Much of this article was the basis for a sermon preached at St. George's on September 19, 2010. --RLS
A song by the popular musical group Counting Crows references the Renaissance artist Michelangelo and one of his most famous works: his ceiling painting of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The Creation of Adam is the most widely recognized fresco of that masterpiece and depicts the Genesis account of God imparting life to humanity. In the Counting Crows song front man Adam Duritz sings,
I dream of Michelangelo when I am lying in my bed;
I see God on the ceiling; I see angels overhead.
And He seems so close as He reaches out his hand;
But we are never quite as close as we are led to understand.
I can appreciate the sentiment in this lyric. Some people long for God and yet lament that this longing seems unfulfilled. There is also here a kind of humility in suggesting some distance between what we claim to know of God and what we can really know of God. One senses a humble recognition of the dangers in excessive religious confidence, as well as a firm rejection of absolute truth claims about God.
Mindful of the violent strains in certain forms of religious fundamentalism today and ever glad to remind us of oppressive chapters in the church’s own past, many of today’s “thinking Christians” have abandoned the exclusive claims of the faith because at times in our history we have seen tragic results when such claims become too entangled with political power and imperial aspirations.
Yet there is more going on with such thinking than a desire for peace and religious tolerance, as important as these goals are. As those who seek to be culturally engaged Christians, it is important for us to examine the kind of assumptions underlying a view that shrinks from or simply rejects the possibility of definitive knowledge of God. Certainly such assumptions do not arise from the biblical narrative or classical Christianity that witness unambiguously to a God who reveals himself in unique and particular ways through an exclusive covenant relationship with an historical people.
So where do we get our assumptions that run counter to this witness? And what exactly are these assumptions that would lead one to doubt we could ever be quite as close to God “as we are led to understand?”
As I share often, it is as vitally important to know both what we think and why we think what we think. To think about our thinking as Christians (rather than simply to assert our opinions or insist upon our desires) is a great ministry for the church in our contemporary milieu.
In the last century, few church leaders or scholars have engaged in such critical discernment with as much wisdom and humility as Lesslie Newbigin. His long career as a British missionary, theologian, and bishop of the Church in South India and his thoughts on an increasingly secularized Great Britain toward the end of his life inspired important writing on contemporary ways of thinking about reality. His accessible and slim book, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship, is an excellent introduction to questions about what we can claim to know. The book charts a path for claims about God that runs between the limp relativism of much Protestant liberalism and the uncritical dogmatism of much conservative Christian fundamentalism.
Newbigin traces the beginnings of a dramatic shift in western thought to the Age of the Enlightenment when thinkers with names such as Rene Descartes and John Locke advanced a philosophy that has come to shape the modern mindset to such a degree that we are practically unaware of its effects. The core of this emerging thinking was that skepticism and doubt are the path to knowledge: every claim to truth must be scrutinized and filtered through natural reason and science in order to be declared objectively true. If something cannot be proven or explained by scientific method or logical reasoning, then it cannot be accepted as true but rather is relegated to the sphere of the subjective or the merely private. Thus, an essential feature of most habits of thinking in the western world over the past 400 years is the separation of knowledge and faith, a divide between objective truth and subjective truth, a dichotomy between the things that can be actually known by science and natural reason and the things that are claimed to be known by faith (e.g., God, meaning, wisdom, etc.).
Yet there is an illogical assumption at the heart of this scientific worldview: the notion that ultimate reality beyond the sphere of natural reason and science is unknowable. But how do we know that? To believe that nothing can be definitely known beyond the scientific method and natural reason is not a belief rooted in science or reason; that assumption is a faith statement itself! It assumes (unscientifically) that God, if God exists, would be limited to science and reason and closed off from revealing Himself in other ways such as through Scriptural revelation, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and especially through the person of Jesus Christ. It is a great irony that many of those who are most forcefully atheistic or agnostic about God are virtual fundamentalists on a purely scientific worldview.
Alas, we are now living in yet another epochal shift in thinking about reality, an era known as post-modernity. Many theologians, philosophers and cultural observers have commented on the death of strong confidence in science and reason as the source of all knowledge and hope for the future. The last one hundred years have witnessed the greatest technological advancements in human history – and also the most killing. Today the question is no longer “How do we know the truth?” but “Does truth even exist?” It seems that the western privileging of skepticism and doubt have run their course even through science and reason and left us with nothing to believe in at all.
And yet I think it is precisely because of our current age’s confusion about truth and knowledge that authentic Christianity has a God-given opportunity and clear mission for the world today. We have an alternative account of reality that neither restricts all knowledge to what can be objectively proven nor succumbs to the relativistic impulse to doubt all definitive universal truth claims in the first place.
The Christian’s confidence is born less in our capacity to know God than in our faith that God has nevertheless chosen to be known. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). The confidence proper to Christian witness it not one based on demonstrable proofs and sophisticated propositions. Rather it is a confidence born of a personal relationship with the One whose nature transcends science and whose love surpasses logic. It is a confidence marked not by condescension or intolerance but by love and forgiveness, gratitude and trust. It is a proper confidence the world needs now.