Anne Lamott: A Humorous “Theologian”

This year, I have read four of Anne Lamott’s books. Some of you have also read some of her many books, but others may not know much, if anything, about her or her writings. In this post, I will briefly introduce her and share a few of her “theological” ideas and statements.  

Anne Lamott was born in San Francisco on April 10, 1954, so tomorrow will be her 71^st birthday. As a girl, she grew up in a lower-income neighborhood of Marin City, Calif., a few miles northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marin City was originally built as housing for shipyard workers during WWII and later became home to a predominantly Black community. Lamott described it as "the ghetto in this luscious, affluent county," noted for government housing, drugs, and crime as well as strong families.

For several years, she also lived in a small houseboat in Sausalito, a more eclectic and artistic environment, where she struggled with addiction and financial instability before finding her footing as a writer.

Most people try to present themselves as better than they are, but in her self-deprecating writing style, it seems that Lamott probably presents herself as worse than she actually is. Still, until she was in her early 30s, her lifestyle was characterized by alcoholism, drug abuse, and promiscuous sex.

Things began to change for the better when she started attending what became St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, an interracial congregation that met for years in borrowed/rented facilities. She was baptized there in 1986, and she wrote that “one year later I got sober” (TM, 51).

For many years, Lamott’s pastor was Veronica Goines, a wise Black woman from whom Anne learned much. It will soon be 40 years since Lamott was baptized, and she has been a faithful member and lay-leader of that church up to the present.

In 1989, her son Sam was born, and in her books she repeatedly writes about her dear son, whom she raised as a single mother.*¹

Lamott’s books are a mixture of humor, ordinariness, and profundity—at least that is my impression from her books that I have read:

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999, TM)

 Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005, PB)

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007, GE*²)

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (2017, HA)

As one who spent considerable time in graduate school studying Søren Kierkegaard, I was surprised that early in TM, she wrote that reading SK’s Fear and Trembling changed her life " forever.” Then, she wrote words directly related to last month’s blog posts about certainty and faith.

She realized that “since this side of the grave you could never know for sure if there was a God, you had to make a leap of faith, if you could, leaping across the abyss of doubt with fear and trembling” (27). Because of reading SK, she “actively made, if not exactly a leap of faith, a lurch of faith” (28).

I was surprised to find such theological statements embedded in her humor-laden writing. Further, her theological understanding of Christianity, as was also true of Kierkegaard’s, is not about “pie in the sky by and by.”

In Plan B, she states that her faith tells her that “God has skills, ploys, and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families, prisons, governments.” In that regard, she quotes Pastor Veronica: “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” (citing James Forbes*³.)

Here are some insightful “theological” nuggets from Lamott’s books:

* We “are not punished for the sin but by the sin” (TM, 128)

* “… not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die” (TM, 134)

* “God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this” (TM, 135)

* Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back” (PB, 47).

* Fr. Tom told her that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty” (PB, 256).

* “… we’re punished not for our hatred … but by it” (GA, 129-130).

* “Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles” (HA, 51).

* “God doesn’t give us answers. God gives us grace and mercy” (HA, 104)

_____

*¹ Lamott’s memoir about the first year of motherhood as a single parent, Operating Instructions, was published in 1993. I have not read it, but according to CoPilot (Bing’s AI tool), that book, written in journal format, “captures her joys, fears, and struggles raising her son.” Further, it “was widely praised for its raw honesty, humor, and heartfelt portrayal of single motherhood.”

*² You can hear Lamott talk about her faith in this 2016 interview regarding her book Grace Eventually.

*³ Forbes (b. 1935) served as pastor of historic Riverside Church in NYC from 1989 to 2007, the first African American minister to hold that position.

Faith is Better than Doubt

There was considerable interest in and comments/questions about my March 8 blog post titled “Doubt is Better than Certainty.” This post is also about doubt, but it is mainly about faith in God rather than certainty or doubt about beliefs. 

“The Shock of Faith” is the title of David Brooks’s opinion column published by the New York Times last December 19. It is a long, thoughtful, heartfelt article that is well worth reading and contemplating. (You can access it here [with a different title]).

