Thinking Christian

Do people really believe in God? That’s the question Bradley Monton asked in a blog entry today. He’s a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, an atheist, and yet somewhat sympathetic toward Intelligent Design. He begins today’s article,

I’ve recently read a couple different pieces arguing that belief in God is less common that it superficially appears — many people who profess belief in God don’t really believe.

The pieces he’s referring to are one by George Rey, who thinks “people who say they believe in God are deceiving themselves,” and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He quotes Dennett,

some people who consider themselves believers actually just believe in the concept of God. … They … think that their concept of God is so much better than the other concepts of God that they should devote themselves to spreading the Word. But they don’t believe in God in the strong sense. (p. 216)

Of course I’m excerpting from Mr. Monton’s excerpts; I’m counting on you reading his own article to get the full sense of how he represents these two writers. Ultimately he doesn’t agree with either of them.

It leads me to wonder just what they have in mind by “believe.” In the excellent book edited by Ravi Zacharias, Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, Michael Ramsden writes (p. 138-139),

This conviction is often expressed most politely in the following form: “Michael, I’m so happy that you’re a Christian, and I wish I could believe what you believe, but I can’t.” In my experience, what most people mean by this is: “Michael, I am so happy that you are so happy. There seems to be a joy and completeness in your life that I find attractive. But the reason you are happy is because you are a Christian. In other words, you believe in things that are not true or real.” (Now, what do you call people who believe in things that are not there? The answer is, lunatics.) So what they are saying is, “Michael, you are actually insane. But the main thing is that you are happy and insane. And I am happy that you are happy. As a matter of fact, I’m so desperate to be happy, that I too would embrace insanity just to join you, but I can’t do it. I’ve thought about it, but I just can’t.”

Ramsden’s point here is that faith is not some kind of wishful thinking. To believe in Christ is actually to consider that the message of Christ is really true, that there really is a God, and that Jesus Christ really is his risen Son. It is, moreover (for those who are inclined to look deeply into these matters) to consider it true after having considered the matter from the perspective of evidences and reason in the face of multiple challenges.

It is, in one sense, to consider it the right answer to the question, what is ultimate reality? It is much, much more than this besides. Belief is not merely about considering something the right answer; it is about entering into a trust relationship with a living Person, and arranging one’s life accordingly. Nevertheless it is also not less than what one considers actually to be the right answer to that question.

So the question, “do people really believe in God?” resolves in part to, “do people really, having considered the question as carefully as their abilities permit them to, consider it true that God exists?” The answer of course is yes.

Following a brief discussion on that, Monton moves on to another form of the question that I find very intriguing, because it touches on belief beyond the “right answer” level:

That said, there are real issues about how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God, issues that I’ve thought about long before reading Rey and Dennett. For example, people who say they fully believe in God, and fully believe that saved people are going to heaven, are nevertheless really sad when a loved one dies. Why? These theists should believe that the loved one, assuming the loved one is saved too, is in a much better place than Earth. The theists should be happy that the loved one is in a better place — just as I would be happy if my loved one got to go on an amazing vacation.

He could have stopped after just that first clause. How can we Christians reconcile our behavior with our professed belief in God? Are we as loving, as just, as devoted to truth, as worshipful toward God, as humble as our beliefs call for us to be? Of course not. We’re all on a path, at different places and moving at different speeds, and often our behavior is at odds with our beliefs. You could hardly ask for a better short explanation of our problem and the solution than what’s in 1 John 1:8-10 through 1 John 2:1-2:*

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

The truth is, we mess up. Our one hope is the loving grace of God through Jesus Christ.

But what about grieving for the departed? I don’t know how much experience Mr. Monton has with various grieving families. Those with more experience than I say they do see a difference between believers and non-believers, broadly speaking (certainly there are exceptions). The difference is not so much in the degree of sadness but in the degree of hope. My mother died two years ago. I still get a heart-stab thinking about it. It was hard to say good-bye, and it’s still hard. But it’s not a sadness of desperation, and in fact there is joy in it. I am very, very glad for Mom—even though I miss her.

In a few short years my son and daughter will (presumably) be going off to college. I’ll be very happy for them, very pleased and proud—and I’m quite sure I’ll blubber like an idiot, because I know I’ll miss them. That’s the kind of sadness true believers feel when other true believers go to be with the Lord. We’re sad because we miss them. Jesus himself wept when Lazarus died (John 11:28-37, including the shortest verse in the Bible).

So the question of Christian grieving is not so hard to answer after all. Had Monton just stopped after that one clause, “how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God,” he would have had his finger pointed at the really tough problem, the one that continually concerns me more than all the logical questions that have ever been thrown at me.

*I’ve split up that reference for the sake of link software that can’t understand it written out as one.

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Bradley Monton has answered my response to his earlier blog entry, including this:

For these people, their behavior is deeply at odds with their professed beliefs, and it makes me wonder if they really believe what they say they believe.

He is especially on the mark when he points to the pattern of Christians’ lives:

But it’s the systematic behavior that concerns me — the systematic lack of evangelism in many Christians’ lives, the systematic acting as if God is not watching and judging their every behavior, the systematic living as if life is not spiritually sacred.

He’s right. I think that’s all I have to say.

For now, that is. I’ve already written some brief thoughts on how this disconnect between belief and action comes about, and what we can do about it. I think, though, that if I wrote that into this post it would weaken the main point, which is this: when a thoughtful, friendly (shall I say?) critic speaks to us like this, we need to pay attention. We need to let it bother us.

Because far more than we would want this to be the case…. he’s right.

