The role of doubt

I just finished listening to a Speaking of Faith episode in which Krista Tippett interviewed Jennifer Michael Hecht about the material in her book on the history of doubt. Doubt, particularly in the context of religious orthodoxy, is frequently seen as dangerous or as evidence of moral failure. The picture that Hecht paints, however, is quite different. She says that doubt has always existed alongside faith, and that it is in periods where doubt has been the prevailing attitude that the greatest ideological progress has been made. She looks at some of the great figures of doubt throughout history, from Diogenes and Epicurus to Job, Jesus, Hobbes, Paine, and others. One of the overarching themes that I heard her talk about was that doubt can actually be a good and productive thing, and has frequently taken a positive form rather than one of negation. So her book is now high on my list of things to read!

This topic is particularly relevant to me right now as I am in a period of what could probably be called doubt. And for me it is definitely not doubt in a negative sense of wanting to tear down, but in the positive sense of wanting to cut away that which is only dogma so as to find a firm foundation on which to stand.

The What or the Way?

I like certainty. I like to know the way things are and how they got to be that way, cause and effect. I like to know why. Right and wrong. Good and bad. These things serve as a sort of compass, a means for maintaining bearings in a topsy turvy world.

Yet I am becoming increasingly convinced that the process of learning and growth is more important than the possession of any set of concrete facts. I have been noticing that the God portrayed in the Bible has never really given people certainty. For example, when Job and Habbakuk asked the big why questions, God responded by reminding them that He was in control and that they should trust Him. And Jesus didn’t really talk much about the whats and whys either, according to the gospel record. Although he did talk a lot about loving your neighbor, following Him, and being connected to Him as branches are to a vine.

This whole business of following, and connection to God and others, seems risky and uncertain in some ways. Following means I don’t know where I’ll end up. Connection means that I can’t survive alone.

But I think there are some good things about this too. For one thing, my faith will never be stale. When it is about a journey and relationships, there are always new experiences, discoveries, and vistas that help me to get new and deeper perspectives. In relinquishing my desire for a set of whats, I am liberated to believe in a God who is too big to be completely defined.

So I am trying to follow the way of Christ, and think differently about what it really means to be a Christian.

Knowing God’s voice: The problematic case of Abraham

I am experiencing what I knew would be the hard part about having a blog, which is actually keeping it up! It is even harder at the beginning I think, because I have so many thoughts running around in my head that it’s hard to find a good place to begin in attempting to make them coherent. But I think I will start by looking at the various ways of knowing mentioned in the Bible: knowing about God, knowing God’s will, knowing God, etc.

The story of apprehending God’s will that absolutely blows my mind and, quite frankly, bothers me is the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac at God’s command (as recounted in Genesis 22). When I have heard this story taught/preached, the focus is usually on Abraham’s faith. Indeed, the writer of Hebrews (in Hebrews 11) praises Abraham for his faith that he demonstrated in not withholding Isaac, his miracle child, from God when He asked for him back. Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) also marvels at Abraham’s faith, suggesting that in faith he may have believed ‘on the strength of the absurd’ that he would somehow get Isaac back again.

However, what I don’t think I have ever heard discussed is how Abraham determined that it was God who was telling him to sacrifice his son. Judging by the Biblical record, Abraham was very close to God, and their relationship had a long history. He had arguably heard God’s voice enough times previously in his life that he could recognize it again. Presumably, he also knew something of God’s character. He didn’t have a written record of God’s dealings with people through history (such as the Bible), and God hadn’t given the ten commandments yet. But it seems fair to say that he had to have at least a basic grasp of God’s character and moral law.

The problem this raises is that when God tells him to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham doesn’t even question whether or not this is God (or if he does, the Biblical record gives no indication). This is in spite of the fact that the command God gives is more in keeping with the practices of paganism and the gruesome offerings sacrificed to pagan deities than anything remotely resembling God’s moral law. I might also add that it also sounds similar to his nephew Lot’s actions in offering up his virgin daughters to be gang raped in an attempt to protect the guests in his home (Genesis 19).