Brooks (b. 1961) is a nationally known newspaper journalist and author as well as a regular on PBS NewsHour every Friday evening. He was raised Jewish, but he attended an Episcopal grade school as a boy. He says in his Dec. 19 post, he grew up “religious but not spiritual.”

When I first began to hear about Brooks, I thought he was too politically conservative and paid little attention to him. But his new book, The Road to Character, was the subject of a study meeting at Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City in September 2015. It was led by then-president Molly Marshall.

Attending that discussion gave me new appreciation for Brooks, and his political views, which continued to move toward a center-left position. The point of this article, though, is about Brooks’s ideas about faith, not politics.

Faith is “like falling in love.” This is one of Brooks’s thought-provoking statements. While there are problems with the widespread claim that people fall in love, that expression implies that romantic love is usually far more a matter of the heart (emotional) rather than of the head (cerebral).

Brooks’s article begins with his acknowledgement that he long “thought faith was primarily about belief.” But when faith finally “tiptoed into” his life, as he put it, it was “through numinous “experiences,” that is, through “scattered moments of awe and wonder” which hit him “with the force of joy.”

That’s what caused him to fall in faith. Even though he had been religious without being spiritual, Brooks says that position “felt empty” to him. On the other hand, he also found that being spiritual without being religious didn’t work for him. Religions, he says, “enmesh your life in a sacred story.”*¹

In that regard, Brooks cites important, instructive words of Rabbi David Wolpe: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”*²

“Have mercy on those who doubt” (CEB) are words in the New Testament book of Jude, verse 22. The issue there is not about doubt rather than certainty regarding beliefs, but doubt about one’s foundational faith.

If people who have fallen in love begin to have serious doubts about that love being “real” and reciprocal, the relationship has become precarious. That is what causes couples to “break up” or spouses to divorce. Just as doubt about love is a serious matter, so is doubt about faith.

Doubt is better than certainty concerning ideas or beliefs, for that doubt nudges the doubter to seek to learn more and to examine his/her beliefs. But faith in God (by whatever name is used for the Ultimate) is not basically about ideas or beliefs. It is about a relationship that can be destroyed by doubt.

Rachel Held Evans, the widely respected Christian author whose untimely death is still mourned by many, once said, “I recognize that faith is always a risk. No matter what we believe, there is always a chance we might be wrong. But the story of Jesus is just the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”*³

Evans’s faith was not primarily in the veracity of Christian beliefs. Rather, her faith was heartfelt commitment to Jesus Christ. She had doubts about many traditional Christian doctrines, but her faith/trust in Christ was stronger, and better, than her doubts about the certainty of those stated beliefs.

Since robust Christian faith is commitment to Christ, that faith becomes apparent not by what we say or give intellectual assent to. Rather, faith is expressed by how we live and what we do.

As Bill Tammeus says on the last page of his book on doubt, faith keeps “us focused on the goal of demonstrating what a world of peace, harmony, mercy, justice, and love might look like.”

Doubt can’t do that, so clearly (undoubtedly?), faith is better than doubt.

_____

*¹ Two of the short “chapters” in Bill Tammeus’s book The Value of Doubt (2016) are about whether one can be spiritual but not religious or religious but not spiritual. In the Comment section of my 3/8 blog post, Bill (who is on my Thinking Friends mailing list) referred to his book, and I had to admit that I knew about it but had not yet read it. Since then, I have been able to check out a copy of it from the local (MCPL) library, and I have been profiting from reading that delightful book. I highly recommend it.

*² David J. Wolpe (b. 1958) is a Conservative Jewish rabbi and now Emeritus Rabbi of the prestigious Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. In 2012, Newsweek magazine named him the most influential rabbi in America.

*³ Rachel Held Evans was born in 1981 and died a few weeks before her 39^th birthday. My June 5, 2021, blog article was about her (see here). The words cited above were part of her discussion about faith with a pastor in 2014. It can be found on YouTube (here); that video has had more than 17,000 views. 

