Why I am not a cynic

I sometimes wonder if people think I'm a cynic. At times I struggle to engage with Church like others do. I find singing sometimes awkward and frustrating. I find the certainty and glossiness of Church annoying and false. I find the lack of honesty and doubt troubling. I see the deep need to challenge people. But I'm not a cynic.

There is a risk of labeling anyone who questions or comments on 'Church' with this title. The fear, I think, is that people like this (people like me) are in danger of filling the Church with negativity, with breeding an unhelpful culture. After all- questioning leads to doubt. Guess we better not question then.

The thing is, I can identify more with the outsider than the insider. Even though I have done it all my life; I think that Church is a pretty strange thing, and at times I don't get it. Sometimes I don't really sing very enthusiastically, sometimes I look distracted in the talks, sometimes I leave without complimenting the preacher on his message. Sometimes I don't really enjoy myself.

I overheard a conversation the other day between two of my friends. A comment from a non-Church going guy was that he found that Church lacked doubt- that it was a place of people coming together and declaring and worshiping with utter conviction. But for someone exploring with uncertainty and doubt, it might seem difficult to ever 'become' like them, to join in fully. And, at times I find this too. I find it difficult to join in. I find it difficult to declare with as much certainty as others seem to have. I find myself asking questions, thinking, and not always agreeing with everything I hear.

But this doesn't mean that I don't want to see people discovering Christ. It doesn't mean that I don't long to see the Church renewed. It doesn't mean that I don't think faith in Jesus is infinitely valuable. Just because I don't like your method, doesn't mean I'm not after the same thing that you are. It might mean that people like this, people that question, slow the process down, it might mean that Church is not always as encouraging. It even might mean that you don't enjoy it quite as much. But if we don't give space to the thinkers, to the doubters, to the questioners then we are in danger of producing a Church which is more about making people that all think the same rather than people that follow Christ. The question is, which of these two things is truly more important?

If the Church is a body composed of different parts we need people like this in our Church. We cannot run the risk of breeding a Church of like minded people. There has to be room to question, to doubt, to challenge. There has to be scope to allow people like this to shape the future of the Church without being squashed and ignored or cast aside as 'cynics'. And equally it is unhelpful to just become a Church of 'cynics'; to ignore the mainstream, to cut ourselves off from the enthusiastic. We need to learn the value of these words:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” ...God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Believe

I'm finding it difficult to believe recently.

Jesus doesn't offer us a theory or a proof to be grappled with and criticised. But I have a tendency to think like that. Probably something to do with studying philosophy for the last five years. The problem I find with philosophy is that it does not offer us a firm foundation to anchor ourselves on- I can spend three months debating, reading and thinking about the best model of consciousness- but my conclusion doesn't seem to have any bearing on my actual life. Outside of the philosophy classroom determinists, libertarians, sceptics, realists, logical positivists, empiricists- they all act the same. There's huge differences in their arguments and their perspectives, but it doesn't alter how they spend their Saturday afternoon or their bank balance. At least in my experience philosophy rarely has any bearing on my actual life, yet it makes some strong and demanding claims. On every level of life, soceity, medicine, science, art, perception- it has something to say. Somehow I find it difficult to ever really apply. As a philosopher I'm an ardent supporter of common sense realism, anti-scepticism, compatibilism and monotheism. None of these things change or have any effect on how I live.

Jesus claims that he comes to bring life, and life to the full. Jesus doesn't offer us a doctrine to leave in the classroom, a theory to grapple with and then get busy living. Unless belief infiltrates every aspect of who you are- how you spend your Saturday afternoon, what you do with your money, how you think, how you act- then it's not true what Jesus says.

The Church in the UK has been dormant for the last century in some cases, and despite being a 'Christian country', we're on the whole a nation of apathetic non-believing agnostics. Partly I think, because we're have been fascinated with Christianity as a concept- as basis for our laws, as a basis for state, as a concept. But Jesus doesn't give you that option. That's not Christianity.

