avoiding pain.]

Sin hurts us––granted. But Chesterton says something more here: not only would we fall off the cliff if we broke down the wall, but our childlike delight of dance and song that the wall made possible would be lost––the wonderful magic of the playground would be shattered. And we, having realized it, would lose all eagerness for play, instead cowering in fear of the sharp fall of the cliff’s edge and the infinite horizon of water beyond. What would seem to give us greater freedom (the elimination of limitations) actually scares us. While we had walls, we had specificity and direction––just the right amount of freedom––quite as much as we could manage and enjoy. We hadn’t even yet explored all the possibilities of that playground when its walls were leveled and its delights scattered. Not only does breaking the walls and going beyond them (sin) hurt us, but the very desire to break those walls is contrary to our internal constitution. We are designed in such a way that when those walls are broken down, we no longer know what to do with ourselves. The impulse is inconsistent with our nature.

A recent Newsweek article discussed how the legal age for receiving euthanasia has been decreased (to 16-year-olds independently, 12-15-year-olds with parental consent) in the Netherlands:

‘Ross cites theologian Theo Boer of the Theological University in Kampen and in the Netherlands. He said, “I like autonomy very much. . . . But it seems to have overruled other values, like solidarity, patience, making the best of things. The risk now is that people no longer search for a way to endure their suffering. Killing yourself is the end of autonomy.”’

This story was one of the most disturbing and tragic news pieces I’ve heard. But it’s hard to argue with Boer’s assessment: if you pursue personal autonomy so ardently that you kill yourself, haven’t you lost the goal you were aiming for? When the focus shifts from enjoying the clearly delineated playground to wanting my own personal freedom on my own terms, I want to break through the walls of the playground at any cost––even the cost of losing my life over the cliff and, with it, any further opportunities for personal freedom.

The desire to break down the walls of Christian morality is ultimately self-contradictory––the thing I’m trying to gain by breaking them down is inappropriate to my nature and will ultimately destroy me. Human beings cannot enjoy unlimited personal autonomy because we are not unlimited or autonomous. What we can enjoy is a specific life limited by Christian morality. Since our lives are necessarily limited by our very nature, we will end up choosing specific limitations––and it just so happens that the ones delineated by Christianity are the most suited to our flourishing.

Something I’ve learned in one of my creative writing classes this semester is that writing poetry is not as much unlimited freestyle as I thought before––in fact, the best poems often have undergone not only serious revision but have also been formed by the most stringent restrictions. Intensely specific structure creates the circumstances in which a poet forms beautiful verse. It’s the same thing with morality. The moral constraints of Christianity should be seen not as burdensome but as freeing––not as the doldrums of a research paper but as the delight of poetry. Human flourishing, rich and pleasant life, takes place only within boundaries––the boundaries of moral law (in this case the law formed by the commandments of the LORD and of his Christ)––or as Chesterton might put it, under the mysterious ordinances of the king of elfland.

On Reading Christianly

3/28/15

Has time ever felt like a bullet train with bad brakes? This sensation slammed into me towards the end of January. I had spent a good chunk of my Christmas break reading for my interterm study abroad trip, and then spent most of January taking the trip. It was wonderful, don’t get me wrong––but it didn’t exactly feel like a break. I landed in CA with a measly three days to spare before the spring semester started––and those three days were occupied by more school reading. I got back on a Thursday and had to read Proverbs by the following Tuesday and Darwin’s Origin of Species by Wednesday. You could say I was pressed for time––not to mention trying to recover from spending two weeks in a different time zone. Darwin was the one who suffered. I ended up blazing through him and his incredibly detailed and complex case for natural selection.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do. It’s not ideal, but the work gets done. Sort of. There was a problem with the way I read Darwin, and it wasn’t primarily the speed at which I digested his theory. My time crunch contributed to a mindset of over-reductionism, even to the point of limiting what I would see in the book to things I was already looking for. I had this same issue when I read Marx’ Communist Manifesto the following week: instead of working to understand what he was saying, I came into the reading wanting mainly just to identify the problems in his argument. My mind was already closed to the possibility of Marx saying anything good or true. This is a bad, even an unchristian way to read.

