No Doubt? No Thanks!
Brian Bork
Laurier Chaplain
There’s a story in the New Testament where Jesus happens upon a man whose son is afflicted with terrifying convulsions. The man is, understandably, quite distraught. Jesus, enigmatic as ever, tells him that his son will be healed, if he has faith. The man, in response, cries out “I have belief! Help my unbelief!”
I love the man’s response, because I think it captures an essential quality of the life of faith: that it is mingled with doubt. This might not be obvious, given the way people talk about faith these days. On one hand, there’s a whole host of “New Atheist” types who misinterpret faith as something “blind” – untroubled by countervailing evidence, and free of those doubting dark nights of the soul. On the other hand, I often run into Christians who are excessively rationalistic, relying on empirical or positivistic foundations for their belief. Of course, faith and reason are, in many respects, good friends; in fact, they depend on each other. Yet it seems a certain segment of the faithful are looking to remove doubt and equivocation by positing overly-rational justification for belief.
I don’t think that I’m any less committed than they are to the great claims of Christianity. But I can’t declare – at least in a way that would satisfy a fastidious lab assistant – that there’s empirical proof for them. In fact, I think I would do my faith a disservice by trying to do so. To argue that my deepest beliefs are at core empirically demonstrable also makes them vulnerable to empirical critique.
I do, however, think I understand the impulse to want to have rational or empirical “proof” for faith. Doubt can be a brutal adversary, a faith-killer, the very thing that keeps you sleepless during those dark nights of the soul. Yet maybe the potential exists for doubt to be put to good use, to actually have some sort of positive effect in a life of faith. I’m coming to terms with the idea that I need to make doubt my friend, because as far as I can tell, it’s always going to be with me, so we might as well get along.
I’ve heard that Fyodor Dostoevsky claimed his faith was “formed in a great furnace of doubt.” I’ve always liked that claim, for its eloquence, but also for the comfort I get from knowing that one of the most luminously intelligent Christians wrestled with doubt. It makes me feel better about my own seasons where I’m unable to shake off the skepticism. I’ve always taken Dostoevsky’s “furnace” metaphor as a description of the pain of doubt – how it can burn intensely and unrelieved – and I imagine that’s the way he meant for it to be understood. But perhaps there’s another way to look at it. Maybe the fire that forged Dostoevsky’s hosannas was not just the agony of doubt, but the refiner of faith. Perhaps the flames of doubt fuelled the questions that pared down the nonessentials of his faith, and all the idols, the superstitions, the insipid metaphysical excess was melted away. Perhaps it was in that furnace of doubt that his faith was refined to something much more pure – a new, genuine faith rising from the ashes of the old one.
I have to admit I’m a bit uncomfortable with where this line of thought takes me, because doubt often does lead to a complete loss of faith. Then again, there are many kinds of faith, Christian or otherwise, that ought to be lost. There are many instances where unbelief may be preferable, because at least unbelief – when it is not dogmatic or fundamentalist as some forms of belief – leaves room for the possibility that something may grow in the absence. And, in the midst of doubt, I hold fast to the faith that something good can grow there.
I’m sure many of you experience your time at university to be one where your intellectual horizons are greatly expanded. This is wonderful, for so many reasons, but there’s definitely the danger that it can lead to a scorching case of know-it-all-ism. So whether you’re a New Atheist, an overly-rationalistic believer, or just confident that you’ve got it all figured out, may your certainty be shaken by tremors of doubt. I’d say that a little doubt is exactly what a bunch of know-it-alls need.

I’ve had John Calvin on the brain lately. It’s the 500th anniversary of his portentous birth, and Princeton Seminary has enjoined the theologically curious (and industrious) to read through the entire “Institutes of the Christian Religion” over the course of the year. They’ve divided the book up into chunks so that if you read just a few pages a day (Sundays excepted), you’ll finish the book just in time to ring in 2010. I’ve been keeping up with the schedule, and I’ve found that it’s actually a lot of fun. Proceeding through Calvin, instead of just reading him piecemeal has been great – to follow his arguments and the development of his case sheds light not only on his deep passion and sharp mind, but also on his personality. Four students have told me that they’ll keep up with the readings too, which is surprising and heartening.

Last term, I also re-read Marilynne Robinson’s “The Death of Adam,” with my faculty/staff/grad student reading group. A great deal of the book is concerned with rehabilitating John Calvin’s reputation and theology, and I’ve found that it was great preparation for diving into the Institutes.

I’m not the only one who has Calvin on the brain. The New York Times Magazine does, too, in this week’s edition. Here’s a link to the article.

The article isn’t really about Calvin per se, but more about some of his current followers. It’s a brief look into the “New Calvinist” trend that was also the subject of Collin Hansen’s book that I wrote about in my last post.

As is to be expected, the Times does a less than admirable job discussing the matter at hand. Don’t get me wrong – I love the NY Times. In fact, I’d say it’s essential reading for anyone who’s interested in anything that happens beyond their navel. But this article just confirms for me that the good folks who write for the Times have no meaningful acquaintance with religious thought or religious practice. From the outset, it’s clear that the author knows precisely nothing about John Calvin, and instead resorts to trotting out asinine and unqualified statements like how Calvinism is “a theology that would make Pat Robertson seem warm and fuzzy,” and “John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake.”