I'm struggling to believe because I'm stubborn, because I'm lazy, because I don't allow Jesus to radicalize my very existence, to transform everything I have. It's easier to think of this is a concept to be grappled with, as an argument to be won. But let me ask you, do you really believe? Do you really believe that a God made you in his image and sent himself as a human to die? Do you really believe that the world will be restored and reconciled with its creator, and that you'll be resurrected into a perfect eternity? I'm sorry but if you really believed that, you'd do more; it wouldn't be something to be grappled with, something to prove or disprove- it would be something that would radically upset my me-centered universe.

I'm the sort of person that can't pretend very well. I don't do the whole 'Christian' thing very well I don't think. If I look like I'm not engaging with 'church', I'm probably not. If I look like I'm ready to give my life for this, I probably am.

I'm trying to challenge myself to go beyond belief. Belief is a philosophers game that can be argued for and against eternally but eventually makes little difference. I'm striving to be Christ like at the core. That's really difficult.

Switching Off

Last night I got into the bath at about 1am with a nice glass of The Balvenie 12 year old single malt after a long day. The combination of hot water, strong alcohol and reading really helps me switch off. I decided to peruse my bookshelf for an interesting read for the bath. I'm pretty good at starting Christian books but by the time I get to the last 100 pages I can never be bothered to finish them. So I decided to start yet another book. My mate (who I respect philosophically) had recommended me The Reason for God by Tim Keller a while ago so I bought it and never started it. So I sat in the bath and started to read. The introduction is really good.

One thing he said particularly stuck with me: "I urge sceptics to wrestle with the unexamined 'blind faith' on which scepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them. I also urge believers to wrestle with their personal and culture's objections to the faith. At the end of each process, even if you remain the sceptic or believer you have been, you will hold you position with both greater clarity and greater humility."

That's really a challenge that I think we need to take to heart if we want to do 'mission', if we want to share faith with those who have doubts. All too often we take a dogmatic line to faith; I have the right answer & anyone's objections must be wrong on these grounds. Or sometimes we don't really engage with people- we construct a straw man opponent; all atheists must be as aggressive and closed minded as Richard Dawkins. In my experience most atheists are well thought out, intelligent people who would love to believe in God if he existed. They just don't think he does.

I think it is easy to be dismissive of doubt and of genuinely well thought out sceptical arguments. But unless we really engage with doubt, unless we understand the perspective of the sceptic and identify with why they believe what they do we can't expect them to really listen to us.

And after all I'm not a blind follower of Jesus Christ- I'm a seeker of truth. I just believe that Jesus Christ offers me a true fulfilment of truth. If something I believe isn't true, I want to root it out. I think it's a real challenge for how we do mission.

Do we believe the truth? And on what grounds? Unless we're prepared to properly engage and understand scepticism and disbelief I think we are in danger of alienating a whole generation of people who just can't believe.

The man who knew too much

There’s always a bit of an awkward momentum when someone asks me what I do. There’s usually one of two responses to telling someone that you’re studying philosophy. Either people don’t really know what philosophy is; maybe they’ve heard of it, perhaps it rings a bell thanks to a famous duet from a singing meerkat and warthog: “it’s our problem free....philosophy”. And even when you explain to them that philosophy is all about studying ideas and asking difficult questions, or perhaps more pretentiously “the pursuit of truth and wisdom”, they still don’t really get it. Or, even more commonly they think it’s a bit of a pointless exercise. My brother for instance tells me that I’m doing a degree in ‘bull***t’. The other group of people understand what philosophy is, find philosophy really interesting, perhaps they’ve dabbled in a little part time philosophy and generally like to take the opportunity to have an interesting conversation with me. It’s fair to say I like meeting the second group of people a little more.

