This is the tale of my struggles since coming to university; of the struggle between my reason and faith, and how I was rescued from despair and saved from denial; a story of grace and God’s goodness.
This is my story, and that means two things. Firstly, because it’s my story, it’s not a theological treatise or epistemological argument. The place for a detailed academic argument about the ideas I’ve struggled with is elsewhere. And because it’s my story, your story and your struggles will be different – but I hope that my story will be interesting and perhaps helpful to you.
I came to university a committed Christian, ready to set the world (or at least the university) on fire. I relished the challenge of my studies, and the task of engaging with secularism, naturalism, postmodernism, hedonism and a host of other -isms. I was also keen to examine my beliefs for myself, to make sure I was really following Jesus out of my own conviction, not just because I’d been brought up in the Christian faith.
As my first year progressed, this last task pressed down on me more heavily. How could I be a Christian with any intellectual integrity if I hadn’t for myself established beyond reasonable doubt the truth of the Bible’s claims?
I began to try and read up on the historical evidence for Christianity, and on the various arguments for the Christian faith. I think this is a great thing to do, and would recommend it to anyone. There are excellent grounds for trusting the Bible and for the resurrection of Jesus as an actual historical fact.
But even though I knew the evidence was good, I wasn’t satisfied, and the doubts pressed in. I wanted to find some cast-iron irrefutable piece of evidence that would leave me, and anyone I discussed these things with, with absolutely no room for doubt about the truth of Christianity. When God failed to oblige me with some magic bullet piece of evidence to zap people with, I began to get rather upset, to say the least.
My greatest fear was having to make the dreadful choice between believing and thinking. My fear was that either I’d stop believing because of my doubts, or I’d commit intellectual suicide by holding on to my beliefs despite the evidence. Because I was demanding such a high standard of proof and evidence, I found myself in a place of real spiritual darkness (ooh-err!), becoming increasingly unsure whether I could believe anything at all.
Fortunately for me, God had been providing me with good books and people that would help me out of my dilemma. I discovered stuff like the books of Francis Schaeffer, with his insistence on the Lordship of Christ in all of life. I realised in my head that following God isn’t just a matter of the intellect, but of my whole self – but ironically, this fact wasn’t something that had really connected in my heart!
The big moment of change came on Contagious, the Christian youth conference I’ve been going on since I was fourteen. On the first evening, Trevor Pearce talked about the importance of the fact of the Gospel, that it wasn’t just something subjective, but part of time and space and history (talk). When he started talking about this, I remember thinking something like “Great! Perhaps now I’ll get my proof”. But as good as the talk was, I didn’t get that magic absolute evidence to give me the God-like quasi-omniscient certainty I desired.
The theme of the week was Smashing the Idols of the Heart, and as I was challenged to put God first above all else – nothing else, however good, can compare with him. I began to wonder whether my approach was wrong: was I making this absolute certainty an idol? Was I taking the wrong approach in setting my own individual, and supposedly autonomous and objective, perspective as the arbiter of truth?
One night later on I talked it through with a couple of the leaders. All my frustrations, all my doubts, pent up and let loose with tears and anguish. We went back down to absolute basics – did I believe Jesus existed? Did he die on the cross? Did he rise from the dead? As we worked through the reasons for my struggles, I grasped my way to a new understanding. Knowledge doesn’t come through reason alone, but by reason and faith working together.
Making this transition from “knowledge through reason alone” to “faith and reason working together in tandem” was difficult and painful. From my old perspective, taking into account anything that wasn’t strictly Rational – that is, derived by logical, empirical, testable and observable means – such as trusting people or sources outside of myself, or emotion or experience, was anti-intellectual. What I learned was that the Christian faith isn’t anti-reason – there’s no intellectual suicide in believing – it is reasonable, but also goes beyond reason alone and calls us to trust God.
