Psyche Searching

“Our churches need to be safe places for people who wonder and for people who wander.” – Ed Stetzer

Unfortunately, many churches are seemingly the least safe places for “people who wonder.”  As a result, an entire generation of those who wonder about the nature of God, whether God exists at all, and whether religious communities are accurately representing who God is are fleeing churches. What are these folks wondering about that puts them on the outs with church people? Can the firmly held theological certainties of religious people alienate and even repulse people who doubt and wonder about God?  I think so.

To understand this phenomenon, I think we should reflect a little on how many God-believers think and feel about God and how those thoughts and feelings get played out in the lives of churches.  I am regularly struck by how many religious people speak about God with startling sureness – as though God readily lends God’s self to both comprehension and explanation.  The God of many Bible classes and church services is a God without nuance, without paradox, and who can be captured with categorically simplistic explanations.  Those who can’t quite grasp this simplicity are seen at best as unschooled neophytes in need of instruction, and at worst as weak and possibly dangerous unbelievers in need of ostracism. I’ve seen those pitying sidelong looks and heard those dismissively reassuring responses when someone asks, “Does God really care about us?” or “How can God allow that?”  I submit that these sorts of questions may not be coming from the naive or the faithless.  They are likely to come from thoughtful people, wounded people, people who have been exposed to diverse perspectives on life’s meaning, and people who are not well adapted to indoctrination.  Churches are running these folks off in droves.

There are many things needed to address this issue and engage with those questions.  I’d suggest a helpful first step is to apply that old-fashioned, philosophical (and biblical) virtue – humility.  Could we begin by stipulating that if God exists, God by definition is beyond human understanding?  The human mind is not capable of comprehending nor is human language adequate to describe the Ground of All Being.  Act accordingly… especially in church.  In his thought-provoking book, The Bible Tells Me So, Peter Enns says it this way: “… I’m going with mystery as an operative category for talking about God.” So, when we speak of God, we should speak with the deeply-held conviction and open admission that what we don’t know vastly outstrips what we know. Faith is not certainty.  Greater faith is not necessarily about fewer doubts, but about more faithful living.

The God of the Bible is a God of paradox.  Consider just a handful of the basic elements of biblical revelation about God: 

• God is omnipresent, but sometimes God is absent.  Sometimes God shows up.
• God is One.  God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – each a distinctive personality.
• God is immanent. God is transcendent.
• Jesus Christ is fully human. Jesus Christ is fully God.
• God is always the same and never changes. God “repents” of decisions and changes his mind.

Christian scripture is filled with tensions and paradoxes in describing God.  Interestingly, the Bible does not make much effort to resolve those tensions.  It’s as though even the best effort at description of which human language is capable can only get at presenting a set of ideas that make your head spin.

It’s normal and even laudatory to want to understand God more fully. But, the reality is, if my human mind could comprehend God, whatever God I would be comprehending is not the omnipotent, ineffable, all-sufficient, Ground of All Being. It would not be the God who exists beyond and independently of the universe or universes.  It would not be the God who is the reason why there is something rather than nothing at all.

Every now and then, I look into the eyes of a doubter and ask them to describe the God that they don’t think they believe in any more.  When I listen to their descriptions, I hear the faint echoes of glib, oversimplified, cocksure assertions that they’ve heard in church.  I typically tell them that I don’t believe in that God, either.

“Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

So what can we say about God, about the questions and answers people share in church, and about the key elements of doubt?  More to come…

A few years back, a friend and I co-taught a class at our church about religious doubt. Throughout the class, I carried the sense that I was speaking to the wrong audience.  There were a few in the room who could identify with the conversation, fellow strugglers who couldn’t synchronize their life experiences or intellectual journeys with the stock answers and theodicies to which they had been exposed.  However, most of the people in the class seemingly had moved to a place where they had found a way to get comfortable with a perspective of life and God that really provided many more answers than questions. (Either that, or they’d been carefully trained to never speak of their doubts in the company of believers.)  I think the doubters or doubt-strugglers in the room probably felt a little alienated and out of place.  I know I did.

The significant proportion of people with whom I work are from what sociologists and demographers would call the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. A lot of sweeping generalizations are made about these folks and those kinds of statements are often dangerous oversimplifications and even misrepresentations of how people really think and behave.  However, with that caveat, I’d venture to say that a bunch of the people from these generations are dealing with the kinds of religious doubts and questions that we were trying to discuss in that church class. They’re not alone.

One man I know was dealing with some tragedy in his life. In particular, the death of his father got him pondering his own identity and the sad state of things in the world. In the face of those reflections, he finally just got to a place where he couldn’t square up the idea of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving God with all of the bad things that happen in the world and in his life. It’s a very old philosophical problem. However, for him, it’s not just a philosophical problem. It’s very personal.