Is the Secularization of Society Beyond Doubt?

This post’s title comes from a new book by three sociologists and some of the article’s content is my reflection on a new novel. 

Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (2023) is a scholarly work authored by three sociologists.* One of the three is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

Many large, public universities have Religious Studies departments. For example, my daughter Karen is the head of the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona.

But in 2011, Zuckerman founded the Secular Studies department at Pitzer, the first college academic program in the nation dedicated exclusively to studying secular culture.

Zuckerman is also the author of several books on secularity, including Living the Secular Life (2014) and What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living An Ethical Life (2019).

He can also be found on YouTube, speaking on various secular or agnostic/atheist sites. For example, here is the link to his March 31 talk titled “How Secular Values Will Save the USA.” It is an attractively presented talk, and I agreed with much of what he said.

However, I was also “turned off” by that talk: even though he is an academic, Zukerman came across as an “evangelist” for secularity and presented misleading “facts.” As often happens, he presented the best examples of secular morality and the worst examples of religious morality. 

Heaven & Earth (2023) is a challenging novel by Joshua Senter (b. 1979), who was born in the Missouri Ozarks and reared/homeschooled in a fundamentalist Christian home

.Senter’s book is about a disgraced megachurch pastor Sam, who was born near Conway, Mo., a small town on Route 66 and about 40 miles west of the author’s hometown.

But even more, Heaven & Earth is about Sam’s wife Ruth, who was abandoned by her hippy mother and raised by her devout Christian grandmother. Until the last chapter, Ruth is also an exemplary Christian, but she jettisons her faith to embrace the secular worldview of her mother.

The sociologists’ book documents how religion is currently losing out to secularization and Senter’s novel depicts how that happened in the case of one particular Christian believer. 

Religion is not always good and secularization is not always bad (as many religionists imply). But the opposite is also true: secularization (=secularism) is not always good and religion (=faith) is not always bad (as many secularists imply).

As I have often emphasized, secularization is better than secularism and faith is superior to religion.**

I agree with the sociologists: the further secularization of American society is quite surely “beyond doubt.” But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Secularization is an antidote to the current widespread advocacy of (White) Christian nationalism, and it helps ensure the freedom of religion for all citizens.

And I agree with the strong emphasis of Ruth’s mother in the novel: we need to embrace the joy of living now instead of focusing only the “life beyond.”

However, I strongly disagree with Zuckerman’s insistence that secular morality is (always) good and religious morality is (always) bad. He even says that it is not only possible to be moral without belief in God, theistic belief is often a barrier to morality.

Zuckerman’s negative view of religion seems to be based largely on the errors and excesses of conservative (fundamentalist) Christianity. (Sad to say, Pat Robertson, who died on June 8, did incalculable damage to U.S. Christianity.) But Zuckerman mostly neglects other forms of Christianity.

And in the novel, an atheistic nurse tells Ruth that “living for today as opposed to living for some future grandeur [that is, Heaven]” is a gift, “a wonderful realization. Life is suddenly so potent” (p. 217). That is the view that Ruth adopts at the end of the book.

But it doesn’t have to be either/or. It is certainly possible to believe in Heaven and to fully appreciate/enjoy the grandeur of life in this world now.

Perhaps everything is sacred (religious) and nothing is profane (secular), as Fr. Richard Rohr contends in his insightful “daily meditation” for June 12. 

_____

* The authors are Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman,  and Ryan T. Cragun. Zuckerman (b. 1969) is the oldest and most prominent of the three.

** See, for example, my 2/19/20 blog post titled “Affirming Secularization, Opposing Secularism” and “Faith and Religion Are Not the Same,” my 6/10/18 post.

Isabel’s Testimony: The Power of Faith

In my March 25, 2021, blog post, I wrote briefly about Rachel (Clark) Seat, my great-grandmother. This article is about Great-grandma Rachel’s oldest daughter Isabel (also spelled Isabelle) and her strong faith expressed shortly before her death 132 years ago tomorrow, on February 13, 1890.