What’s more, the Bible treats us as a whole person, not as a creature cut up into separate bits – Mind, Will, Emotion, and so on. It’s possible to make those distinctions, but they are all interrelated and connected. So Jesus’ call to follow me wasn’t just a matter for my mind, but legitimately makes a call on my whole self. It is perfectly reasonable to take into account my experience of the living God and that the Christian life is one that can be lived out in practice – just not rationalistic.
It was only recently, almost a year on, that I began to realise more fully just how important a transition I made that night. In reading up on postmodernism for my course, I came across the Christian book in the university library Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K A Smith. In it, Smith engages with postmodern thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, drawing out the positive insights that postmodernism has as well as critiquing postmodern thinking. His key insight was that the whole modernist/postmodernist dilemma is essentially about the relationship between reason and faith – the very issue I’ve been struggling with since coming to university.
As he analysed Western thought in light of this, I began to see that my own personal journey had in many ways retrod the recent history of Western thought in a nutshell! It was a real thrill to read something that described and made sense of my experiences.
I’ll give a brief, necessarily generalised and simplified overview: Descartes had responded to the scepticism of his time by attempting to prove the Christian faith by reason alone, by starting from man by himself as an autonomous thinking being. This approach is summed up in that most famous of philosophical slogans: “I think, therefore I am”.
What Descartes did, however, was to remove faith from the equation of how we know things. Modernism assumes that the only true knowledge is absolute, autonomous, objective knowledge, and seeks to find it. As you can see from my story, it’s easy for us as Christians to buy into this way of thinking, but our pretensions to such God-like knowledge is basically idolatrous.
Postmodernism also buys in to the assumption that faith and reason are divided and opposed. It rightly sees through man’s pretensions to God-like knowledge. As a Christian, I agree that man by himself cannot solve life’s questions. Postmodernism sees knowledge as a matter of faith, but since it divides reason and faith, it is a blind faith that cannot have any grounds for deciding what to have faith in. So any choice is as justified as any other, working out on a popular level in attitudes like “That may be true for you, but not for me”.
I started off like Descartes, but was faced with the same difficulties as the thinkers who followed him, and was beginning to spiral off into postmodern despair in the search for true knowledge. But in reconnecting reason and faith that night on Contagious, I became what Smith calls “properly postmodern” – or, as I like to think of it, I moved out of the blind-alley of modernism and postmodernism that comes from disconnecting reason and faith.
The journey isn’t at its end – I’ve just navigated a particularly tricky part of my own intellectual journey. I’ve been looking into the question of reason and faith further. I listened to a series of talks on Epistemology (how we achieve knowledge) by Andrew Fellows from L’Abri on the Bethinking website, which further confirmed my new understanding. Just a few weeks ago, one of the talks on the UCCF Forum helped me to recognise more fully another vital component in the knowledge equation, that of revelation: in particular, God revealing himself and revealing truth to us, though I won’t unpack all that now.
(As an aside, the Pope’s recent controversial talk in which he supposedly attacked Islam was all about the importance of the connection between reason and faith, and is well worth reading).
I’m really thankful to God for helping me work through these difficulties. He has kept me from intellectual despair on the one hand, and intellectual suicide on the other, and I’m the stronger for having worked through this particular question, of having made my faith more my own and not just something inherited from my parents and upbringing.
Doubts and struggles aren’t an evil to be shunned – rather, they’re a part of the process of growing to be mature in my mind and in my service of God through the use of my mind. Often Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, is deemed to be stupid or immature. Well, unfortunately the Church is currently very intellectually weak in many ways, but the Christian faith can stand being intellectually prodded and poked and dissected.
What’s more, the Christian faith is not unreasonable. It is more than rationalism: the Gospel speaks to you as a whole person, intellect, will, emotions and every other aspect of you, and Jesus calls you to follow him with all that you are. Examine the evidence, but do so knowing that ultimately we all have to decide what to believe on the basis of who and what we will trust.
I’ll just end with a quote from Jesus in Matthew 22:37-38, which sums all this up:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.”