To be more specific, the personal issue for this man is that he can’t quite reconcile the notion of a loving God with the idea that his late father is going to burn forever in hell because he was such a screwed-up mess that he never got around to the whole church and Jesus thing. It was about all his dad could do to get his drinking and drugging problem under control, stop abusing his wife and kids, and hold a job. By the time he got all of that stuff worked out, he died. My doubting friend would say that this departed one probably did the best he could with his life, considering the chance he had and the issues he had to overcome. So for that effort, there is a God who will torture him in eternity.  At least, that’s what he’s learned in church. It’s the same God who also allows atrocities to happen to innocent people every day. That notion is just more than my friend can intellectually and emotionally work through. So, he’s gotten to a place where he doubts there is a God – or at least a God who resembles the one he’s learned about in church.

My friend and many others like him feel disconnected and alienated from religious communities because of these feelings and doubts. Even the best-intentioned churches often don’t deal with folks like that very well. Other Christians are often frightened of them and angry with them. Doubters make people nervous. They tend to trample on our own carefully tended yards and flower-beds of belief.

I want to share some thoughts and perspectives about the issues doubters face and how we can perhaps become more genuine religious communities – for both the doubting and the certain.  More to come…  

In a horrific and tragic accident, Aeroflot Flight 1492 made a fiery emergency landing last week and forty-one people lost their lives. Some of the press coverage of this event has focused on the shocking footage of survivors fleeing the burning plane with their carry-on luggage. News analyses included interviews with passengers commenting on the delays caused in the evacuation process by folks grabbing their bags before they exited. Making sure they took their stuff with them may have cost lives.

The post-disaster analysis has had a great deal to say about the importance of passenger safety procedures (leave your stuff behind and get off the plane!) and the human tendency to act impulsively or without thinking clearly in an emergency. All of that is important to point out. However, I couldn’t help but think that there’s another important lesson to consider in this sad event. Don’t judge the folks rolling their suitcases across the melting Sheremetyevo tarmac too harshly. The fact is, people have been giving up their lives for their possessions for a long time.

Psychologists have understood the deep connection between our possessions and our identities for decades. In the 1980’s Russell Belk concluded from his classic research that “possessions become extensions of the self.” In some sense, my stuff is not just mine; it is me. It is a fundamental human characteristic (at least in western cultures) that we invest our very identities in our belongings. By the time they’re in preschool, children exhibit the endowment effect – an irrational overvaluing of a possession because it belongs to you. Replicated experiments reveal that four-year-olds strongly prefer to keep a toy that belongs to them, as opposed to trade it in for a similar toy. As we mature, we don’t seem to grow out of this. It’s as though some element of ourselves gets invested in a thing we consider to be our own. The reality is, this human tendency is not just a recent discovery of psychological science. Aristotle wrote about it over two millennia ago.

Interestingly, this characteristic does not seem to be prevalent in less well economically developed cultures. Some hunter-gatherer societies don’t seem to exhibit the endowment effect. It seems that our glorification of wealth, conspicuous consumption, and rampant devotion to the accumulation of material possessions has shaped our identities and behaviors in ways we may not understand. In the USA, we have bought in to a culture that invests so much time, energy, and emotion in getting possessions that we sacrifice our health, time with our families, and spiritual formation. The American Dream is mostly about the accumulation of possessions.

In one of his most subversive and counter-cultural statements (at least for Americans) Jesus said, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” As usual, he was kicking against societal norms and expectations, along with some deep psychological tendencies.

So, after a long pause, I’m about to once again take the plunge into the dangerous world of blogging. It’s a strange and stormy place to be, especially in the polarized intellectual environment that our culture has become and in the manner in which I enter it. In some sense, I hail from three intellectual worlds, each with its own particular and peculiar culture and traditions. Those three worlds are – a Christian faith tradition, higher education (a private, primarily undergraduate college with roots in that faith tradition,) and a behavioral/social science (psychology.) All three of these worlds have a strong ethos and sense of orthodoxy. At some level, all three would claim that those who think and speak for themselves are welcome and free to express their convictions. When these realms are at their best, they live up to that claim. However, when they are at less than their best, all of them have demonstrated a strong propensity to flash fry those whose self-expression departs from the prevailing ethos and orthodoxy of the day.

So, creating a venue for self-expression about topics of concern is risky. One risks either repeating or rehashing the standard party lines and thus, becoming boring and pointless, or departing from those old familiar songs and becoming the object of criticism, scorn, and even hatred or ridicule. No kidding. I’ve seen it happen. So have you.

Still, despite the risks, I think it’s worth doing – though time will tell. Before I really begin though, I probably should clarify how I’ll think about what I’m doing here. First, what I’ll try to present is my own perspective. I do not write here to express the official institutional position of any church, college, clinic, or other organization with which I am or have been affiliated. Second, much of what I’ll write may be sort of working through tentative ideas and hypotheses. All people who are sane believe that in the general/hypothetical sense, they could be wrong in their thinking. However, most people tend to believe that in any given specific case, their particular perspective is right. I’ll admit ahead of time that I could be wrong. I’m willing to be talked/reasoned/cajoled out of a lot of things. I’ll always try to write what I believe to be true at a moment in time about things that I think are important; but my thinking could change, both about what’s true and about what’s important. I hope yours can, too.

I hope you’ll read and benefit. Peace.