Introducing Isabel

Isabel Tempe Seat was born in rural Worth County, Missouri, on September 9, 1871. She was the first child of William and Rachel Seat, who had also been born in the same township.

When she was still 17, Isabel married Jake Williams, and before long they were expecting their first child. Leslie was born on January 25, 1890. But before three weeks had passed, his 18-year-old mother Isabel died of complications from childbirth.

Three days before her untimely death, a sizeable number of relatives and friends gathered around her deathbed where she repeatedly urged people to become Christian believers so that they would later be reunited in Heaven.

Isabel’s Testimony

A document titled “The Last Words of Isabel Williams” has been preserved in the Seat family. I don’t know who initially put those words in writing, but the first copy I saw was one made by Mary Rachel Seat, Isabel’s niece and my “wonderful aunt,” as I called her in my 6/25/16 blog post.

The first line of that document says, “Isabel Williams, while on her deathbed and there being several present, asked them to talk.” But actually, Isabel wanted to talk to them, and most of the document (which can be read in full here) are the words of testimony and entreaty given to many people.

I don’t know how so many people could have been present under one roof—and probably they were not all there at the same time—but Isabel called for them to come one or two at a time for her to speak to them from the depths of her Christian faith.

Her most often spoken words were, “Will you promise me you will meet me in Heaven?”—or words to that effect. And, evidently, many did make such a promise, including many who had not been Christian believers, or active Christians, at the time they heard Isabel’s question and plea to them.

Several of the people didn’t live close to New Hope Church where Isabel and her close family were members, so not long after her death, a new church was started—and given the name Isabelle Church. (It was about 3½ miles northeast of New Hope, a fair distance when traveling by horse and buggy.)

The Isabelle church building has been torn down in that sparsely populated part of northwest Missouri, but the cemetery is still there—and just a year and a half ago, J.W. Harding, a man I knew fairly well, was buried there. The picture below (taken several years ago) is of the entrance to the cemetery.  

Isabel’s Faith

Isabel’s belief/certainty about going to Heaven after death was not at all unusual for someone living when and where she did—although perhaps it was a bit unusual for someone only 18 years old to express that faith so strongly.

Isabel’s parents lived within easy walking distance from New Hope Church after it was constructed in 1877-78, and she, no doubt, attended services every Sunday morning and evening with her mother during her girlhood years. (Isabel’s father, sadly, died in 1880 on Isabel’s ninth birthday.)

My previous blog post was partly about common sense, and I asserted that “common sense” can be called that only for those who see the world through the same, or quite similar, “conceptual lenses.”

The conceptual lenses of most people in Worth County, Mo., in 1890 were those fashioned by evangelical Protestant Christians. While certainly everyone was not a professing or active Christian believer, Christianity as understood by Baptists and other evangelicals was the dominant culture.

Certainly, there were many things about Christianity that Isabel still needed to learn—but who can say that her faith that she expressed so powerfully was wrong?

Isabel’s faith was, without doubt, highly comforting to her. But who can say, and on what basis, that her powerful Christian faith wasn’t also basically true?

In Memory of J. Howard Pew and Appreciation for Pew Research Center

This post is about a notable man about whom I have mixed feelings and about a notable research center about which I have much appreciation. I am writing about J. Howard Pew, who died 50 years ago (on Nov. 27, 1971) at the age of 89, and about the Pew Research Center, sponsored mainly by The Pew Charitable Trusts. 

The Notable J. Howard Pew

In the Presbyterian church in the small city of Bradford, Pennsylvania, the pews were often occupied by Pews. Joseph Newton Pew, Sr., (1848~1912), founder of the Sun Oil Company (later Sonoco), was a devout Presbyterian and he raised his children to be the same.

In 1876, the Presbyterians started a “normal school” in Grove City, Penn. After it became Grove City College, J. Howard Pew enrolled there, graduating at the age of 18 in 1900. Later he served as president of the board of trustees of his alma mater for four decades.

