Amanda (Hontz) Drury on Doubt

Heard a great sermon this morning by Amanda Drury at College Wesleyan Church, best sermon I can remember ever hearing on the subject (I love it when God gives object lessons showing that women can preach every bit as well as men).  One of the lectionary texts for today was John 20, where Thomas doubts Jesus' resurrection.  The sermon should come up on the CWC site sometime this week.

I personally had several take-aways:

• Don't doubt alone--doubt among friends (although Amanda indicated that the Josh McDowell approach to doubt is less than helpful for the sincere doubter, let me take her one step further and say that the "Oh, you just need to learn a few things" approach to doubt usually comes from those who know far less than they think they know and is just as likely to push the doubter into an even greater crisis).
• From Karl Barth (pronounced BART): Don't weigh your quantity of doubt against your quantity of faith.  The measure of your doubt doesn't count.  Faith "the size of a mustard seed" outweighs vast measures of doubt (she pitted a bowling ball against a clump of balloons).
• Wait for Jesus to appear next week.  In John, there is a week between when Thomas doubts the appearance to the disciples and when Jesus shows up to quell his doubts.  It may be more than a week before Jesus makes his presence known to your heart... just keep putting one step in front of the next until it happens.
• Trust in the faith of others when you are struggling yourself.  For Amanda, she trusted in the faith of John during a hard spot.  You can also read Scriptures and read the creeds and affirmations of faith during a dark spell--focus on what you believe in them, not on what you are doubting.
• For one of my friends, the main take-away was that you cannot control the "what" of your doubt and you cannot control the "when" of your doubt, but you can control the "how."  Doubt like Thomas did, not like Pilate did.

Great sermon!  Listen to it when it comes up on the CWC site.

Christianity in a Christopher Hitchens world

Christopher Hitchens died early this morning.  Notoriously outspoken on everything, notorious political conservative, those in my circles will know him most for his vocal role in the new atheism.

Figures like the triumvirate of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris are on the poster of post-Christendom.  Mind you, most Americans still believe in God.  And a simple listening to the GOP debates will confirm that Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism are far from dead.  Those who like to tout how cool they are because they know we are now in an age of post-Christendom are likely a bit premature.

Belief of all kinds is persistent.  It usually is not rational.  People will believe in things they hold dear in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  No, I do not want to use Hitchens as an argument for post-Christendom.

What he and the other new atheists represent is a powerful force in Western society.  They will not convince those over 30.  The most long-standing front in the battle of ideas is with our children, teens, and twenty somethings.  What impact will people like Hitchens have on them?

At one time, we could shield our children from ideas we didn't like.  We still have home schooling, Christian high schools, and private Christian colleges.  Then there's the internet, the great leveler.  And there are movies and satellite.

Here are my suggestions, for what it's worth:

1. Focus on what is really central and important in Christian faith.  Major on the major.  God exists, loves, and is active in the world.  Christ reconciles us to God and shows us how to love our neighbor.  The rest is the details.

2. Learn something.  Let's face it, we've earned the reputation we have for being stupid.  Start listening to the experts on whatever subject--that's why they're called experts.

Don't get me wrong.  Anger driven ignorance goes a long way.  But you have to keep feeding the anger, and you have to work constantly to dodge the experts.  Anger runs out and leaves you feeling empty.  You get tired of trying to come up with new counter-experts.

It's your choice.  I'm betting the strategy above has more staying power.  I'm betting we'll keep more of our children in the faith.  I'm betting we'll have healthier churches.

My Faith Development Model

For both the Missional Church and spiritual formation course this week, we looked and are looking at various faith development models, thinking about how people go about changing (in the Missional course toward changing attitudes toward mission, in the spiritual formation course about changing individually).

In the spiritual formation course, Change and Transformation, the whole class basically by partial coincidence, ended up looking at either James Fowler or M. Scott Peck. Peck's looked to me like a modification of Kierkegaard: 1) chaotic, 2) fundamentalist, 3) agnostic, and 4) mystic. Fowler's has 7 stages, the first four of which he finds fairly normal and the last 3 of which he suggested only some people reach.

Part of the assignment was to come up with one's own sense of faith development stages and I found myself coming up with more of a Venn diagram, which I will only talk through here:

1. Default: unreflective faith or non-faith
One begins with an inherited default set of beliefs and practices or non-beliefs, etc.

2. Path 1: never becoming reflective
A person might never reflect on the beliefs or non-beliefs and practices they inherited from their parents or environment their entire life.

3. Moments of reflection
For most people their default faith comes to various moments of reflection to various degrees. In these moments, they will make faith choices.

4. Path 2: from faith toward non-faith
Some people whose default is faith will move to varying degrees away from faith and faith practices.

5. Path 3: from non-faith to faith
Some people whose default is non-faith will move to varying degrees toward faith and faith practices.

6. Identity commitment
A few people, not many really in the vast scheme of things, find themselves investing their core identity to a particular set of faith or non-faith beliefs and practices.

