To Build a Home

As I sit in my office (or glorified spare room) studying the theory of the atonement and how best we are to understand Christ's sacrifice on the cross for the satisfaction of sin, I am struck by a stark revelation: a deeper understanding will not necessarily bring about about a deeper devotion. That is not to say that a deeper understanding is worthless, but rather truth without faith is not very much at all.

I read a great example of this in Kiekegaard's journals: understanding without devotion is like renting a house and filling it with possessions and furniture but being left standing there without a beloved to share life with. Christianity is not something to be believed but something to be lived. Ultimately a quest for more and more knowledge will be an unsatisfied one; according to the Kierkegaardian there is a limit to reason, and a limit to understanding. Unless we are prepared to make the leap into living we are left with an empty house built with solid understandable bricks but no-one to share it with.

This resonates with me. When I read through the life of Jesus and his teachings, although to some extent his project is one of truth and understanding, his teachings are ultimately of a practical nature, his aim is to urge people to live more fully not to know more. He doesn't give us a nice tidy doctrine in which to do this with. He asks confusing questions, he spits in people's eyes, he flips orthodoxy on its head. Any attempt to tie Jesus' teachings into a neatly understood system seem entirely to miss the point- he is urging you to live in fullness of God.

According to Kierkgeaard our sense of human reason is tainted by the condition of sin. Our distance from God makes Christianity seem repulsive at times. It is only in living in faith that we can fully embrace Christianity. Yet the temptation I have is to desire everything to be neat, for my knowledge to be complete, for my theology to be orthodox and my understanding of God to be much richer than anyone else's. If Kierkgeeard is right however, then I am deeply lacking if I do not live it. If the doctrine of the atonement is no more to me than just another philosophical argument, if it makes no difference to how I speak to my wife, how I spend my money and what I do tomorrow, then it is futile.

"What good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life;- what good would it be to me if the truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?" S. Kierkegaard's Journals, August 1 1835

That isn't to say we ought to abandon reason altogether- Kierkgegaard doesn't endorse irrationalism as some have supposed, but he merely recognises the limits of reason. What if Truth were not something that could be discovered by looking at more evidence, what if Truth were not something we could prove, what if Truth were a person? If this is the case, it seems that Kierkegaard is right, what we need is not a reasonable understanding but a complete devotion.

Limit to Your Love

I've suddenly realised of late that it's all about love. If it wasn't for love, I would have no faith, the words of the Bible wouldn't move me, the evidence for the existence of God wouldn't convince me. Love is so central to faith, that without it, I think faith is utterly inconceivable.

I've just graduated from three years of studying philosophy; it's been such an interesting, challenging three years. I've read so much, I've been exposed to so many different ways of thinking. I've learnt to think differently, to structure arguments well, to read the densest texts, to pick apart worldviews, ideas and concepts. I honestly think that philosophy is such a useful subject for any human being, the ability to think is vital to a life lived to the full. And philosophy is something that the Church needs to learn how to use; as theism becomes a less and less fashionable intellectual position, we need to be able to show that we believe because it is true, not just because.

But I realised something the other day, I was having a late night whisky with my housemate who also studies philosophy. And I asked him “Do you know anything now that you didn't know when you started? Are you any closer to the truth?”. And I realised, actually philosophy hasn't brought me closer to the truth. I might be able to argue why I'm a naive realist, or why I think scepticism is an incoherent position, but it has little bearing on reality. Don't get me wrong, I think those things are useful to think about, I think reason and argument is so useful to our society, but I'm not sure they bring me closer to truth.

It's hard to explain why I am committed to Jesus, why I have surrendered my life and my will to a deity that seems unknowable at times. It's hard to explain why I can believe in things which I think are genuinely contra to reason and logic, like the doctrine of the trinity or the incarnation. But I do. And I sleep intellectually sound at night. I'm not a deluded fool. I think, I debate, I argue. But I firmly believe there is more to life. I firmly believe that I am created by a loving God. The evidence supports my beliefs; the historical evidence for Jesus the Messiah and his resurrection, the arguments for theism, the change I have seen in the lives of my friends. They're all perfectly reasonable 'reasons' to believe. But it doesn't convince me beyond doubt.

“The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love” 1 John 4:8

I've realised recently that it's all about love. I can't explain love, I can't pin it down, I can't argue for it, I can't argue against it. But honestly, I can't deny it. In my mind, the biggest failure of reductionism and humanism is that it provides a thin vision of humanity. You can tell me that love is a sequence of chemical reactions and releasing of endorphins. But it just doesn't cut it for me. That's such a limit to my experience of love. I don't understand what love is, I don't understand why. If all that exists is this universe, matter, energy and decay, this is all meaningless. There is no love in that world view. But I cannot live without love. It is so undeniable to me. The spirituality of mankind is such a reality to me; the way a piece of music can move me to tears, the way a close friend can hurt me so deeply, the bond between me and my parents, the longing I have for justice. I can't deny that love is central to who I am.

Love moves me to faith. The bible says that God is love. If that's true, it makes so much sense that love is such a tangible reality, but such an irreducible concept. The bible says that everything else in this world will cease, religion will die out. It says that I can be the most moral person, the most intelligent, the most faithful person but if I lack love in my life, it's all pointless.

I know, more than anything else in this life, that love is real. It is inexplicable and it is undeniable. It is all about love. And because I know this, I know God. I know more than any argument could ever show me that there exists something more than what we see, something more than what is reasonably evident. I cannot stop believing until I stop loving.

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.