I remember once talking to a woman in my Church back home before I left to go to university. She asked me what I was going to be studying, so I told her. She told me that I should be careful; she’d known someone who went off to study philosophy and ended up coming back without believing in God. “Philosophy is dangerous”, she told me. Apparently there was a chance that I might suffer the same fate if I wasn’t careful. I found this quite amusing; as I saw it, Philosophy was the quest for the truth and if it turned out that Jesus wasn’t really the truth then I didn’t really want to believe in him.

I spent a lot of time in my first year trying to ‘seek the truth’, to get to the bottom of my belief. I doubted a lot and went through a similar process to Descartes of starting at the foundations of my beliefs and working out was actually ‘true’. I’ve got a lot of scraps of paper stashed away into my draw with flow charts of beliefs, I’ve got files on my computer titled “why I believe in God” and “can I really be a Christian?”. Honestly, its great fun, you should try it some time. But it’s not an easy ride. As I wrote in my blog last week, I would really struggle to believe anything very well at all if I hadn’t confronted my doubts, sought answers to my questions.

Needless to say, I’m now more than two years through my philosophy degree and it hasn’t really destroyed what I believe, the woman at my Church wasn’t completely right. But I am a very different Christian today than I was this time two years ago. I think about things very differently, I like to think that my faith is more reasonable than it was.

In a sense the woman was right; philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Before I came to university I was very much a Christian who ‘experienced’ God. I was the guy that would shake ferociously when people prayed for him, when I was meant to be playing keyboard in the worship band I would be so ‘lost in worship’ that my hands spent more time in the air than they did on the keyboard. I had ‘words’ and ‘pictures’ for people all the time, I spoke in tongues. I felt very ‘close’ to God. Some of the time, I’m still that person, but not very often. I’ve lost some of that experiential side of my faith since I’ve questioned it more. Instead of closing myself off and flailing my hands around when they play worship songs at Church, I find myself screening the songs for decent theology. Whenever someone gives me a ‘word’ from God, I am very doubtful that it didn’t come from their own head. It’s fair to say philosophy has changed me and my relationship with God.

It leaves me with two options. If philosophy is the seeking of the truth and some of my beliefs and my behaviour won’t stand up to the scrutiny of investigation then they’re irrational and I should abandon them. Or the other option is that my beliefs are the firm truth and philosophy is somehow defective in getting to the ‘real truth’. Honestly, I think there’s a bit of both going on.

I find it useful to think of a “pendulum of faith". There are two extremes of faith; we can be like I was pre-Philosopher; experiential, swayed by impulses and experiences. Our beliefs are built solely on experience and ‘closeness’ with God. The problem with this is, when our experiences fade, when we fail to be able to experience God like we used to, what is left is just a set of ungrounded, shallow beliefs. If we never take the time to investigate, to know what we believe intellectually, when experience fades (which it usually does), our faith goes with it. I think it’s also really difficult to know the difference between God speaking to us and what is just human ideas if we never take time to question. If every ‘word from God’ that I’ve ever heard is from God, if every spiritual instinct I’ve ever had was God talking to me, then I think God is probably in the business of contradicting himself an awful lot. And when the atheist philosopher comes knocking and tells you that your experiences can be explained psychologically, you are in trouble if you don’t know your faith very well. Like I said, philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Experiential faith is passionate, it feels ‘close’ to God, it can be exciting but ultimately it is without foundation, and often irrational. Because of this it pretty flimsy.

The other end of the pendulum is pure intellectualism. This is the kind of faith that any philosopher would be proud of, the kind of faith I was looking for when I started hacking away at my beliefs when I came to University. This kind of faith has a set of coherent beliefs; it questions everything and doesn’t believe until there are good reasons for belief. There are problems with this as well though. I think ultimately it is a failed project; we cannot ever have proof or certainty in God, we can’t ever have faith without doubting. We will never get to the kind of firm foundation I was looking for by purely intellectual investigation. Even if we do get to a place where we have some kind of ‘rational’ beliefs, God just becomes a ‘concept’, he is nothing more than a set of ideas. Intellectual faith can lack the passion, the drive, the closeness that experiential faith does. No one ever dies for a ‘concept’. I really don’t think that the philosophical concept of God is really in the business of changing the world. It can often just be a selfish pursuit for reasonableness.