After his father’s death, J. Howard became the president of Sun Oil Company at the age of 30 and soon became a wealthy man.

Pew was a strong conservative, both theologically and politically. Using his oil money, he helped found the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947, and Christianity Today, the influential evangelical magazine launched by Billy Graham, in 1956.

Politically, Pew was a staunch Republican and opponent of FDR and the New Deal in the 1930s. In 2018, one scholar wrote about Pew’s “Godly Conservatism.” His conservative politics were rooted in his conservative evangelical views.

The Notable Pew Research Center

While I disagree with many of J. Howard Pew’s theological and political views, I much appreciate the work of the Pew Research Center, which since 1996 has been largely supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which was established by Pew and his siblings.

In spite of Pew’s strong conservative evangelical and Republican views, The Pew Research Center (PRC) is a non-partisan think tank, or as it refers to itself, a “fact tank.”

Now based in Washington, D.C., PRC describes itself as “a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.”

They go on to explain, “We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.”

Society benefits greatly from the extensive work of the PRC as it provides accurate information on social issues, public opinion, and trends shaping the United States and the world.

A Notable Pew Research Center Survey

On November 18, PRC released a report titled “What Makes Life Meaningful? Views From 17 Advanced Economies.” That survey clearly indicates that one source of meaning is predominant: family.

In 14 of the 17 advanced economies surveyed, more mention their family as a source of meaning in their lives than any other factor.

However, outside of the U.S., religion is never one of the top 10 sources of meaning cited—and no more than 5% of any non-U.S. public mention it. In this country, however, 15% mention religion or God as a source of meaning, making it the fifth most mentioned topic.

Here is a chart showing how the 17 countries ranked on the “what makes life meaningful” poll. 

I was surprised that only 15% of USAmericans said “faith” is what makes life meaningful—but even more surprised that no more than 5% of the people in any other country said that, as indicated on the image on the right. 

Back in 1912, Walter Rauschenbusch, the proponent of the social gospel that was opposed by conservative evangelicals such as J. Howard Pew, wrote,

No material comfort and plenty can satisfy the restless soul in us and give us peace with ourselves. All who have made test of it agree that religion alone holds the key to the ultimate meaning of life.**

I agree with Rauschenbusch and with the 15% in this country who say that faith makes life meaningful.

What about you?

_____

** These significant words are included in To Live in God: Daily Reflections with Walter Rauschenbusch (2020), p. 21.

Believing What You See, Seeing What You Believe

The impetus for this article came from seeing the following optical illusion on Facebook last month: 

What do you think? Are the blue bars all parallel, or are they zig-zag? Can you believe what you see?

Victoria Skye’s Illusions

The above image was created in 2017 by Victoria Skye, who introduces herself on one website as “a children’s and family magician and balloon twister in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Another website says she is a “magical entertainer” and “illusion artist,” and it gives a link to the image above, which is called the “Skye Blue Café Wall Illusion.” That website also links to a YouTube video, which explains that the blue bars in the image are really parallel.

So, what about it? Can we really believe what we see (or what we think we see)?

Believing What You See

As you know, Missouri has long been called the Show-me State. The origin of that unofficial motto goes back at least to Willard Vandiver, who served from 1897 to 1905 as a Missouri member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

According to this 2021 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Vandiver declared in a 1899 speech about a questionable issue, “I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me.”

As one born and reared in Missouri, I have always taken some pride in our state’s motto: it is a caution against gullibility and a call for verifiability.

One troubling problem, though, is that we humans don’t always see things correctly. Even what we think we see clearly can sometimes be an illusion—as the above image of Victoria Skye clearly shows. And we can be mistaken about important, real-life matters also.

Thus, a large majority of the voters in the Show-me State were under the illusion that their preferred candidate for POTUS in 2016 was an admirable man who would lead the U.S. in a positive way. But after four years they were still unable to believe what they saw and voted for him again.

Seeing What you Believe

Some things have to be believed in order to be seen. That was the title of#20, the seven-page chapter in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2018). (I wish you all had my book and would (re)read that chapter, but you can read it online here.)