It seems there are a couple possible options for explaining Abraham’s approach. Either he did not know God’s moral law and prohibition of murder, and therefore saw nothing inconsistent in the command he received; or he placed a higher value on his sense-experience perception of what God was telling him than he did on his previously acquired knowledge of God. It seems to me that the first option is not likely. For someone to walk as closely with God as Abraham did and not know enough of His character to at least be aware that He would (generally) not be pleased by the sacrifice of his offspring seems improbable. That leaves the second option. So to be clear: Abraham acted drastically on the input he received through his sense experience rather than rational application of previous knowledge.

The implications of this are huge. The best example I can think of to illustrate this in the present era is that, if we are to follow Abraham’s example, we would be obligated to fly a plane into a building if we believed we heard God’s voice telling us to do so.

People who say they hear God’s voice today are usually looked at with suspicion. We may ask if they hear these voices often, if they have been to a psychiatrist lately, and if they are taking their medication. If they seem otherwise sane, we would probably ask what they were hearing, and compare that with what we think we know of God from the Biblical record. This rational application of previously acquired knowledge certainly trumps any supposed divine revelation most of the time; anything that does not line up is judged to be, at best, not from God. And I would guess that if a Christian told his pastor that God told him to fly a plane into a building, the pastor would probably call in the elders for an exorcism.

Another recommended way to judge whether something is from God is to ask for the counsel of Godly people – usually those senior to oneself. Yet Abraham does not do this either. The Bible indicates in Genesis 14 that, at least earlier in his life, Abram (as he was called at the time) had interactions with Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who the Bible says was “the priest of the most high God.” I don’t know if Melchizedek was still around by the time this incident occurred, but the fact that there was, somewhere, a “priest of the most high God” suggests that there were other followers of God that Abraham might have consulted. Not least of which would be his wife, the mother of the son he was prepared to sacrifice. Yet the author of Genesis seems to indicate that Abraham told no one else of God’s command, and did not ask for anyone’s help in determining if it was actually from God.

So where does this leave us? Do we say that Abraham is an anomaly – that his (childish?) obedience is a nice example of faith, but that this is a type of faith we should never practice? Or should we act like children of Abraham, and listen to God’s voice and follow wherever it leads?

I’ve realized that this also points more generally to the seemingly antithetical approaches of reason and faith. I would like to think that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive; rather, I would like to think that in fact it is impossible to have a mature faith without reason or a reason that makes any sense without faith. Yet the case of Abraham seems to falsify this position.

I don’t quite know how to even wrap this one up, except to say that I am sure I will revisit these issues of reason and faith in future writings. I do believe that God still speaks, and I hope that I will get better at listening. But, for better or worse, I know I don’t have the faith of Abraham.

a note about me

I consider myself to be a non-typical, progressive Seventh-Day Adventist. I was raised a conservative Adventist and went through a combination of home-schooling and the Adventist educational system through college. I went to a secular educational institution for the first time for my Master’s degree (unless you count a few weeks of summer drivers’ ed at the local high school).

While my childhood would seem to be pretty good and non-traumatic from the outside, it left me with a ton of religious baggage that I have been working through ever since. The picture I saw of God’s love, as reflected by the people who claimed to represent Him, made me wonder if this was really love, and if it was, if it was even a good thing. I was also taught to know the difference between right and wrong, and I honor my parents for that. However, everything was framed in terms of right and wrong. No shades of gray were allowed. As I grew older, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with this limited view. I yearned to know God, but all the while I was terrified that He would turn out to really be like the worst version of God that I could imagine. My beliefs started to shift slightly away from those of my parents; as they did, I was excited by the new, personal and loving God that I was getting to know, but also scared to be venturing out of the world where all the rights and wrongs were safely defined.

I am still on that journey: still haunted by my early view of God, still occasionally longing for the certainty of knowing exactly where all the lines are drawn, and still thrilled to occasionally get a better view of our awesome God.

During the school year when I am at home (I am on the west coast for an internship currently) I go to church online at the Forest Lake web church. I would prefer going to a ‘real-life’ church, but there aren’t any around where I feel I can go for real spiritual nourishment and fellowship. I would love to be able to meet with fellow believers who embrace the ‘generous Adventist orthodoxy‘ that Marcel of Re-inventing the Adventist Wheel describes. Since I can’t get that locally, I take the online version.