I got to a point this summer where I knew that philosophy fell short of truth in some way. I cannot live my life for a ‘concept’ of God; I need to live my life in relationship with God in some way. Sometimes this involves believing things which don’t quite live up to the scrutiny of philosophical investigation. I think perhaps this is where philosophy falls short of truth. I can’t live my life for reason or intellectualism ultimately because I don’t really think it can change the world. But then I find that pure experientialism is blind and dangerous and I can never justify it from a philosophical perspective. So I’m seeking to find a happy medium in my life; to root out irrational false beliefs, to have a reasonable belief, but to seek God every day, to experience him intimately, to be in a relationship with him. It’s a very hard balance to strike.

If I lived for philosophy, for proofs and rationality then the woman from my Church would probably be right, I might stop believing in God. But ultimately I can’t live for philosophy, I think as much as I love to study it; it falls short of real meaning. I think philosophy seeks truth, and it has helped me to get rid of irrationality and falsity in my beliefs. At times it has stopped me worshipping God, stopped me being close to God. But ultimately I want to live for the truth, not for experience. At the same time I don’t think philosophy can really get me the whole way; it can tell me what the phenomenon of love is in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it can’t really explain why I feel it. It can explain away my experiences of the Holy Spirit in terms of psychology and social pressure, but it can’t explain how and why these experiences have shaped my life. Philosophy is limited to the facts, to the intellect of faith; and if this is the only grounds on which I believe, then the faith that I now have is irrational and wrong.

However, I do really believe that God exists, that Jesus is bringing about kingdom transformation today, but I cannot believe this by pure intellect alone. Reason falls short of real meaning and ultimately I cannot live for it. My life has meaning in Christ but I need much more than philosophy to achieve this. To me faith is all about finding the balance between believing with my mind; doubting and questioning but still seeking relationship with God in my heart, trying to be obedient to him even when I can’t explain everything. But then again there's always the chance that I'm just wrong....

I’d be interested to know if anyone else struggles with this, how you find the balance between intellect and experience. Looking forward to reading your comments.

No Doubt?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only Christian that ever doubts. Either, most Christians go along in life believing everything they say and never doubt, or they just don’t talk about it; they have their doubts but instead of voicing them, they just go on pretending. I felt very guilty for doubting my faith for a long time; I knew what I was supposed to believe, what words I was supposed to be singing, what the Bible teaches, but often I just didn’t believe it deep down. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in God and his plans for this earth, but this doesn’t mean I never doubt. Maybe I’m the only person that feels like this, or maybe there are people all around me struggling in doubt and feeling like they just can’t talk about it. I reckon doubt is something which is pretty important for our faith, but at the same time something which people are being very damaged by, because there doesn’t seem to be much room for it in ‘Christianity’. I just wish we talked about it more.

I’ve got a mate who lost his finger in an incident featuring a year eight music class and a very heavy door. When I first met him, I never really noticed he was a digit down but after getting to know the guy he became one of my close friends and eventually I noticed. We had a lot of late night chats about Jesus in our first year at university and one night we both agreed that we wanted to see more miracles happen. We found it really hard to believe the crazy stories about eyes growing back and blind people getting their sight back. So we decided if we could just see a few more miracles it would build our faith and we would doubt a lot less. So we started to pray for his finger. I remember a few times putting my hand over his slightly deformed stump and praying “in the name of Jesus, grow back finger!” For a while I would plead with God- “if you could just grow that finger back, I won’t ever be able to doubt you’re real”. But what do you know, it never happened; to this day I have a mate with a missing finger. After a few weeks, we stopped praying. I often wonder whether his finger growing back would really have made that much difference to my doubt.