7. Path 4: commitment to fundamentalist faith or non-faith
Some commit themselves to a rather rigid and narrow approach to faith or non-faith, usually with a very cognitive orientation. Yes, there are fundamentalist atheists.

8. Path 5: commitment to mystical faith or agnosticism
Another set of individuals commit to a more personal and existential approach to faith or non-faith. The person of faith cannot fully explicate the basis for their beliefs and practices but they are at peace with them. Similarly, the agnostic cannot deny the possibility of faith but is at peace with a doubtful uncertainty.

20 Something Faith Abandonment

The opening two paragraphs of a master's project at IWU:
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"Katie* was a dedicated teenager in the youth ministry at Anonymous Wesleyan Church* for four years. She was the type of girl who every leader would want in his ministry. Katie was passionate about Christ and didn’t hesitate to share her passion with others. She was a leader both in actions and in words. To top it off, Katie was a beautiful young lady who her peers enjoyed being around. After years of going on mission trips with the youth group and serving on the leadership team the time came for Katie to graduate and head off to college. Within the first year of her collegian journey, word came back to the church that Katie was no longer attending church, no longer living her life above reproach and no longer desiring to make good decisions. Katie had walked away from the Lord and her faith because it wasn’t convenient in this season of her life.

"Katie is not the exception of those who have participated in the youth ministry of Anonymous Wesleyan Church. Unfortunately situations such as Katie’s are more of the norm. As the youth pastor of Anonymous for the past thirteen years, the greatest hurt and frustration I have had to deal with is watching teens that I personally have invested in graduate from high school and walk away from their faith. I’m afraid that loving a teen just isn’t enough to create a committed disciple of Christ. The means by which the gospel is communicated and the expectations placed on our teens are ineffective and need to be overhauled."

Faith after High School: Planning for Future Re-entry

American churches are bleeding Chrsitians, it seems. A student in IWU's grad ministry program is doing his final project on the many former teens from his youth group who have lost faith or completely stopped going to church since they graduated from high school. He has several surveys going on surveymonkey.com.

Of course there are some books out there that are in the neighborhood. McLaren has his Everything Must Change, as does Bishop Spong from a different angle.

The student will have some solid research behind his conclusions, but I have some thoughts that I'll throw out here for discussion (the rest of Hebrews nine is underway, but this seemed more immediately interesting).

1. Christian faith seems irrelevant to our kids. I was having a somewhat frustrated conversation with a friend the other day over what Wesleyans should do for a sort of "confirmation" with kids who were baptized as infants. A nearby teen reaction to the conversation was something like what sort of freaks argue over baptism.

Of course my hunch is that just about everything truly meaningful in life is irrelevant to our upper middle class "Christian" teens, many (perhaps most) of whom are doing drugs, having sex, and drinking just like all the other upper middle class kids in their high school. It is not at all just the "lower" end doing these things. The wealthiest high school in a nearby town, full of rich brats, is permeated with drugs and alchohol. It seems like a drunk student from there kills him or herself by running into a tree or something at least once a year.

This bored, pleasure level subsistence is an American problem, not particularly a Christian one. We're a fat nation ripe for being conquered or undergoing crisis because we lack for nothing pleasurable and have no interest in anything lasting. When I lived in England, I was shocked by how stupid Europeans think we are. When I landed back at the Detroit airport and listened to the conversations on a bus leaving the plane, I saw their point. Then after Iraq, we became the scariest nation in the world to them because "stupid" was shooting missiles at everyone.

2. We are a hyper-individualistic culture. Say whatever you think about cults, polygamist Mormons, old fashioned holiness types. But they have a group dynamic that keeps people in the group. The ethos of the current generation of middle class Christian students graduating from college is to blend in with the secular world. And they are blending right into non-existence as Christians. Non-denominational meets non-identity.

3. No "youth lesson" can compete with human sexuality. Our youth pastors can go "blah, blah, blah" about saving sex till marriage or about homosexuality. But it seems that most of this generation are going to have sex anyway. You can't watch them 24/7 and indeed to do so might create a solution more damaging than the problem.

I'm not affirming it. I'm saying I have never been more discouraged about Christians being "holy" than I have become this past year. Maybe I've been blind all these years to what people in the church are really like. My verse of the year is from Joshua 24--"You cannot serve the LORD your God. It will be too hard for you."

I have no great wisdom here (and thankfully no problems with my own family). But I do think that we need to start planning for re-entry into the Christian community once prodigal teens begin to think about marriage and children. I'm not condoning the "testing" years. What I'm advocating is an ethos that somehow projects a bright Christian future when our teens eventually have families.

If we could put a picture in our teens' minds of a day when they raise a Christian family, then they may begin to remember the homeland from some far away country they eventually find themselves in. I have no great wisdom for those for whom homosexuality is the issue, except that the church without question should welcome those who choose to remain celibate. The church will have to wrestle with how to be Christ to those who do not.

But a day will come for most when the competition between sexual drive and church ends. How are we planning today, when they are teens, when they are children, for future re-entry, for those who leave us in the meantime? If we do no planning, we are planning for them to fade away rather than to return. But an ever increasing number, I fear, will leave as soon as they are free.