In that chapter, as in my July 10 blog post, I quote the fox in The Little Prince: “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” What we know intuitively or, yes, by faith is necessary for “seeing” things that are of the greatest importance to us. We “see” those things because of what we believe.

But here, too, is a knotty problem: our beliefs are not always correct. Just as we can be misled by what we see with our physical eyes (come on, the blue bars in Virginia Skye’s image are clearly zigzag!), we can also be misled by what we incorrectly believe.

To avoid duplicating what I wrote for #20 in my book, here is an important matter not discussed there—and something I need to know more about. There is often, we are told, a skewing or misunderstanding of “reality” by something psychologists call cognitive bias.

I found this 2020 article about that matter instructive, although it did not say enough about the central importance of beliefs/presuppositions. But it did refer to “confirmation bias,” which is “favoring information that conforms to . . . existing beliefs and discounting evidence that does not conform.”

Because we all tend to see what we believe, we have to examine our beliefs regularly just as we have to be sure what we see with our physical eyes is correct. (The blue bars still look zigzag to me!).

To use the previous example, we “libtards” who strongly disagree with the “Trumpists” must discuss or debate not just what we see/hear but most of all what we each believe and why.

To acknowledge that we all see what we do and evaluate what we see on the basis of our basic beliefs/presuppositions is of the greatest importance.

Seeing by Faith: Using our “Magic Eye”

In all the nearly 900 blog posts I have made to this point, only one has mentioned bees: “The Plight of the Bumblebee” posted on 7/20/14. But I now know much more about bees as recently I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2001) and watched the 2008 movie based on that novel.

More than What the Eye Can See

Sue Monk Kidd (b. 1948) is an engaging writer. Her The Invention of Wings (2014) is on my list of the “top ten” best novels I have read this century. But her earlier novel was also a delightful and thought-provoking read.

The central character in The Secret Life of Bees is Lily, who turns 14 early in the book. She is splendidly played by Dakota Fanning in the movie, which also stars Queen Latifah as August Boatwright, the second main character in the book/movie.

About halfway through the book, Lily reflects on what August has said to her about “spiritual” things, and she thinks,

maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn’t know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine (p. 176).

Perhaps things that the eye can see—things that can be thoroughly investigated by science—is all that can be taught in public schools. But how unfortunate is any child whose education is limited to only what the eye can see!

Seeing with One’s “Magic Eye”

Most of you are probably familiar with “magic eye” pictures. Their technical name is autostereograms.

Only 30 years ago, in 1991, a computer programmer and an artist created the first color random-dot autostereograms, later marketed as Magic Eye. I was fascinated with them when I first saw them in the 1990s and several times used them as sermon illustrations.

I was somewhat surprised when I discovered that the “magic eye” pictures could be seen on a computer screen as well as when printed on paper. So look at the image below. On the surface, it seems to be only a random-colored, meaningless picture.

But now use your “magic eye” and look for the depth in the picture. Do you see the 3-D picture? Believe me, there is really a meaningful image there, and I assume that most of you can see it. 

It is only an illustration or an analogy, so there are limitations to the explanation, but similar to seeing a magic eye picture, faith is seeing the “depth” of reality rather than just “carbon and oxygen and mineral.”

What Is Essential is Invisible to the Eye

Moving beyond what we actually can see with our eyes if we look at a magic eye picture in the right way, I am thoroughly convinced that by faith we can “see” what is not visible to our physical eyes.

I have many “top ten” lists, and one is a list of my favorite quotes, which includes these words from The Little Prince (1943), written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In that delightful story, the little prince declares, 

I have always felt a bit sorry for people who were unable to see the 3-D objects in magic eye pictures. But that inability is trivial to the inability to see the “depth” of existence, the essential meaning of life that is invisible to the physical eye, i.e., to science alone.

Most people, though, who are open to suggestions about how to look at magic eye pictures do come to see what is really visible there.