I can see a lot of myself in the disciple Thomas. Thomas was one of Jesus’ best mates- a guy who watched him perform countless miracles; he had seen blind men healed, lame men walk, seen men come back from the dead. He might have even seen a mangled finger stump grow back. Thomas got to see more miracles in a few years than I could ever imagine seeing- I like to think that I would never doubt Jesus again if I was in Thomas’ position, but I’m not so sure.

After Jesus had been crucified, three days later he appeared risen from the dead to a woman called Mary, then later he visited some of the disciples. Thomas found out by word of mouth that Jesus had come back from the dead. I suspect that like me, Thomas really wanted to believe that this was true but he just couldn’t believe it- Thomas says in John 20:15 “unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were...I will not believe it”.

The philosopher in me really sympathises with Thomas; what he wants is reasonable evidence. He can’t force himself to believe something is true, without actually seeing it. I reckon I would have acted pretty similarly in the situation. Thomas’ request is a reasonable one, despite all the miracles he’s seen, he can’t make himself believe this remarkable thing, he can’t just ignore his doubts. It makes me wonder if seeing my mate’s finger grow back would really have kept doubt away for very long.

What I find interesting about this story is not so much Thomas’ doubt, but more Jesus’ response. I think often people see being a Christian as having blind faith- believing without really having much evidence. At least that’s the way the ‘new breed of atheism’ paints faith. But Jesus doesn’t refuse to meet Thomas until he believes, he doesn’t wait until Thomas’ doubt is fulfilled; he meets him where he’s at. He fulfils his desire for evidence. Jesus comes to see Thomas, scars and all and tells him to “stop doubting and believe”. Jesus really wants Thomas to believe but crucially he shows him the evidence first then he tells him to believe after.

I think that doubt is a really important part of believing. Jesus doesn’t want Thomas to have blind faith and I don’t think he wants us to have blind faith. If we don’t question what we believe, how do we ever know that we have the truth? If we aren’t open minded enough to doubt things then we end up believing things because we’ve been told them, rather than because there are any good reasons for believing them. That’s not the sort of faith I want to have, and I don’t think it’s the sort of faith that God asks of us.

It is only because I have doubted that God exists that I can really say that he exists, it is only because I doubted Jesus rose from the dead that I can honestly stand up and say that I believe he did. Doubt is shaping what I believe, for me doubt is what makes my faith active and it is what makes it real and if I couldn’t question what I believed I would just be pretending. I really believe that Jesus doesn’t want us to ignore our doubts- he wants us to engage with them, he wants to meet us where we’re at. Doubt is a healthy part of a living faith. But how can we ever do this if we never talk about doubt?

Even though Jesus satisfies Thomas’ doubt he also tells him to stop doubting and start believing. Ultimately, we can never have certainty in anything- not that the world we live in exists, that our friends actually have minds like ours, not that God exists. No amount of questioning or doubting will get us to certainty. If we end up just wrestling with doubt forever, and never accepting anything we can end up in a really difficult place. It’s pretty lonely, it feels miles away from God and it’s not very healthy. The best piece of advice I ever got about this was from an awesome German guy on a Church men’s weekend away. I was struggling to really experience God like I used to, my mind was just on overdrive being sceptical about other people meeting with God and at the same time longing for God to convince me to believe in him. So, during the worship time I just sat there pretty annoyed with God when this guy came up to me and told me quite abruptly: “don’t let your mind **** you”. You might have issues with that, and it might not have been the best way of wording it, but honestly it was exactly what I needed to hear, and I honestly think that God used his words to speak to me. He was right, I was at a place where my mind was destroying me, and doubt was destructive. Even though I know doubt can be healthy, it can equally be incredibly destroying. We really need to find this balance.

The real question is- why don’t we talk about doubt more? Why do we pretend we all believe with certainty all the time, when we don’t? Jesus doesn’t want us to hide our doubt away, to let it destroy us, he wants to meet us, he wants to satisfy our doubt and then he wants us to believe. I really think that he can do this if we let him. But then again maybe it’s just me; maybe I’m the only Christian that ever doubts anything.