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A
Reasonable Faith:
A
Few Things Athens Can Teach Jerusalem
One
thing Athens can teach Jerusalem is the value of a gadfly.
This
is a hard lesson to learn. Socrates was the gadfly of Athens, the
man who pestered the brave and beautiful with inconvenient questions,
the man who cornered people in the streets and wouldn’t let them
pass until they had given an account of themselves. You could say
that Socrates was history’s first confrontational evangelist. In
the end, he was accused of corrupting the youth, condemned, and
forced to toast his fate with a glass of poison. This most celebrated
Athenian was not appreciated until his community had destroyed him.
But
appreciate him they did, because in time they came to realize that
being forced to test our assumptions is a valuable thing, and there
are precious few men willing to make us do it.
Four
categories of faith and reason
Ever
since Tertullian asked his famous question—“What has Athens to do
with Jerusalem?”—Christians have struggled with the perplexing relationship
between reason and faith. Some have abandoned faith in favor of
reason, others have stigmatized reason as the enemy of faith, and
both sides have reserved a special vintage of hemlock for the would-be
gadfly in search of thoughtful alternatives. But the Christian community
desperately needs such a gadfly, someone to test its assumptions
about the mind and the heart and see if they are truly biblical.
Because
they are not the same type of thing, faith and reason are not mutually
exclusive. In other words, faith is not the “absence of reason”
and reason the “redundancy of faith.” Rather, faith is a starting
point—a state of being or relationship—and reason is a method of
thought. A man can either have a relationship with his Creator or
not. He can think rationally or not. There are four categories at
play here, not two:
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The
rational unbeliever. This man has no relationship with God,
but he is committed to reasonable, coherent thought. He starts
from a false assumption, but his reasoning is often sound. He
believes that his grounds for unbelief are rational, and will
demand rational ‘evidence’ for faith. In argument with irrational
believers he will feel his assumptions are validated.
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The
irrational believer. This man enjoys a relationship with
God, but he does not think like a man created in God’s image.
Instead, he embraces contradictions, fails to make necessary
connections. He starts at the right point, but cannot reliably
proceed to further truth. The Spirit may reveal certain things
to him, and he may intuit other truths, but he cannot work from
these points to a rational system of true belief. He is often
afraid to test his assumptions.
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The
rational believer. This man enjoys a relationship with God
and thinks rationally. He attributes reason to his Creator and
recognized rationality in creation as an indication of God’s
design. He starts from the right point and proceeds with the
right method. While he cannot satisfy the rational unbeliever’s
demands for incontrovertible evidence (apart from the Spirit’s
agency), he can give a reasonable defense of the faith. He also
encourages irrational believers to embrace a more consistent,
defensible faith.
If
rational belief is a breeding ground for gadflies, irrational belief
keeps the hemlock trade in business. There is a profound distrust
of reason among irrational believers. They have locked horns too
often with rational unbelievers and had their untested assumptions
handed to them on a platter. In frustration, they jump to the unwarranted
conclusion that reason, not unbelief, is the problem. So when a
fellow believer encourages them to think reasonably about matters
of faith and practice, they start polishing chalices and pouring
strychnine.
The
gadfly as prophet
The
Christian gadfly faces a unique challenge. His irrational brethren
cherish their untested assumptions. In fact, they often regard them
as manna from heaven, as the very tablets of stone from Sinai. In
the religion of feeling, emotions are sacrosanct and intuition trumps
logic every time. A passage of Scripture means whatever we feel
it says to us, and anyone who says otherwise is a rationalist.
Anyone who says otherwise is sowing seeds of doubt and discord,
and “God is not the author of confusion.”
But
even a cursory look at the Bible reveals that God’s people have
frequently acted as a herd of wrong-headed sheep, and God has just
as frequently raised up gadflies to stop them in their tracks, turn
them around and march them back toward the truth. Often, these men
have stood against the pillars of government, religion and popular
sentiment. Often, they have been punished by a community ignorant
of their value, a community that only later came to appreciate what
its prophets were saying.
One
thing old Jerusalem can teach New Jerusalem is to listen the first
time around.
Corrupting
the youth
There
were two things Athens held against Socrates: he had questioned
the gods, thus proving himself to be an atheist, and “corrupted
the youth.” In other words, he had warned sons to be careful of
adopting the untested assumptions of fathers, admonished a new generation
not to repeat the mistakes of the last. Was this rebellion against
authority, or was it an appeal to a higher authority?
The
Christian gadfly is the man God uses to warn one generation of the
mistakes made the last time around. He puts weight on slip-shod
structures to see if they’ll hold up. He applies revelation and
its necessary consequences to the whole of life, respecting no tradition
but the Truth handed down from Calvary to today. He is often wrong
and always conscious of his errors, but he trusts in what God has
given him and is willing to build on it. He takes God’s premises
and God’s reason and seeks God’s will wherever the path leads. He
sees venerable old traditions confirmed, and he sees them broken
to bits. He sees some doctrine purified and purged, and he sees
other teaching sink into the abyss. He is uncomfortable, unloved,
unappreciated, misunderstood, misquoted and misconstrued, conscious
always that the best he can ever do is raises questions and point
out the way. He suffers and he rejoices, too.
A
gadfly is a kind of pesky insect that buzzes thoroughbreds out of
their complacency. Socrates predicted that Athens, like a mighty
stallion, would smash him with a flick of the tail, and then return
to its slumbers.
What
will we Christians do with our gadflies? Will we crush them and
keep on sleeping, or will wake up and heed their warning? Both Athens
and Jerusalem have something to teach us. It is time that we listened.
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