A New Kind of Christian

I'm encountering more and more people that have been educated out of any need for the Church. What does the Church, after all, have to offer a person studied in various sciences and French philosophy? There are those who just seem too smart to condescend to fellowship with the plebeians clinging desperately to God's grace. They would rather entertain the concupiscent cleverness of their friends while sipping Belgian Ale, where ridiculing the Church, and the pathetic souls within it, provides both sport and aggrandizement. Each in the group is blessed with the spiritual gift of sardonic wit.

The curious thing is that many of these people claim to be Christians. But their Christianity is of an aristocratic variety, propped up by studies in all the nouveau theological and philosophical perspectives; ideas which clearly put to rest any need for any archaic, and one might add ignorant, historical community perspective. Diversity is cherished over unity; unity in fact must always be met with suspicion. A Christian community of drones catechetically parroting the Trinity doctrine is clearly to be shunned in favor of the cauldron of theological turmoil, new ideas, challenges and ad nauseam debates over theological subtleties.

These are the people (themselves members of the bourgeoisie) who think that "organized religion" is a bourgeois attempt at indoctrination and control for commercial purposes. They are the sternest critics of the logic and hermeneutics of the pastor, in those rare cases that they actually go to Church. It occurs to me that perhaps many of them expect the Church to be like the university, isolated and welcoming to their ilk. They expect everyone to be treated as intellectual equals, to wrestle with questions without solutions, to challenge solutions long accepted and generally engage in the institutional equivalent of a grand coffee house or pub, and without any meaningful sense of responsibility to those who have gone before them. Of course such people are going to be uncomfortable in a Christian church, but one also wonders why these people would be comfortable anywhere there is an attempt to promote a settled position in literature, philosophy, religion, politics or even in the sciences. Surely such people, in love with endless change, must find stasis unacceptable. Challenging the status quo has become their status quo. They are at home in a world of questions rather than answers, because uncertainty clearly expresses the tentative nature of intellectual maturity.

One representative of this new condescending "Christian" intelligentsia once said that "No one outside the top 10% or so of scientists really knows what is going on in science." Oh really? Well, pardon me for breathing the same oxygen as a top ten percenter. Really, I can't know "anything" that is going on in science?

A Greek trained seminarian once said, "I can't listen to preaching anymore because I know all the places that they go wrong in their handling of the text." So why should either of these two care about the Church? They should speak to their friends about the constantly changing worlds of true scholarship and have nothing to do with established positions on anything. Embrace the flux of the journey and don't settle into defending anything. Be against everything and for nothing.

Of course this is an unlivable idea, which leads one to find a "home" somewhere. Surely one of the goals of liberal education is to become less liberal, in one sense. The purpose of searching widely for the truth is to find it, and once one has found it, to move forward in that rather narrow direction. It should be noted that it is an interesting exchange when a person who has settled certain philosophical matters and has moved on encounters someone presently immersed in the nouveau. What are they to say to each other when one thinks the questions open and the other thinks them closed? And why should we think that the settled group must always give way to the nouveau? Can I be as convinced that my religion is true as I am that there is such a thing as causation? And if anyone came to challenge my belief in my religion, I might say the same thing I would say to anyone who challenged my belief in causation. I would say, I've moved on from needless skepticism here because my belief makes sense of my experience. Is that fideism? No, because I am talking about a symbiosis between my belief and the world, not merely the state of my beliefs.

Here is an interesting scenario: What if we have a Ph.D. graduate in some new philosophy from the University of Paris engage, as unlikely as this is, a thoughtful and convinced Christian with little education from Salina, Kansas. Why do we automatically assume that the more educated man lives the more worthy lifestyle and is correct in his philosophical and moral choices? Could it be that the uneducated man was exposed to the same ideas in other forms throughout his life and has simply rejected them, and for good reasons. He cannot assess this philosopher's ideas with any degree of philosophical sophistication and would in fact be out-argued by the philosophy grad, but of course that on the surface of it means nothing. Perhaps in reality our uneducated man has sound reasons for rejecting the same ideas under another guise. And perhaps our doctor of philosophy has merely won a debate but has not won the truth.

I don't want to be misunderstood for one who advocates ignorance as an end in itself. All I'm arguing is that there is no guarantee that a broadly educated man will arrive at the truth by sheer virtue of the broadness of his education--in fact, many of them arrive at a deeply obfuscated and incoherent, even insane, picture of the world as a result of such an education (Nietzsche for example). In the same way, a narrow education, but perhaps a deep one, does not preclude the possibility of finding the truth (about God, the self, purpose, etc.), at least I hope it doesn't for my grandfather's sake.

And one last thought: perhaps the world is not so nearly as complicated as it seems. The variety of philosophical ideas out there is probably not as dizzying as the intelligentsia would have us to believe. It may actually not be the case that we require the parentage of intellectuals to manage our way through life with wisdom and success. There are only so many philosophical perspectives that are coherent enough, and time tested enough, to hold persuasive power. The rest is chatter. And it is no sign of wisdom to obtain an advanced degree in chatter.