Christian Faith in our Time

Will be different from Christian faith in the recent past. Or for that matter During Wesley’s time, or Luther’s time, or in the time of Paul and Silas.

No matter how one defines it, faith it is a human experience, and like all human experiences is shaped by culture. How it feels to have faith, and the modes through which we become faithful are different for contemporary Americans than the were for past generations of Americans, because our cultural has changed. And is changing.

The changes are not only generational. Depending on one’s social location they may have happened far earlier or later. When I was child my father was completing a PhD in a major university. And we were in a family of educators at a university level. We went to a Methodist church full of university people. Yes, we lived in the South.  But my culture was far different from some of my later friends who were raised in small rural towns and cites. So while cultural shifts are most obvious between generations, they can’t be reduced to a single generation as in “evangelism among millennials.” When I became a pastor it became clear that my congregation might be modern and non-modern, but few were, like I was, post-modern. 

But cultural change, if uneven and unpredictable, is inexorable. The most profound cultural shift in faith experienced in the contemporary US has been examined from different perspectives by Charles Taylor, Robert Wuthnow, Calvin Schrag, Matthew Crawford, Marcel Gleiser, and many others.  Naturally there is great depth in their analysis, but two things stand out: 1. ours is increasingly a culture in which faith can be lodged entirely within immanence and still provide meaning, and 2. our way of being faithful is experienced primarily as living out a story rather than holding a belief.

And this has profound implications for evangelism. Classical apologetics, making Christian doctrine believable to rational people, may serve little evangelistic purpose if most people experience faith in terms of living a story rather than believing a doctrine. Webber and Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar may be experienced as truer in both content and form than the assertions of the creeds. This is why the fiction of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien remains compelling 80 years on while Lewis’s apologetic work, Mere Christianity, is a fading force even in the church.

I’m not saying that older forms of faith experienced as rational belief are dead, only that fewer and fewer people find them compelling. We no longer understand being faithful in terms of holding true beliefs about reality, or having a trust in the source of that knowledge.  

It isn’t necessarily in the realm of Christianity that this is most evident, it is in science. In the modern era the greatest appeal of science was its superior capacity to produce comprehensive models of reality and therefore pragmatic ways to increase human flourishing. What scientists believed about the world often seemed far more reasonable that what Christians believed, and certainly more useful. 

But science, especially subatomic physics and cosmology, has come up against two hard limits in its capacity to create such models. First, these models are far beyond the capacity of the great majority of even well educated people to understand. As an exercise I recently outlined a book on the Higgs boson. I created a spreadsheet that systematically listed every mathematical model, experimental discovery, and new technology necessary to arrive at the consensus understanding of the Higgs. The result was clear: to even begin to grasp what the words “Higgs boson” mean one would need a decade of study of higher mathematics, often in incredibly complex realms where mathematicians themselves barely understand their equations. (One can see this table at https://www.dropbox.com/s/49j0kdt3pllvjj9/Table%20of%20Sub-Atomic%20Physics%20Knowledge.docx?dl=0)

The second hard limit is the limit of what it is possible to know. Since the early 20th century physicists have known that because the speed of light is finite most of reality is unseeable to humans. But this wasn’t an impediment if one assumed that natural law was universal even if not always observable. With the demonstration that the universe began with a “Big Bang” whose origin can be modeled in multiple ways but never experimentally verified adds another dimension to unknowability. And finally contemporary theories capable of explaining the most recent findings related to dark energy and dark matter (both of which are implied but apparently unobservable) allow for both regions of our universe with different laws, or of multiple universes that are unknowable by definition. Whether one celebrates it or laments it, what Gleisner calls “the island of knowledge” is strictly bounded.  

So it isn’t surprising that prominent physicists like Gleisner, Weinberg, the late Carl Sagan, as well as his student Neils de Grass Tyson focus their popular presentations on the story of scientific advancement. The possibility of engaging and entering into a meaningful story becomes the primary apologetic for and mode of faith in science because actual intellectual assent to scientific models of reality is no longer possible for most people. And this approach has been successful, quite possibly more so than any Christian apologetic, because it fits our cultural inclination to understand ourselves in terms of narrative and place our faith in the most hopeful and comprehensive story available.

Modern Christianity, the Christianity that gave birth to contemporary apologetics like the works of Josh McDowell and others, suffers the same problems as modern science. 

Its first hard limit is the near incomprehensibility of Christian doctrine if faith depends on belief. A colleague of mine, himself a theologian of note, told me that in writing a review of another colleague's work on the Trinity he had to read it twice to understand it. I had even greater difficulty, so subtle and technical were the arguments. Decades of experience talking to mature Christians has shown me that although they may recite the creeds most Christians, if pressed to explain their meaning, are heretics. That is largely true of pastors as well if asked to go beyond repeating rote formulations learned in seminary. But is this really surprising given that those creeds were and are the work of legions of highly trained theologians who themselves frequently disagreed? 

The realty is that if faith is intellectual assent in doctrine it is unattainable for all but an intellectual

elite.

The second hard limit is that Jesus isn’t directly accessible to us, coming to us only through fallible human witnesses, and that God is unknowable by definition. The reason McDowell’s work hasn’t commanded instant assent is that no historical evidence provides absolute proof of an event, much less a resurrection from the dead. Oral accounts, written down much later, of encounters with a man who was seen to die, all of which take place under isolated circumstances, are unlikely to be taken as “evidence” of anything. The writings of the New Testament and the first appearance of Christian communities on the stage of history are the Christian "Big Bang,” the evidence that simultaneously proves that something happened and completely obscures just what it was. 

As for God, while God may reveal such aspects of God’s self as can be comprehended by limited human minds, it is ludicrous to claim that we can “know” God. The only god we can contain in our human minds is an idol. And thus far in human history the only path to direct apprehension of the Divine has been that of mystics, which is as far from rational assent to a theological model of divine reality as you can get. At best theologians and philosophers can demonstrate that belief in God and beliefs about God arising out of religious teaching are warrented. Showing that they are true simply isn’t possible - because the God whose existence and attributes can be proven is not, by definition, God. (My primary takeaway from Dr. Hartshornes Philosophical Theology course in university low those many years ago.)

What this means is that the modern theological project, faith experienced as rational assent to a set of beliefs about Divine reality is doomed to failure, and was really doomed from the beginning. Modernity was a cultural step in our human understanding of who we are in relationship to reality, and modern Christianity with modern science were its fruits. Neither project is sustainable in its original form. 

For Christian evangelists this requires grasping what the evangelists of science already get, that as we move into the 21st century it's the story that will most likely to bring people to faith, not the facts.