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I’m still thinking about Bradley Monton’s questions, linked from here, about Christians not living up to our beliefs. His observations certainly call for a prophetic response: Christians, wake up! It makes a difference how we live! There is more to it than that, though.

Our inconstancy of practice raises two questions: what does it signify regarding the truth of Christianity (the apologetic question), and what can we do about it (the pastoral question)?

This being a blog and not a book, I can’t answer either of those fully, or even pretend to try. I’m going to suggest just three general areas for us to think about:

• Beliefs
• Habits
• Focus

Beliefs
Not long ago I heard someone praying, “Lord, please help me just live according to what I believe.” I almost interrupted to disagree, but that is not something one often does in a prayer meeting, so I held my peace. (I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have spoken up.) What I was thinking of saying was, “That is the most unnecessary prayer you could pray. You do live according to what you believe!”

I know what she had in mind, and sure, it was commendable. She recognized she wasn’t being consistent in living in according to the truth of the Gospel, and she was asking God for help with that. Understood that way it was a perfectly appropriate prayer.

But on another level, to pray to live according to what one believes is to misunderstand our problem. Nobody’s beliefs line up as a perfectly coherent system. That explains a lot about why our practices aren’t perfectly consistent. I’ll take myself as an example. I’m firmly convinced that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the true source of love, the ultimate guide to good, the foundation of wisdom; yet still at times I catch myself also believing I’ll be happier (at least for the moment) if I do something outside of his good wisdom. Does that make sense? Of course not! Not everything I do makes sense. And although I can see the problem there, I’m not at a point where I have overcome it.

Jennifer at Diary of a Former Atheist sees it too, I think:

Because I’m so entrenched in my role as organizer and leader, whenever I think of setting aside the checklists and the calendar and just prayerfully letting God guide me, I have this absurd gut-reaction thought that’s something along the lines of, “What if God screws it up?”

Absurd, maybe, but also quite understandable in light of being human.

This is a matter for personal and spiritual growth. So how do we go about this? Here’s one way: by examining our own beliefs and challenging them regularly. Some of that we must do on our own, but much of it we cannot do on our own. We need quiet times of prayer, study, reflection, especially with journaling, to understand ourselves. We also need others to help us understand ourselves, to see us and reflect back to us in ways we can’t do for ourselves. In humility, and as fellow learners, we can also do the same for others.

For example: “When you spoke sharply to that person just now, what were you believing about them, and about your relationship with them?” That’s a simple example. More to the core: “You seem anxious about your 401(k) today—what are you believing about God’s provision?”

Habits
Some things, though, we do with hardly any reference to beliefs about them. Beliefs in the cognitive sense are not the full story. We need to practice what we believe; and I mean “practice” in a certain specific sense here. I was a music major as an undergrad. My weaknesses as a trombonist were not cognitive. Non-musicians won’t necessarily understand this, but my weaknesses weren’t necessarily even a matter of skill. What my teachers drilled me on the most was learning to breathe and learning to relax. Look, I was born with those skills! But I had to practice—a lot—to apply them properly in the specific context of blowing a horn.

Writers like Dallas Willard advise us to practice spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, study, and so on. As a musician, practicing was its own reward: I really loved playing trombone (I won’t go into why I later set it aside), even doing drills like long tones, scales, and the like. But much of it was doing something I could do directly, for the sake of indirectly developing the ability to do something I could not do directly.

Did that make sense? I’ll illustrate. For trombones, music in the key of B major can be very difficult, especially if the tempo is fast and the rhythm complicated. To tackle that directly would be pretty overwhelming. Musicians often take a sort of indirect approach instead. In this case, it would be to practice the B major scale until I had it down cold. Then most of the notes would be drilled into me solidly enough that I wouldn’t need to think about what key I was playing in, and I could concentrate on the music’s other challenges. Playing the scales would be an indirect approach to learning music that would be very difficult to approach directly.

In the same way, I won’t love my enemy as Jesus said to do until I’ve practiced loving someone who is just different from me. We have to grow in these things, starting with what we can approach more directly, and we’ll gain skills that will help us with other spiritual practices.

Addictions may be considered under the category of habits, though, with internal reward and punishment structures dug very deep, requiring more than just disciplines to overcome them. I am not prepared to say more about that now, beyond that simply acknowledging the problem.

Focus
It’s one thing to be fully convinced there is a spiritual dimension to reality; it’s another thing to keep aware of all that means. Psychologists speak of salience, referring to what is most present to our conscious awareness, and most likely to influence our behavior. It takes time and focused attention (we’re talking spiritual disciplines again) to stay in touch with all that is real. Prayer, worshiping with other believers, studying God’s word, hearing and reading about God’s work in the world—all of these will help keep God’s reality more salient before us. Without that, we will indeed revert to living as if physical reality were all there is.

The Work of the Holy Spirit
Our beliefs, habits, and focus are all spiritual issues, for which God supplies us equipping and direction through the Holy Spirit. I would be remiss not to include that as a reminder here, even if space does not allow me to expand on it. We depend on God’s work for all of our growth.

The Apologetic Perspective
What do our inconsistent practices say about us and about the faith? They show that we’re human, we have habits, we are not perfectly consistent creatures, we’re influenced by what’s most present to our awareness. They show that we need God and his grace. All of this is entirely consistent with what Scripture says about us.

What do our practices say to others about the truth of the faith? I think John 13:35 is quite clear, as is John 17:20-21. Our message is a lot more convincing when delivered with true Christian character behind it. We have to give ourselves grace for our failures, but we can never stop striving for growth.

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