Anticipatory Confidence

Here at the end of a particularly cruel April, just today, I am experiencing one of those rare moments where a number of different deep movements of spirit and thought suddenly break the surface of consciousness and align.

Here's one movement that surfaced: I had a chat today with a friend whose struggles with faith in part inspired me to start this blog. We picked up on some themes she had raised in earlier conversations, e.g., how to keep a faith when so much of the faith of one's childhood seems nonsensical or repellent. I found myself putting into words thoughts and feelings that had largely been inarticulate for a while but roiling in my subconscious for some time. It felt good to talk about what I believe and why I believe it.

The conversation also reminded me how my absence from writing on this blog, my break from forcing myself to communicate my beliefs, has muted my spirit. The engagement of conversation--with another or even with myself in writing--is a discipline I need to practice more often. I write, after all, about evangelicals training themselves to be articulate ambassadors of Christianity. While I distance myself from many of their methods and theologies, I too am a representative of Christianity.

I especially like representing a Christianity different from the one my friend (and I) absorbed as a child, the black-or-white system of certain belief. "When I was young," my friend explained (I paraphrase), "I just knew that certain things were true: that Jesus was God, that he rose from the dead. Now I don't believe that. Or at least I don't know that.

"Do you," she asked, "believe in heaven? Or that Jesus is God?"

I did, I said. And I do. But, as I explained, this is something I've chosen to believe. I do not believe because I have been presented with an accumulation of convincing empirical evidence. In fact, the whole push toward evidentiary apologetics, "proving," say, Christ's resurrection as one might prove a legal case or scientific theory (Josh McDowell is the go-to example here)--this turns me off.

I believe in Jesus as God not because I've been rationally convinced but because I'm caught by the image of God-with-us, of God's miraculous, shocking solidarity with humanity even at its most painful and alienated from God ("My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"). I see heaven as congruent with this image of the God who breaks through all barriers to be with humanity. This image of the reconciling God resonates with me, provokes an affirmation of spirit that I cannot justify in purely material terms. It's also, I said, a belief that I feel pushes me towards an ethic beyond myself. I feel I am a better person than I might otherwise be thanks to my belief in a fullness beyond my own temporal life.

And so, without being fully, rationally, finally convinced in some forensic way, I have committed to this belief. It is, to be sure, a leap of faith, an act that Charles Taylor christens "anticipatory confidence." And I have felt as I leap that I have been caught, upheld. Not all the time, to be sure. There are plenty of days where I feel only alienation and uncertainty, the temptation to stop trying, to stop leaping into the dark (or the light?).

But--and this is another difference between my childhood faith and my current faith--my belief isn't a matter of clear certainty. It doesn't depend on my moment-to-moment feeling of confidence. Rather, I keep up a fragile commitment--fragile because I am constantly aware that it could be otherwise, fragile in the sense that I don't take it for granted. Fragile, but not brittle. I look back on my childhood faith, where I like my friend just knew that Christ was God, that heaven was real, that angels surrounded us. I just knew this because the only other option to such certainty was nihilist unbelief. My firm knowledge rested on some absolute truths which, if questioned in the slightest, would shatter the entire framework of my beliefs. The appearance of utter doubtlessness was made of glass.

I sense the same brittleness in the "Bible-believing" (i.e., pro-inerrancy) and material-evidentiary branches of Christianity. The Bible is true in its every literal detail because it must be. Were even the slightest discrepancy, the slightest contradiction discovered, the entire Christian belief system would crumble. Here confidence isn't anticipated but desperately maintained no matter what.

I recognize--largely thanks to Taylor's A Secular Age--how such brittle certainty is both a product of and a reaction to the present age of pluralized beliefs and non-beliefs. Reading him this evening brought other mental wrestling matches I've been waging to the surface. I've gotten (finally) to the part where Taylor addresses and answers some of the current arguments against Christian belief. His writing on suffering and faith captures much of my own thinking, much of my own feeling.

More on him next time.

JF