Why? Mainly because reading like this hardly even qualifies as reading. Reading is listening––to a speaker who is just absent or dead. Listening means putting my own thoughts on hold so I can attend to the thoughts expressed by another person. Listening demands focus on another person––it is impossible to do for someone absorbed with their own thoughts and concerns. But shouldn’t we have solid stances on important issues like the origin of living organisms and what is a good form of government? Absolutely. Listening does not mean agreeing with––in fact, I often discover that, when I hear someone out, I find myself on opposite sides of the fence with them, or at different ends of the field. I actually only discover that when I hear people out. Listening does not mean condoning either. It is, rather, the prerequisite for condemning a viewpoint or idea as false or faulty––I cannot judge an opinion, a position, or a worldview to be wrong unless I understand it.

That’s all just common sense, not even considering reading from a Christian worldview. But I think Christianity colors the reader’s lens in an important way: it makes good reading, particularly good reading of Darwin and Marx, an act of faith. These guys assumed stuff that is flat out contrary to a biblical worldview. They purported a cold, hopeless vision of the world that I, 1) find depressing and, 2) believe is a load of lies. But that doesn’t mean I should not listen to them. And in listening to them, I am going out on a limb––listening to them is trusting that when I am genuinely seeking truth, God will reward me with it. His Spirit is stronger than the machinations of Karl Marx, and he will guide me into all truth. If I truly believe that, I can read the ideas of men like Darwin and Marx––and the ideas of anyone and everyone, for that matter, no matter their beliefs––without fear.

Faith Feels

(3/14/15, 1:56pm)

There’s a sense in which some of us have lost our grip on what faith is. I experienced the youth-hood of my Christian life in a strongly Bible-emphasizing non-denominational church. When I think of faith, I think of its description from Romans as the agent by which we partake in justification and sanctification, the transfer of trust to Christ for God to view us as righteous. I still believe this definition is essential for us to grasp––if we don’t understand this and, as a result, don’t have this faith, we have missed the boat. Without this specific belief in Jesus, we cannot be saved. But when it comes to living out the Christian life, do we know what role faith plays?

I recollect struggling through this in high school as a young Christian: I would ask what my mindset should be as I sought to grow in Christ, wondering how faith fit together with obedience. Sometimes I was told faith was the whole thing and operating on anything more than faith was self-righteousness. Other times I was completely left in the dark on faith’s role in daily Christian living. Often, however, I personally felt strongly that faith was essential for living for Christ day-in and day-out. But I wasn’t sure what to do with this feeling. Faith in Christ applies salvation to us––and after that it’s just some sort of process of obedience or something to grow, right?

Yes and no. Kierkegaard helps reorient our thinking about faith. Two passages from the beginning of Fear and Trembling provide a helpful perspective shift.

The first sets the tone for his project in the book, which is more or less to explore what faith consists of, what it requires of us. Responding to the idea of his time that faith was something to be moved past, he describes an unsophisticated man preoccupied with the ordeal of Abraham: “What he yearned for was to accompany them on the three-day journey, when Abraham rode with grief before him and Isaac by his side. . . . what occupied him was not the finely wrought fabric of imagination, but the shudder of thought” (44). Kierkegaard’s focus could hardly be further from the realm of mere theoretical understanding or abstraction. He wants to get at the shudder of thought that convulsed through Abraham as he chose to kill his only beloved son––the convulsion of faith.

The second addresses what Kierkegaard believes to be the main problem of his day: “Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further. . . . In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, and kept his faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows” (42). Now, he may not be directly addressing people of the church, but, considering my experience, the critique could still apply. Who thinks of faith as a lifelong journey, a long and arduous climb rather than a one-time apprehension? Who even thinks of faith in a primarily experiential way? Do we think faith is something to be had once and for all, not to be worried about after first becoming a Christian? I think most of us Christians know we need faith to be saved, but some of us never think of it in terms of daily individual experience. What would it look like and feel like to have faith in making a business transaction or asking someone on a date or deciding what to do with your last summer before graduation?

I’m not saying we need to change our understanding of what faith is, but it might do us good to try approaching faith from different angles, to try looking at it through different lenses. Could it be equally helpful, or perhaps even more helpful, to further focus our discipleship and conversations, to emphasize concrete examples––women and men like Abraham who wrestled through life in faith––rather than trying to apply the definition of faith directly to our lives? Speaking of which, how ought we balance our time and energy between seeking to nail down definitions of doctrines and seeking to apply doctrines to our lives? Obviously a sound understanding of faith is a prerequisite for living out faith––but perhaps Kierkegaard is onto something in his emphasis on individual human experience. What do you think faith is? How do you feel faith playing out in your individual Christian life? When it comes to doctrines, Kierkegaard helps keep us from losing our grip on concrete individual experience in the abstract. Know what you believe, yes, and feel the shudder and fix your eyes.