An Education in Doubt

            This weekend I’ve been reading the book Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose. In a nutshell, Roose was a student at Brown who had an encounter with some far-right Christians that got him thinking about the God-divide. He enrolled in Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a semester and pretended to be an evangelical Christian in an attempt to see the other side of the divide and then wrote about it. As a Christian, even a politically moderate Christian, I disagree with a lot of his views, but many of his observations of conservative evangelical culture hit uncomfortably close to home.

            Particularly, his observations on the sheltered nature of the education system at Liberty have gotten me thinking. Throughout the book he notes a distinct lack of professors encouraging students to really question what they believe in order to learn more about it. Rather, the usual stance is that you should actually ignore evidence against your beliefs and just stick to your guns. Roose and many of his peers at Liberty see this as contradictory to a good liberal arts education, and I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing.

            In my own Christian college experience at George Fox University, I’ve been presented with a pretty wide range of beliefs from my professors, and an even wider range in the material we study (I’m taking a class on the Beat generation for crying out loud, it’s hard to get much further from traditional Christianity). I’ve heard some fairly negative responses from my family and people at my church about this, one or two even wondering aloud if the university should be considered Christian if so many liberal views are held. As an advocate of engaging my faith on an intellectual level, I have to disagree with them.

            Perhaps the biggest concern my friends and family have voiced when I tell them about the less traditional aspects of GFU is that it may drive students to leave the faith; like teaching us about the various stances on evolutionary theory besides young-earth creationism versus atheistic evolutionism might turn us from worshipping from Christ to praising Richard Dawkins. I don’t feel like I should have to point out how ridiculous that sounds, but apparently it’s necessary. Many of these young adults, myself included, have been raised in a pretty sheltered environment where our exposure to alternative philosophies has been severely limited. That isn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later, most of us are going to find ourselves in environments where our ideology won’t be the majority, and if we haven’t been prepped at all it’s going to come as a bit of a shock.

            College seems like the ideal place to get that exposure, especially if it’s a Christian college. We’re young adults, which means it’s time for us to grow out of the faith of our elders if we haven’t yet and figure out what we believe for ourselves. College is the time when we’re figuring the rest of our lives out anyway, so it seems fitting that we should hash out what we believe in regard to religion as well.

            In fact, I think it’s healthy to question what we believe and weigh it against other beliefs. Is a faith mature if a person is unwavering on what they believe but has no actual idea why they believe it beyond it being what they grew up with? Why should we apply more rigorous study to science or other studies than we do to our faith? If I go through the first 22 years of my life without looking at other beliefs without dismissing them offhandedly and then enter the real world where people around me believe those things, how am I going to function alongside them? Better yet, how am I supposed to witness to them, as I believe I am called to do?

            I want my faith to be intellectual as well as spiritual and emotional. I enjoy questioning what God says and growing to understand it better through that. And if my views should change, as they have quite a bit, I think that’s a good thing.

God Doesn't Understand

            People, especially young people it seems, are fond of claiming that God doesn’t understand what they’re going through. Struggling Christians seem convinced that their situation is somehow unique and He can’t get it. Atheists and agnostics have trouble believing in a higher power that is that intimately connected to everything. If we start with the assumption that God is the creator of everything though, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

            Why? Well the easy and commonly quoted answer is that He is God and all knowing and whatnot. The problem with that answer is that much like a father telling his kids that he makes the rules simply because he’s dad, it’s true but unsatisfying to people who are seeking an emotional and intellectual relationship with God. You could reduce a lot of reasoning for the rules in the Bible to “God says so,” but that answer gets annoying pretty fast. I accept that some things come down to that because they are beyond my understanding, but this is not one of them.

            Another reason one could give for how God can understand the human experience while not being human is that He actually did live a human life as Jesus. There’s a joke that points out the fallacy of saying God can’t understand because He never had to endure hunger, thirst, poverty, death of friends and family, rejection, persecution, pain, and death himself, because Jesus experienced all those things. Still, this answer has weak points in my eyes. Jesus didn’t go through genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, nor did He witness the terror of an atomic bomb, nor many varied and specific kinds of pain. If this is our only answer for God’s understanding our struggles then some people can claim it’s not enough and He truly doesn’t understand.

