"Where you at, Little Dawg?" - today's edition
One of those periodic check-ins on the state of my faith walk
Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me.
At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.
When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.
These are the introductory paragraphs from a post from last September. They were the table-setter for what I hope was an honest look at the strength - or wobbliness, as the case may be - of my Christian faith.
So where do things stand in the following mid-June?
Maybe the most accurate depiction would be very incremental progress.
I truly do make an attempt, as I rise each morning, to hold the cascade of worldly concerns, irritations and little amusements at bay and make my first deliberate thought how amazing the life, ministry, death and resurrection of our Lord is when considered without filters.
The next few steps in my routine are as follows: feed the cats, put on the coffee, go downstairs and fire up the office.
I have a - I guess the way to describe it is as sort of like a rolodex; I call it my flippy-flippy - daily scripture verse thingy on my desk, and that’s the next order of business. I’ve used it for years. I’m often spurred to read the entire chapter from which the daily verse is taken, so as to get some context.
Often, the next step is to read the daily selection in the Business of Heaven collection of gems from C.S. Lewis’s various writings. I don’t always do this, since I’ve likewise had that as part of the routine for years as well, and if it seems perfunctory to do it, I skip.
Then I check the weather, do a first perusal of the news and drop by a social media platform or two.
About that time, the coffee’s done, and I step into the front courtyard and greet the early morning light. I relish the tranquility of the moment, but I don’t get all gooey about it. I’m just not very gooey by nature; more on that later.
This sets me up for a healthy start to the day - at least until the first frustrating, annoying, or downright maddening occurrence puts me on the express train to the bad-word zone.
That happens less than it used to, but it’s still something that I discuss a lot with my therapist.
So I start with some structure, and it serves me well.
So what’s up with the “very incremental” qualifier? Well, I do know some things in a very bedrock kind of way, but there are still some sticking points.
I’ll systematize this a bit.
Things I know in a bedrock sort of way:
I don’t doubt that God exists. I’m in no danger of becoming an atheist. Further, I know that the Judeo-Christian take on God is accurate. God is a He; He has particular qualities. I’ve finally moved past wondering if the Biblical take on God is just the human attempt to anthropomorphize something too big for us to comprehend. I now see that the opposite is the case. That we were made imago dei means that traits we’d ascribed to our human-ness are actually divine attributes He instilled in us. It’s not only perfectly reasonable to talk about God’s forbearance, mercy, grace - and, yes, wrath - it’s essential to talking about God like a grownup.
I also know that the above-mentioned thirty-three years of the Incarnation put the capper on Western civilization’s direction. We could now see that Jerusalem is what gives Athens its importance.
Some scripture is dense and inevitably subject to interpretation. Some is quite plain and there’s no mistaking the proper understanding. Genesis 1: 27 comes to mind, as do Romans 1:24 and 1 Corinthians 6:9. (Know where I’m going with this?)
It’s a matter of the universe’s basic design. God could have had our species reproduce hermaphroditically, like a lot of annelids, or used some pollen-based model. But he designed the two types of people he was creating to come together in a state of unifying love reflective of the love that binds the three facets of His triune nature. He wanted offspring born from a man and a woman to see relationship modeled right off the bat. That would provide assurance to the young human that he or she was part of that unshakeable bond.
Now, onto
The remaining sticking points:
The fissures: Institutional Christianity has always had ‘em. Rome-Constantinople. The Protestant Reformation. Arminianism-Calvinism. Subsequent denominational splinterings-off.
But lately it seems as if we’re in for a particularly dismaying round of them. Complimentarianism versus egalitarianism is the one that causes the most trouble among folks who want to be serious about their Christianity. And it’s not easily sorted out. Kaeley Triller Harms, Kristen DuMez and Beth Moore seem to have the more grace-based arguments vis-a-vis those who flat out reject their positions.
That said, overall, I gotta note that the move of mainline Protestant denominations toward overlooking the plainly stated scriptural assertions mentioned four paragraphs above seems to be mainly steered by those denominations’ female preachers. This has me wrestling with the whole stereotype that women aren’t as interested in following the letter of anything (in the case of Christian religion, following sound doctrine) as they are in making sure everybody has a hot meal and a hug. That’s too broad a brush with which to paint the actual reality, but dismissing it out of hand strikes me as irresponsible.
