John Suk as Astronaut

Someone today asked me if I knew John Suk before my habit of reading or commenting on his blog. I confessed that besides renting an apartment from him when I was in seminary I really didn’t.

I confessed in my blog post a while back “My John Suk Fantasy” that in some ways I am living vicariously through John. He’s an astronaut from the same community that I am from, heading outside the thick atmosphere of the CRC into the space and “freedom” of skepticism and doubt.

For those of you who don’t know the CRC you should know that it is a thick community and culture. There are family ties, relational ties, and deep emotional ties that bind this church together. I know a possibly apocryphal quote from Martin Marty that when asked about the CRC he said “it isn’t a denomination, it’s an extended family” and he had a point. The CRC is the kind of place where I can know John Suk not simply as a former editor of the Banner but also because I lived downstairs from him in Southeast Grand Rapids for a season.

John Suk as Traitor

I’ve written enough about John Suk on my blog that I had to start a John Suk tag. It isn’t uncommon when I wrote about John that others write back to me and basically express the idea that I shouldn’t encourage him (as if he really cares what a student who used to rent from him thinks about him enough to impact the journey he clearly is on). I should instead make noises of rejection and criticism so that I send a message that all such astronauts should be shunned. Shunning is a natural way that a thick community enforces order, discipline and maintains itself, and when John leaves the CRC or questions a foundational doctrine like the Trinity I should keep ranks and express my condemnation.

I have a two fold response to that message:

1. I think shunning in cases like this is pastorally counter-productive in our communal relationship with skeptics like John.
2. It is counter-productive because it reinforces a post-modern narrative that weak, unjustifiable traditional beliefs (like Christianity is suspected to be) can only be propped up the coercive and manipulative use of power, of which shunning is a communal form.

Using John Suk and Rachel Held Evans

I must also confess that I’m using John Suk the way many of us use other public figures. In a CRC-Voices discussion a while back about John’s defection from the CRC some people who know him well and have actual relationships with him expressed concern and discomfort in the public way John is processing his space odyssey.

Others noted that John is a public figure for the CRC as a former prominent leader as editor of the Banner as well as writing a book and keeping a blog about his journey. He’s offering himself for this discussion so he has relinquished his privacy in this matter. I think that’s true.

I think it’s also true that part of the gift that John is giving to us in the way he’s chronicling his journey is that doubt is hot right now. John is of course not alone on his journey. I’ve had a loose, blogger relationship with Rachel Held Evans for a few years now. She too is someone who grew up in a thick, conservative Christian community and is publicly heading out of the airlock on a number of issues causing a stir among people who feel a bit left behind.

These two are offering themselves to their broader communities and playing a role in a larger narrative of doubt in the Christian church today. You may not agree with what they are doing or saying, but there are many more like them who are harboring similar doubts and feelings and in some sense they speak for this broader group.

If you disagree with what they are doing and where they are going I’d suggest that pastorally the wrong move to make is the shunning one or the criticizing one for the reasons I mentioned above. Engaging them in the issues they are raising is of course fair game. They are raising difficult issues, but I think it is counter productive to try to use power, even relational power to try to keep ranks and reinforce positions via community pressure. Let the positions stand on their own and learn to make them attractive on the basis of something deeper than just “this is what we believe as a thick community and we will punish those who dissent.”

John and Rachel as public figures are actually extremely useful to the rest of us in engaging these issues because they become voices and proxies for broader conversations with people who are reading, listening and watching but not writing. Those of us who remain in a thick atmosphere should thank them for the sacrifices they are making.

I would imagine that it is sometimes not much fun to be John and Rachel when people are saying “Don’t let the airlock hit you where the good Lord split you on your way out of our community!”

The Convenient Irony of Skepticism

It’s not uncommon for those of us who remain in the thick atmosphere of communal belief to apply our own hermeneutic of suspicion to skeptics. “They just jettison traditional belief because it lets them think and do what they want to.”

I don’t find this to be a completely baseless point. You can’t be a theological heir of Augustine and not maintain a healthy skepticism about the motives of our hearts. We will find ways to justify all kinds of places our hearts wish to go.

I would like to also observe, however, that the corrosive compound of skepticism when joined to the liberty of a heart set free dissolves in many directions.

Skepticism as I actually see it often embraced today isn’t actually as freeing or free floating as it is portrayed as being. We quickly get into the discussion of “freedom from” vs. “freedom to”. If there is less information, if there is less justification, if the bonds that used to hold you no longer restrain your belief universe, then you are actually allowed to exercise choice more freely than before. What fun is skepticism and bondage breaking if “knowing” less brings you to a place where you can choose less?