Similarly, for those who are open to learning what kind of world we are actually living in, as Lily was, the “magic eye” of faith makes it possible to see the wonderful splendor of reality that is invisible to our physical eyes.

How marvelous is the magic eye of faith!

TTT #24 Who We Believe In is More Important than What We Believe

Although I have sought to make my as yet unpublished book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT) of interest and of relevance to people who are not Christians as well as to those who are, this chapter speaks mainly to those who are (or have been) a part of the Christian faith.

Shifting Away from Jesus?

In recent years it seems that there has been an increasing shift away from the centrality of Jesus Christ in the thinking of some Christians.

It would seem that for Christianity to be considered as primarily about faith in Jesus would be a foregone conclusion, but there are now some Christians who seek to downplay the significance of Jesus for the sake of fostering better relations with people of other faith traditions

Christ and Christianity are largely relativized.

It is a shameful historical fact that Christians have often mistreated those of other religious faiths, and the move toward a position of respect for those who embrace different views is highly commendable.

But to what extent can one downplay the divinity or the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and still be a Christian in any meaningful sense?

Believing in Jesus

As I was working on this chapter, I just happened to read (again) the story of Augustine’s conversion. Upon hearing a child’s voice saying, “Take and read, take and read,” Augustine picked up the Bible and opened it at random to Romans 13:13-14. 

Those verses renounce the type of profligate life Augustine had lived for years. But they also, significantly, contain the words, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Augustine went on to become a committed Christian and then a great theologian. Some call him “the father of Western theology.” But his conversion experience was not nearly as so much in what he believed as in whom he believed.

His faith was “putting on” the Lord Jesus Christ. It was not his belief about Jesus but rather his belief (trust) in Jesus that formed the foundation for all he later wrote about belief about Christ.

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing Baptist preachers emphasize, fairly often it seems, the difference between believing in and believing that. The latter, of course, is about what we believe, but the former is about whom we believe.

Believing that has to do with intellectual assent to statements or propositions. Believing in has to do with trust in a person. That was, and is, an important thing to emphasize, and people still need to recognize that difference.

Trusting in Jesus

In many of those church services where believing in was emphasized, “Trust and Obey” was often sung as a congregational hymn. The words of that old hymn were based on a testimony given by a young man in an evangelistic meeting led by the famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

It was quite apparent from the young man’s words that he knew little about Christian doctrine, but he finished his testimony by saying, “I’m not quite sure—but I’m going to trust, and I’m going to obey.”

Belief that is merely intellectual assent and often has little relationship to how one actually lives. Belief equated with trust, however, is much different: it means commitment to the one in whom that trust is placed—and when belief is trust, it includes obeying.

For Christians, what they believe about Jesus—and the many other doctrines of the faith—is important. But as human beings, whether people believe/trust in Jesus or in some other savior, teacher, guru, or whomever is of the greatest importance.

Truly, who we believe in is more important than what we believe.

[Here is the link to the entire 24^th chapter, which I encourage you to read.]

TTT #20 Some Things Have to be Believed in Order to be Seen

This article, based on the 20^th chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), is closely related to my previous article posted five days ago. But this article starts with reference to a delightful fictional story rather than the thought of a noted sociologist.

The Secret of the “Little Prince”

One of my favorite books is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, and one of my favorite quotes is this one from that delightful little book: the fox says to the Little Prince, 

It is in this vein that I suggest that some things have to be believed in order to be seen.

That affirmation has sometimes been hard for this Missouri boy to affirm. Missouri is the “Show-Me State,” and we Missourians like to have visual proof of something before we believe it.

The desire for proof is not a bad one. Such a desire keeps us from being gullible, and that is good. Even though it is fairly common, gullibility is not a good thing.

Michael Moore, the social critic who is well-liked by some and maligned by others, once said, “There’s a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.”

It is never good, though, to be misled by religion—or by anything else. Seeking proof or sufficient evidence before believing something, thus, is usually a very good thing. But that is not always possible.

In fact, it is not possible for the most foundational aspects of our existence. As the fox wisely said, “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

The Insight of Pascal

Let’s move now from a charming book by a French writer to the ideas of another, more famous, Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, about whom I wrote a whole article last October (see here).