What to make of it? It’s still presently above my pay grade.
Modern praise music: I still can’t stand it. I’m aware that it means a great deal to many devout Christians, but I just don’t get it.
The chord changes rarely explore anything beyond I, II, IV, V and relative minor in various combinations, all of which are formulaic to the point of utter predictability.
And the lyrics are utterly pedestrian, completely devoid of the theological depth and sense of the sublime relation between Creator and creature that’s made palpable in the works of William Cowper, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and Fanny Crosby.
And the repetition! I’ve discovered that this is the subject of discussion in a few forums online. Some defend it as effective in driving home the message. I’m sorry, but it sounds to me like a desperate attempt to stave off doubt. About the fourth time of repeating one of those lines and I’m thinking, Ive already run that information across my head, thank you very much.
Young-Earth creationism: Sorry, but it just flies in the face of too much evidence that getting this ball of dirt and water to the point of being hospitable to our species took a long, long time.
I’ve heard people float the argument that the six-day account has to be so for the rest of Judeo-Christian cosmology to fall into place. That has yet to be explained to me in a way that pays proper respect to my faculty of logic. We have fancy machines that can date dinosaur bones.
So, did Lewis believe that the Bible was inerrant? Not in the way most people understand the term today, as meaning “absolutely reliable and precise in matters of fact” (Marsden 1980). In a 1959 letter to Wheaton College professor Clyde S. Kilby, Lewis explained:
That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader […] I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients. (Christensen 1979)
While it is critically important to affirm the historicity of certain events recorded in the Bible, it must be noted that the primary purpose of biblical records is not history for history’s sake. John Calvin wrote, “[t]he whole point of Scripture is to bring us to a knowledge of Jesus Christ […] [It] does not, and was never intended to, provide us with an infallible repository of astronomical and medical information” (McGrath 1998). Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that Genesis does not comment on the existence of Adam and Eve’s physical forebears.
Lewis and theistic evolution
So where did Lewis stand on the subject of evolution? Historian of science Ronald Numbers describes Lewis as a theistic evolutionist (Ferngren and Numbers 1996). His view seems to agree best with a type of theistic evolution espoused by B. B. Warfield in the late 19th century, which holds that “Adam’s body was the product of evolutionary development (secondary causes working alone under divine providence), and that his special creation involved the imparting of a rational soul to a highly-developed hominid” (PCA Creation Committee Report 2000). In The Problem of Pain, Lewis proposed a myth to explain how God could have created man. First, Satan corrupted the world and animals began to prey on one other. Then God made Adam’s body by evolution and gifted him with a soul. Lewis wrote,
For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself [….] Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness […] In perfect cyclic movement, being, power and joy descended from God to man in the form of gift and returned from man to God in the form of obedient love and ecstatic adoration. (Lewis, Problem 65)
Finally, Adam fell into sin which, according to Lewis, was not the mere eating of forbidden fruit, but Pride-“the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being […]) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself” (63). Lewis also wrote about evolution in a series of letters to his friend Captain Bernard Acworth, a strong opponent of evolution. In one 1944 letter, Lewis wrote,
Just as my belief in my own immortal & rational soul does not oblige or qualify me to hold a particular theory of the pre-natal history of my embryo, so my belief that Men in general have immortal & rational souls does not oblige or qualify me to hold a theory of their pre-human organic history-if they have one. (Ferngren and Numbers, 1996)
Did you notice the Calvin quote in the excerpt above? Jerusalem is supremely important, but Athens (reason and scientific discovery) is pretty important, too.
So I guess I’m far enough along on the walk that I’m not worried that I’ll bail. My foundation is pretty solid.
But I would like to discuss the above with some folks with more advanced doctrinal and theological chops than I have at present.
I may not be a baby Christian anymore, but I feel like I’m probably still an adolescent (which is how I often feel in general, which may say something about my level of progress in a number of life’s areas.)