Values usually are not rational. They are stored deep in a child's subconscious before they can reason. They are triggered powerfully by rituals. Say what you want. "Teaching" is powerless next to this deep magic.

Faith and Rationality

I posted this on Scot McKnight's blog the other day.
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... I do sympathize with Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) at least to the extent that so much religious thinking does seem to involve dysfunctional thinking. This is a way of thinking that, if we used the same logic in real life, would lead us constantly to misunderstand conversation, to berate others for no reason, to argue vehemently that the sidewalk is actually the road--or someone else's driveway.

To a great extent, such mis-thinking is harmless, indeed beneficial because it fosters meaningful existence. Where it gets us into trouble is when it leads us to hurt others or stops peace processes or flies planes into tall buildings.

To keep my own faith (I can't stomach a disconnect between my religion and the thinking I do in the rest of my life, sorry Kierkegaard), I have had to adopt a particular hermeneutic that disagrees with Dawkins when he says that faith is not convinced by evidence. In order for me to truly affirm God as a God of Truth who actually exists ontologically, then my faith in him cannot be more irrational than rational. That doesn't mean I have to be able to prove he exists--frankly, I don't think I can prove that I exist as a person (I could be a really sophisticated computer program).

So when it comes to science or biblical studies or any field of knowledge, if the overwhelming majority of those competent to judge an issue have reached a particular conclusion, if I cannot identify a clear fatal presupposition leading them to that conclusion, then I have to take that as the most likely conclusion given the evidence we have at the moment. I always have a footnote for the new discovery, for the unexpected paradigm shift. I won't call it fact. But I admit that if I am to affirm something different, I am doing it in the name of "blind faith" on this issue. [note, refusing an overall irrational worldview does not mean that I cannot accommodate points of irrationality within that overall view].

Chicago Statements and Losing Faith

Today I came across the title of an older book by prolific writer Bart Ehrman, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. If I might psychoanalyze the title, it seems full of the anger of an ultraconservative who has just lost faith.

Our division chair, David Smith, sent me this story about some of Ehrman's most recent autobiographical words on his loss of faith: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/june/11.26.html. Although Ehrman was raised as an Episcopalian, he went to Moody, then Wheaton, then Princeton before he became a "happy agnostic."

What really saddens me about this tale is that the process that resulted in such anger was completely unnecessary. From the title of his book I mentioned above, you can see that the beginnings of his faith loss started with a commitment to the KJV as the right text that is just begging to be destroyed by any study whatsoever. Not that there aren't some intelligent people who think the "textus receptus" is the most accurate text (e.g., http://www.daveblackonline.com/). But I would argue they believe this because of their presuppositions, not because of an honest assessment of the evidence.

According to Ehrman's new book, he lost his faith when he found what he thought to be one concrete error, Mark's mention of Abiathar as the high priest in the time of David, while Samuel says it was Abimelech. This type of thing used to trouble me as well when I was in my late teens. I actually have a book of some 700 pages called Alleged Discrepencies that tries to iron out these sorts of things. For Southern Baptists and others, the Chicago statement on inerrancy demands that you be able to explain every single incidence in Scripture like this one or else we can't have Christian faith.

What a waste! ... to lose your faith because of matters like whether there was one blind man or two, whether Jesus was crucified the day before Passover or on the day of Passover itself. What ever happened to "on Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand; all other ground is sinking sand"?

I have no interest to spend my time trying to find problems in the Bible. But, but to be blunt, Christ's incarnation and resurrection do not rise or fall with the Bible's inerrancy--especially when it is defined as narrowly as the Chicago statement. Did Joshua conquer Jebus or not? It's an interesting question, but "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again"!

Somehow I suspect that people whose faith is so troubled with details like these have taken their eye off the ball, er, off Christ. Christ is God; the Bible gives witness to them. Even Jesus says in John that he gives witness to the Father, not to himself. So how twisted is it to get so preoccupied with these sorts of details in the Book that you forget Who it is really about? Not a truth of the Apostle's Creed is affected by whether Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple in the first or third year of his ministry.

I've argued here a while back that the Wesleyan Church as a whole has never connected its understanding of inerrancy to the Chicago statement. For us, the word "inerrancy" is not closely or narrowly defined. As Asbury puts it, "The Bible is inerrant in all it affirms." But we give some slack to our Bible scholars, pastors, and studious laypeople to wrestle with just what that might mean.

This is why I think a group of Free Methodist pastors from southern Michigan are ultimately barking up the wrong tree in their attempt to move the FM church more solidly in a Chicago statement direction. Well intentioned, they will condemn some in their midst to unnecessary faith crises because they are majoring on the minor.

What a waste! The lines that Moody and perhaps Wheaton drew for Ehrman set him up for a completely unnecessary faith crisis. So beware, ye Wesleyans and Free Methodists. "Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!" That's the cake. There's a lot of delicious icing on the cake. But it's icing. Christ takes the cake!