Pascal believed that true religion must be the free choice of the human heart and will. Thus, he suggests that God wishes “to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart.”

Consequently, God “has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not.” On the basis of that understanding, Pascal makes this frequently quoted aphorism:

There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.

If God and the things of God were so plainly visible that there was no question about their existence, humans would have no freedom except to believe. But if God were completely hidden and unknowable, then no one could believe.

Naturally, most atheists object to Pascal’s statement—and to faith in general. They use the words blind faith to criticize the believer’s position. But it has been suggested that blind is a rude word that people who do not have faith stick on to the faith of those who have it.

Of course, theology, which is “faith seeking understanding,” is an important discipline that endeavors to counter blind faith. As Kierkegaard recognized, faith may begin as a leap, for it obviously is not based on sight from the outset.

Nevertheless, rigorous thinking, critical analysis, and careful investigation (i.e., deliberate theological activities) are certainly incumbent upon any serious person of faith.

But all of that does not change the fact that some things have to be believed in order to be seen.

[This article is from the first and last sections of Chapter 20 in TTT. Click here to access the entire chapter.]

TTT #16 Unexamined Faith is Not Worth Having

This article is based on the 16th chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), the first chapter in the second half of the book. The first half is mostly about theological “true things.” The remainder of the book is about more personal, “close-to-home” issues.

My Personal Experience

In May of 1957, I graduated from junior college and transferred that fall to William Jewell College. One of my courses that first semester was Philosophy of Religion and the textbook was the newly published Philosophy of Religion by the Quaker scholar D. Elton Trueblood.

In the first chapter of his book, Trueblood (1900~94) declares, “Unexamined faith is not worth having” (p. 14). My professor, for good reason, emphasized that statement repeatedly, and I gradually came to realize that it was, indeed, not only an important statement to think about but also something that I badly needed to do. 

That autumn was an uncomfortable time for me. Seeking to examine my faith resulted in a trying period of doubt, reflection, and examination—but that was an extremely valuable experience.

As a result of that process, I came to embrace what seemed then, and still seems to me now, an examined faith very much worth having. Of course, at various times through the decades since then, it has been necessary to re-examine various aspects of my faith.

How Could Faith be Not Worth Having?

If faith is always good, as asserted in my 6/10 article (and in Chapter 15 of TTT), how could faith ever be not worth having?

Well, faith is always good—but it is not always stable. Sometimes it is weak, easily shaken, and even so fragile that it is broken by adversity. In that sense alone it is not worth having: if faith cannot withstand challenges, both those from within and from without, how can it be of great value?

Faith in God is, truly, always good, but people often have insufficient or an erroneous understanding of God. Failing to have an adequate understanding of God can produce a flawed faith.

Moreover, there are many challenges to faith hurled at believers by aggressive atheist or anti-theistic writers. Far more than at the time that Trueblood wrote about unexamined faith not being worth having, in recent years there have been several popular, widely-read authors who have strenuously attacked faith in God and touted an unabashed atheism.

These “New Atheists” represent a belief system that actively opposes faith in God. If a person of unexamined faith is confronted by people such as those militant atheists, that faith may not be strong enough to withstand the attack.

That is part of what I mean by emphasizing that unexamined faith is not worth having.

How Does One Examine One’s Faith?

The process of examining one’s faith is not easy, though. Philosophical and theological thinking rather than the empirical or scientific method must be used. Serious reflecting, analyzing, studying, and, yes, praying must be a part of that process.

In addition, being a part of a community of faith is also invaluable for that important endeavor.

Those who come to realize that unexamined faith is not worth having need to realize that in addition to their personal efforts, they must make an effort to examine their faith by study, thought, and prayer as a part of a supportive faith community.

That community may or may not be a part of “organized religion,” but robust faith often doesn’t last long for people who proclaim to be “spiritual but not religious.”

[Thirty True Things . . . can be purchased at Amazon here.]