Finally, a few words about why I am blogging anonymously. It kind of goes against the grain for me to not say who I am, since I generally believe in personal accountability and all that. There are a couple reasons I am not doing so here. First, I don’t necessarily want my family (especially my parents) to know everything I am thinking along these lines; I know that I have already caused my very conservative Adventist parents quite a bit of pain by doing things like drinking coffee and getting my ears pierced, so I would like to avoid causing more. The second and perhaps not quite so honorable reason is that as I am beginning my professional life I don’t want the first Google hit for my name to come to this blog. This is NOT to say that I am ashamed of my faith: I will happily tell anyone that I am a Christian, and I hope that my life also testifies to that fact.

That said, if any of my (at this point extremely hypothetical) readers would really like to know who I am, I will probably tell them if they email me and ask nicely. =)

Beginnings

I have been considering starting a blog for my spiritual musings and quandaries for a while now. Today I happened on a fantastic and encouraging community of progressive Adventist blogs, like those at Re-inventing the Adventist Wheel, Intersections and ProgressiveAdventism, that encouraged and inspired me to finally just do it. I hope to join that community with this blog, and hopefully make a worthwhile contribution. I am hoping that as I chronicle my journey I may also be helped by others along the way.

My agenda is to articulate my struggles to find the roots of faith. The pretentious way of putting it is to say that I am concerned with spiritual epistemology – how do we know what we know, how should we know, and how can those ways of knowing be justified as leading to a knowledge of the true?

I am a fledgling academic (PhD student currently), and as such I have become accustomed to approaching things critically. I have for quite a while lamented the fact that there is not much within traditional Adventism that is geared for intellectuals, and many things that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Case in point: what academic will not be turned off by a Bible study guide that asks her to fill in the blanks after reading a Bible verse?! And when traditionalists cling to a standard liturgy on Saturday morning (because that is what has always been done, and what has always been done must be right), how can we claim that our belief system is more than just a cultural construct? In trying to think of ways that a (Adventist) Christian worldview might be defended to intellectuals, I have realized that the first thing to establish is the foundation and frame of how knowledge is acquired and what type of knowledge is considered to be valid. Hence my questions about epistemology.

In the spirit of reflexivity and to make this more concrete: How did I come to the belief that I am saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and that he will come one day to take all who believe in him to heaven? I was raised an Adventist, so the obvious answer is that I believe it because that is what I have been taught by the authority figures in my life (i.e., my parents). This only supports the ‘Christianity-as-a-cultural-construct’ argument. The other obvious answer is that I believe because the Bible says so. Now I do believe that the Bible is God’s word, and that there are many strong arguments for its validity (internal, historical, prophetic, etc.). And yet the Bible is another collection of things that other people have said – records of their encounters with God. So in a way it still comes down to what other people have told me. What differentiates these people’s accounts from accounts of interaction with, say, the Abominable Snowman, or sightings of the Loch Ness Monster? Also, I can’t say that I could rattle off all the reasons the Bible is valid, and these are reasons that I have heard from those who come from the same belief system I do; there are other experts who would disagree with them. Since I am not an expert in most of the issues I just kind of go with the side I have been taught.

Another angle to take is to say I believe because I have experienced a saving relationship with Christ in my own life. Changed lives are certainly one of the best witnesses for the power of God, but also one of the biggest vulnerabilities when Christians do not seem at all like Christ. And people can say that their lives have been changed by many things – perhaps they have become better at managing their stress by doing yoga, or made positive life changes for the sake of the baby they just had.

Another way of knowing could be by direct divine revelation. But how can divine revelation be validly distinguished from the tricks of one’s own mind, or a substance-induced altered state?

I believe (and here I go again with my beliefs!) that there are ways God makes himself known to us, and that these ways can be identified and justified. I have some initial thoughts and intuitions, but I don’t think I am at the point where I can defend my views well. That is why I am trying to sort things out here.

I should also say at the outset that I do not consider myself to be a great intellectual; half the time I feel like an idiot, and the other half I feel like a fool. My only hope is that I can be God’s fool.

The title of this blog comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Finally, I am encouraged by Christ’s words recorded in John 8:32:

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.