Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

 "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him...."  (The Lutheran Small Catechism).

The author of BeAttitude recently announced his "de-conversion" from the Christian faith.  Normally, such posts do not draw my attention as they all sound pretty much the same, much like Christian "personal testimonials" of conversion.  Funny how that is.  What caught my eye was the fact that this author claims in his profile to have been baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church.  He's "one of ours," so this one hit a bit closer to home for me.

The post is not the usual triumph of reason over superstition nor does it have the typical broadside against believers.  It is really more like the last breath of the dying, a quiet sigh of resignation.  The last breath is always a sigh.  

The author lists his "Top 20" reasons for making the break.  In a word, they mostly deal with credibility - the credibility of God, of the Bible, of the Church, of Christians.  They are worth pondering, not for their profundity so much as for their ubiquity.  There are many people who quietly think these things.  Some of them occupy pews and pulpits.  Ask yourself, "How would I respond if my son, daughter, or best friend said these things to me?"  If your reflex is a 20-point refutation, you're starting off on the wrong foot.  A draw is the best one can hope for when arguing with a skeptic.

The skepticism of our age has had a cumulatively corrosive effect on faith.  I've seen it in my own people, especially our youth, and, to be quite honest, I experience it for myself.  There are times when I find myself kicking and screaming against faith.  I cannot by my own reason or strength believe.  I believe that.  Faith is a gift of God's grace, an orientation of trust worked by the Spirit who calls us by the Gospel.  I also believe that we can by our own reason and strength undermine faith by our own relentless questioning of things that cannot be fully answered to our satisfaction.

I trust my wife and believe her claim to love me.  Her actions support her claim of love, not as "proofs" but as consistent actions.  But if I continually question her love, demand further irrefutable proofs from her, and constantly approach her with an attitude of skepticism, I will risk two things.  First, I will endanger her love to me.  She will be hurt that I do not believe her words or trust her.  Second, I will destroy my love for her as I become consumed by my own skepticism when attempts to "prove" her love do not live up to my expectations for convincing evidence.

None of us is immune.  You can't read the Bible to any degree of depth without being aware of its difficulties.  You can't hang around with Christians for very long without being painfully aware of their foibles.  You can't spend any serious time in the church without encountering power grabbing institutions and bureaucrats, corrupt clergy, and a checkered past along with a spotted present.

There is a place for healthy skepticism, what Luther called the "ministerial use" of reason.  There is room in the life of faith for Mary's "how can this be?"  Jesus warned His disciples of deceptive signs and wonders, and His apostle John urged his hearers to "test the spirits."  We don't cry "it's a miracle!" every time we can't explain something, and we're rightly suspicious of weeping statues and beatific visions in the burn marks on a tortilla or the watermarks on the side of a barn.

Skepticism ceases to be healthy when it closes the mind and hardens the heart, when it sets the rules for evidence and becomes prosecutor, judge, and jury.  The skeptical mind is closed by its own set of presuppositions and untestibles.  Things like "There is no such thing as miracles" or "Matter and energy is all there is" or "The only way of knowing things is through scientific observation."  The believing mind turns out to be more open than the unbelieving, while a healthy dose of skepticism keeps one's brains from falling out on the floor.  Hardened skepticism, however, can best be described as a colossal failure of the imagination.

Kierkegaard said that faith and doubt must always coexist.   I cannot for a moment imagine Joseph looking at Mary lying next to him at night and wondering "Really?" just as I stand before the altar at Holy Communion and often wonder the same.  Faith in something that is promised and unseen will always have an element of uncertainty. It goes with the turf.  The question is whether we would have skepticism become the governing principle in our lives, which at least for me, would be like having a library filled exclusively with science textbooks. You won't find poetry or literature in the chemistry library.

Science can inspire awe and wonder, but it can't inspire trust much less love, charity or self-sacrifice. The slogan of the skeptic is "trust nothing and no one apart from the evidence."  In his published letter to his ten year old daughter,  Richard Dawkins tells her never to trust anything based on tradition, revelation, or authority but always to seek the hard evidence.  He concludes with this poignant paragraph:

  What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

He signs his letter with a tender "Your loving Daddy."  I have no reason to question his fatherly affections, but were Dawkins' daughter to take her father's sage advice, she would immediately respond to his "Your loving Daddy" by asking, "What kind of evidence is there for that?"

In a perfect world, the Bible would be a perfect book, logical and coherent, glowing with unearthly radioactive luminescence or something equally scary.  It would not be filled with ambiguities and contradictions and hares that chew the cud (Lev 11:6), but then, what would people in religious studies departments have to argue about? The church would be a perfect reflection of the kingdom of God on earth, and Christians would walk around with glowing nimbi hovering behind their holy heads like you see in the icons.   Talk about weird.  But when God deals with us through the ordinary and the mundane, we seem to pass it all off as beneath the dignity of a respectable  Deity.

We all have our pet notions of what a respectable holy book and God would be like if we had things our way.  Richard Dawkins likes to say that "a universe with a god would be a different sort of universe," which sounds really profound until you stop and realize that he thinks God is a delusion.  How can you speculate on a universe with a God when you deny the God in the universe you already have?  That's like saying that the Taurus would be a better car if it was built by Toyota, while not believing that Toyota exists.  How exactly is an n-dimensional being supposed to reveal Himself to our four-dimensional world except in four dimensions?  And wouldn't one reasonably except at least some measure of messiness around the revelatory edges?

As for me and my house, I'm running with the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who died and rose again and called the shot three times in advance.  The record of Him is as credible as any other event in human history, regardless of what Bart Ehrman thinks.  One thing my healthy skepticism does tell me is trust no one in a "religious studies" department.  As for BeAttitude's Top 20, I've thought of most of them in my own skeptical  pilgrimage and can add a few more to the list.  Some are debatable; some dismissable; most we'll just have to ponder.  I choose to ponder these things in prayer, in the Word, and at the Lord's Table, trusting that at the close of the day and at the end of my days, I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him.

I guess sometimes you need to lose your religion in order to find Christ, or better, to come to the recognition that He has already found you.  It's kind of like admitting you don't know anything before you can learn something.  The nice thing is that the Father is always waiting to welcome his prodigal children with open arms and a party.

"Lord, I believe.  Help Thou my unbelief."