Expressing faith without insipid platitudes

This is something I'm only in the attempt phase of dealing with

I’m going to have to proceed very carefully with this post. The last thing I want to do is step on the toes of some very devout people who have been instrumental in pulling me out of my years-long mire in jaded agnosticism.

But you folks know what the overall mission is here at Precipice. As I say on the About page, “Western civilization and the world generally are close enough to a yawning abyss to see its terrifying vastness. It’s an abyss with cultural, political, economic and spiritual dimensions.” My interest is in seeing if there is a way to step back onto solid ground.

I’m riddled with doubt that there is. No signs of light have appeared since I began this venture in 2019. Neo-Trumpists are still slavishly devoted to the most disgusting and unqualified person to ever enter US politics, and may get him re-elected as president. Progressives become ever more deft at cramming their grim vision down our throats. Witness such ugly phenomena as Pride Month and the push for racially based reparations, or the current progressive administration’s forging ahead with subsidization of play-like energy forms even as the nation’s debt and deficit continue to balloon. The flatlining of our “culture” continues apace. We react to all this with the frantic seeking of distraction.

I understand, per an abundance of think pieces saying so, that sound-doctrine Christianity is not completely dead. My own congregation is one of the most viable in our city. Everybody is enthusiastically hands-on. Outsiders are attracted to the way we love Christ and each other. There are still sound-doctrine theological seminaries, the classrooms of which are filled with faculty and students with their heads on straight.

But there can be no doubt that it’s dwindling as an influential societal force. Indeed, in the public square, it generally needs to keep its head down and its mouth shut.

And I’m not terribly impressed with the argument that Christians have lived through similar periods of being relegated to the margins of Western civilization and indeed humanity generally. Does that excuse us from watching helplessly as human advancement - on levels ranging from a predominant institutional stature for our faith, to technology, to art, to establishing the political assumption of the freedom and dignity of every individual - swirls the drain?

The fact of the matter is that evangelizing - winning souls - is going to have to look very different in our time.

We have to figure out how to approach our fellow human being in such a way so as not to elicit a response along the lines of “oh, sheesh, I thought you’d get around to bringing up that Jesus s—-. You’re losing me big time.”

Most people are that unreceptive.

This is why I think apologetics is an essential part of our outreach. In an August 2021 post, I addressed this thusly:

[Apologetics] hones my steadfastness to ponder ringing yet respectful defenses of the Christian truth against objections.

Paul set the pattern when he addressed a crowd in Athens:

22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man,[a] 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for

“‘In him we live and move and have our being’;[b]

as even some of your own poets have said,

“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’[c]

29 Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. 30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

He allowed that their search to date had been earnest and, indeed, had revealed to them some valuable insights. Only then does he say that the God they’ve been feeling their way toward (I love that phrase) can be truly known.

Origen’s Contra Celsum, written circa 248 A.D., provides us with a fine model for responding to not just objections but attacks on Christianity. Celsus, a secular philosopher who not only thought the faith was a lot of hooey but harmful to society, had written The True Word, a book-length explanation of his views. Origen took the time to address Celsus’s points one by one with rigor but also courtesy.

Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions is an account of how he came to see the folly of being driven by lust and an attempt to convince himself that his intellect was a sufficient guide. He contributed greatly to Christianity’s understanding that, while human beings are imbued with free will, there is a right use of free will to which they become compelled to turn once they heed God’s beckoning.

Pascal’s Wager takes an interesting approach, namely, asserting that the stakes are too high to not believe in God. Pascal was one of those guys who has to be heeded, given that he was no slouch in a number of fields besides theology, such as mathematics, physics and philosophy.

In more modern times, C.S. Lewis’s Meditation in a Toolshed is a classic in the field of apologetics. I return often to his notion of looking along the beam:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the dif- ference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements in the grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so- and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some “ideology” (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or “debunks” the account given from inside. “All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside”, says the wiseacre, “are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.” And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, “If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.”

That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically “modern” type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at? in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can't think at all - and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.

The other objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing. And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”. And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you?

In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end?

The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and babies are not really affected by it. In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of looking. We do not know in advance

whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.

Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft’s approach really sticks to my ribs.

How’s this for a consideration to chew on?

Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.

I need this kind of bolstering when I fold my hands and drop to my knees, principally because I need my Christianity to have an aspect of being raw, of deadly seriousness.

I want my devotion to be built on that foundation of which Christ spoke in the parable of the house that could withstand hurricane-force winds.

I understand that a lot of those today with the most steadfast faith have come by it due to a personal-level life event: the depths of addiction, the death of a child, being on the receiving end of a horrific crime. That’s not how it happened for me. It’s true that I have recently come through a pretty nasty health downturn, but I still need to be reminded on the level of my restless, barely tamable mind that, no matter what possibilities I might entertain, there is no avoiding Him if I am to ever find peace.

We’re going to have to make sure we don’t engage nonbelievers in a way that projects an image of us as hopelessly cornball, insular, and uninterested in how they each have come to their present junctures in life. This will be deep work. With a lot of people, we’ll get one chance, and if we blow it, they’ll continue on their way, with no more understanding of what’s at stake than before they encountered us.