Part of the irony of skepticism as I see it is that many who embrace it initially seem to be more constrained and their worldview menues diminished. “I can’t believe in this any longer, sigh, even though it was emotionally satisfying and part of me misses it terribly!”

If this is the case, then maybe our mental, metaphorical map, labeling this as skepticism, of what is actually happening isn’t as accurate as we though it was. Maybe in fact we aren’t simply being released from constraints, but rather shedding some constraints in favor of some new ones.

Ideally, quests out of the thick atmospheres of communal beliefs should help us to see and live better (that is what these skeptical astronauts are I think implicitly promising or offering). If in fact we are less sure according to the narrative of suspicion my hope would be that we would become more free.

Thick Belief Requires Thick Community

If I am less sure and more free than I ought to be able to chose a belief system that I find attractive, compelling and enjoyable. I see this in friends around me who are exploring all manner of inconsistent and incoherent new age ideas. “White wine goes with fish and red wine with beef you say? Bah, I’ll drink what I want!”

The most obvious truth about human beings and beliefs that our culture seems to suppress  is that we believe in community. Many easily assert “God wouldn’t condemn someone born in a a Hindu community for being a Hindu, that would be unfair!” as if it is only true that people overseas believe what they believe by virtue of their community. We ALL do this. We ALL live within epistemological atmospheres.

Our belief systems as such are only partly volitional. We don’t choose our beliefs as much as they chose us. We form them from within our epistemological atmospheres even if we live in one (shared by church and skeptic alike) that indulges in the fantasy that “I believe what I chose to believe”.

We kind of do, and kind of don’t, but it is less like deciding whether we want to breath air or water and more like deciding if we want to inhale the air by the flowers or by the smokers.

If you actually want to have some control over what you believe, what you really need to do is exercise choice over what community you wish to live within. If you don’t like second hand smoke don’t live with a smoker. If you are allergic to lilacs, don’t plant them in your garden. If you have ideas about the kind of person you wish to be, or the kinds of ideas you wish to embrace, go find a group of people like that and start living amongst them and in time you will believe what they believe and do what they do.

Is this Really About Believing or Relating?

When I read John and Rachel I often get the sense that the confessional bullet points they’re picking at or the culture war buttons they’re poking at aren’t really the issues. When I read the second to last paragraph in John’s post and a lot of what Rachel writes I hear a lot of believing into relating stuff. These two want to be less of what they felt they were or at least saw in their thick communities (shunning, condemning, insisting, arguing) and more loving, accepting, embracing, affirming.

This is not a bad thing! If you’re looking for alignment with the Apostle Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit they are desiring something good.

Part of why they are heading out is because some of the communities they are reacting against seem to have faith in shunning, coercion and power more than faith in the transforming power of joy. A dark and deep irony for the CRC on this subject is that its most beloved confessional document, the Heidelberg Catechism, IS about the power of joy to transform, but we don’t often life it out.

What I DOUBT is the connections they are asserting between their beliefs and this relating. I don’t doubt that thick faith communities (not just Christian ones) have a difficult time dealing with outliers of one stripe or another, I do doubt that thinning the atmosphere is an antidote to this kind of dynamic. I doubt this because I doubt that we are really simply thinning the atmosphere. What we are actually doing is changing the atmosphere. I also wonder if this new atmosphere is actually able to support new, thick communities that will be able to avoid bias and discrimination against outliers. Shunning is natural to us as a species.

What then is the Quest?

What I want is a thick community in a rich belief atmosphere (no thin atmospheres please!) that will enable me to relate to others in a way that I don’t naturally wish to do. My heart is drawn, like that of John and Rachel to a vision of being a person capable of loving others in a healing, life-giving way. When we try to think of a person who really exemplified this, of course the candidate in my epistemological atmosphere is Jesus.

The problem is, of course, I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor. This seems pretty empirical. I also find that what I really need to have the emotional energy to expend the relational capital in loving actual people who are difficult to love (churches are filled with them BTW) is a belief system that is very thick, reinforced by very strong community, that can deliver emotional joy even sometimes by asserting beliefs that seems strange and odd in my broader, epistemological atmosphere. Beliefs like Jesus rising from the dead and God establishing and propagating sacrificial love within his own tri-personal relational community.

Where can I go to inhale this vapor? The church of course.

If it is really doubt in the atmosphere I’m breathing, then I am more justified in standing next to believers in thick community who both afford an atmosphere of thick belief while challenging my natural inclination to segregate from difficult people in order that via joy and emotional satisfaction I may actually begin to live out loving my enemies.

The less I am assumed to be justified in knowing, the more free I am to live any way I want. If I want to be the kind of person who loves enemies, then I am free to chose a thick community of difficult people who believe strange, difficult things.