Wrong on both counts. I’ll admit that the former is perhaps a valid description of some people who’ve called themselves Calvinists, but that says nothing of the idea itself; I’m sure that there have also been Marxists, Democrats, Rabbis, vegetarians and wedding singers who make Robertson seem snuggly. People are grumpy and dour, despite their ideological affiliation. As for the latter claim, there is that whole Michael Servetus business, but it should be noted that Servetus is the only example of Calvin having a hand in an execution, and that Calvin not only visited Servetus in prison, but asked that he not be burned at the stake. (Of course, one execution is too many, but this was the 16th century, and for a magistrate of the time to have a kill count of one is actually pretty mild).

I think what bothered me most about the article, however, was not the journalist’s ignorance, but her subject. The piece focuses on one Mark Driscoll, a troglodytic mega-church preacher from Seattle.  According to the article, Driscoll is emblematic of the New Calvinist movement, which places major theological emphasis on God’s predestination of creation. I suppose predestination is a part of Calvinist theology; however, Calvin is by no means the sole proprietor of the doctrine. Many great theologians have espoused the doctrine over the years, and one could make a good case that Thomas Aquinas’ conception of predestination is much more hardcore than Calvin’s ever was.

What I don’t get is how the doctrine is so associated with Calvinism and Reformed theology, to the point that in the mind of many people, the entire theological system can be distilled to that point.

What’s more, the understanding of predestination that the New Calvinists affirm isn’t even a good one. One of Driscoll’s disciples was reported to have uttered this fatuity:

“There are plenty of comfortable people who can say, ‘God’s on my side… but they couldn’t turn around and say, ‘God gave me cancer.’ ”

We are to suppose that the pious Calvinist should be able to say “God gave me cancer.” Yikes. I don’t imagine that this fellow is often called upon to console the cancer-ravaged, or to counsel the bereaved with his exuberant callousness. To say things like this is at best to espouse a masochistic theology, and at worst to elide the difference between God and the devil. It’s also a fast and firm denial of God as revealed in Christ, who did not, as I recall, go around preaching the gospel and spreading disease.

This understanding of predestination – where every jot and tittle of human action is foreordained, and where evil is actively willed by God as part of the metaphysical unfurling of God’s good plan – is not so much predestination as it is fatalism and determinism. Those things were rampant 2000 years ago (also implicit in much scientific thinking today), and it’s Christianity, with its focus on love, on grace, on freedom (though not the voluntarist sense of the word) that sprang humanity free from them.

So please, please, please, let’s not talk about predestination as if it entails that all things – even cancer, even holocausts – are directly willed by the hand of God for his good purposes, or to make his glory shine forth. Those things are not necessary for the outworking of God’s love in creation, even though grace is often made manifest in them. Cancer is false and damnable; it plays no essential role in the blooming of God’s redemptive work.

The New Calvinists also seem to be big fans of a reductionistic (and therefore simplistic) understanding of gender. Men and women, though equal before God, are endowed with different gifts that require them to serve in different capacities. I suppose that were the Bible filled with charts and graphs that clearly delineated what the job description for a man was, then I’d assent to it, seeing as I’m the sola scriptura sort. But the Bible doesn’t seem to have that agenda, or if it did, it’s hidden well in the context of parable, song and poem and in epistles written to unique communities.

But Driscoll and the New Calvinists know what the Bible teaches about the essential characteristics of men and women, and they’re getting the word out to save us guys from our impending emasculation. (I can’t help but wonder what sort of man Driscoll would think I am, given that I was making pea soup for my wife while I read this article…). Both men and women at his church assent to a kind of gender “complementarianism,” which is a nice-sounding word for a rather insipid concept.

How can we account for all of this determinism, this reductionism, this mechanistic understanding of the nature of creation? Is it just lazy theology, or does it arise from something deeper? I wonder if the New Calvinist piety is not so much fueled by the Spirit as it is by an anxiety about the nature of creation, of being a creature. The cosmos is a complex place, with a complex relationship to its creator. Gender identities and gendered relationships are unfathomably elaborate; anyone with the slightest acquaintance with being human knows that we can’t be neatly summed up, compartmentalized, or assigned roles  based on chromosomal difference. All of this complexity can be overwhelming and jarring, and a narrow, deterministic theology may be the prescription some seek.  With it, all loose ends are tied up, all complexity is reduced, all mysteries solved. Even cancer isn’t so bad, when we realize God doles it out for a good reason, like he does with everything.

The question the New Calvinists ask, then, is are we man enough to accept that fact, to swallow this pill (and make our wives submit to it, too)?

There’s something so anti-creational about this prescription, besotted as it is with predestinarian clockwork and prescriptive gender roles. David Bentley Hart muses that when “everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens, there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God’s unadulterated power. One wonders, indeed, if a kind of reverse Prometheanism does not lurk somewhere within such a theology, a refusal to be a creature, a desire rather to be dissolved into the infinite fiery flood of God’s solitary and arbitrary act of will.” I think he’s on to something.

I should probably stop ranting, and posting half-baked thoughts.

I will, however, say one more thing: I don’t like that these folks are the new face of Calvinism and Reformed theology in North America. I don’t like it, because I don’t think they do a fair job of representing a grand tradition.

I come from a long line of Calvinists. I want my tradition back.