            The thing is, by His nature as creator, He has to be able to understand everything, and far better than any of us can. Think of it in terms of art. How ridiculous would it be for a painting to say its artist doesn’t understand it, or a pot to say its maker doesn’t get how it works, or for a character I create in a story to claim I don’t understand her? For us to say God doesn’t get what we’re going through is even more ridiculous a claim than that.

Artists are still dependent on materials and ideas that they did not create to form their art, but God created everything from nothing by the sheer power of his will. For that to be true, he has to understand every aspect of every piece of creation. Think about the implications of that. He gets everything. All those systems of nature with all of their intricacies? He came up with those. While we’re still struggling to really understand everything from gravity to the atom to black holes to the act of creation itself, he came up with all that. On a much more personal level, God created us too. That means He created our minds, which means He came up with how they work. We’re still fumbling with and debating psychological theories, but He knows exactly how we tick. Not only did He make the system, He made the emotions themselves. Those same emotions that so many people claim He can’t possibly understand, He understands better than we could possibly hope to. And if He understands things like hurt and grief and the like so well, I can’t help but think He feels them in the most profound empathy possible as well.

My Body is a Tent?

            If there is one thing American Christians are really good at, it’s coming up with catchy, pithy metaphors to sum up complex theological ideas. It’s quite a handy little talent, if sometimes problematic. One such metaphor that became very popular a couple years ago in my church was the idea that our physical bodies are just tents; temporary and imperfect dwellings that we have to live with for now but will eventually be replaced with something better.

            You can probably see why this is such an attractive idea. Our bodies are broken in thousands of ways, many of them irreparable, and we don’t want to think that we’ll be stuck in them forever. So we look forward to the next life where we’ll live forever and have new bodies that don’t have all the same problems our current ones do (either new or renewed, I’m not solid on the theology there but the point is the same). We’ll be trading in these crappy tents for a mansion. It really does seem like a sweet trade, and at first I totally bought into the idea, but there is a very big problem with this metaphor.

            Word choice is important, especially when fitting a lot of thought into a short statement. The less words you use the more precise you have to be. The body as a tent metaphor is an example of bad word choice.

            What is a tent? It is a temporary dwelling unfit for long-term use. Many people I know would say, “Well yeah, like our bodies. They aren’t meant to last, they are broken and corrupted and need to be replaced.” Well, that’s half right. Our bodies are broken and corrupted, but to say they were not meant to last is a massive fallacy.

            In Genesis 1:31, after God had created humans and everything else it says, “Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.” Everything God had made, including these bodies, was good. God didn’t half-ass our bodies with the intent of making them temporary, his creation was complete and good.

            This attitude of the flesh being evil and sinful is everywhere. Another popular saying is, “You don’t have soul; you are a soul. You have a body.” Always this separation from the physical form. We’ve romanticized the mental and spiritual form and degraded the physical form, but this is wrong. We are a soul, yes, and a body and a mind. We cannot separate our flesh from what we are any more than we can our mind or soul. The flesh is corrupt and broken, yes, and so is the mind, as was the soul before the sacrifice of Christ.

            This is the problem with calling the body a tent: it implies that God made a mistake. He didn’t finish us because he knew we were going to screw up, but that’s not right. God didn’t give us a tent because he knew we’d screw up. He knew we’d screw up, but gave us a perfect mansion anyway. The broken body isn’t a crappy tent, it is a beautiful masterpiece of a mansion that God gave us and we wrecked. Calling it a tent takes the blame for our brokenness and places it on God.

            These bodies are broken now, but that is because we messed them up. We’re going to get new ones, but it’s not an upgrade from tent to mansion, it’s so much better. God gave us beautiful homes to live in for free and do as we pleased. We chose to party it up and let the homes fall into disrepair, and instead of looking at us in anger and leaving us with our mess he gives us another chance and is going to completely rebuild our homes for free again. Isn’t that a much more moving illustration of grace than God throwing us in a crappy tent to screw it up before trusting us with a mansion?