Category Archives: possibility

Deception in certainty / deliverance in stories

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Have you ever read a novel or biography and found in it something that you had never been able to articulate, or were even unaware of, but which deeply expresses who you are?

Good stories—fictional and historical—capture the most essential aspects of human existence.  They not only convey our most intimate hopes and fears, but they help form who we are and want to become.  Key to making stories “work” is the imagination.

Yet many people see imagination as the enemy of truth.  Truth is real, imagination is not.  Truth is concrete and certain (and so valuable); the imaginary is fanciful and potentially misleading (and so not valuable, or perhaps even dangerous).

Thus the view that facts are good, but stories are bad.  Or at best, facts and stories are very different creatures.  And particularly when it comes to beliefs, facts give you what you need to know.  Stories are something extra for those who like or want them—like bonus material on a rental movie.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  (Pardon the pun).  Let’s take a closer look.

Interestingly, stories have led us back to knowledge.  And in an earlier post I noted how people believe that they can “access” the Bible’s truth (or Truth) absolutely so as to arrive at certain knowledge: to be without doubt.

Yet as it is impossible simply to “read what is in the Bible” instead of needing to interpret it (whether we are conscious of doing so or not), the upshot is that human beings cannot have certainty.  About anything.  Through any means.  Only God has certainty; humans have varying degrees of probability.

But let’s look deeper.

Note that people believe in absolute access in order to arrive at certain knowledge.  This, then, is a belief.  Why do we hold it?  The answer is there: in order to arrive at certain knowledge.  So why is certainty important?  Two reasons present themselves.

First, certainty brings security.  We can live with other viewpoints without feeling threatened by them.  Second, certainty brings rest.  We can be at ease from nagging questions and can instead devote our energies to the truth, where they are best spent.

Interestingly, the enemy is again relativism.  Relativism implies that other views are just as valid as our own, so we must constantly be maintaining their validity.  To circumvent this, some Christians attempt to fortify their knowledge claims: by asserting that what they know is certain—even unassailable—they can feel secure and at ease.

When acquired in the right way and held for the right reasons, security and rest are good things.

As we’ve discussed, though, they cannot be acquired through certainty: certainty is a commodity that humans simply cannot trade in.  But neither can they be held out of pathology.  Because desiring such absolute security is indeed pathological: we are here again faced with a desire to exceed the bounds of what it is to be human and become like God.

It is pathological, too, in that this desire stems from fear and unmet needs.  The fear of wrong beliefs is really the fear of losing our worldview and our very self-understanding.  Further, if a loving God is not real this threatens one’s need to be loved and valued.

So what about stories?

I believe that stories—fictional and historical—deliver us from these excessive (and destructive) perspectives.  Where a desire for absolute security demands certainty, stories invite dialogue with numerous perspectives through our imagination.  And while diversity implies relativism (and doubt), relativism also includes the possibility that matters may be “more” than we had first presumed.

Ironically, it is through opening us to the possible and the essential that stories keep us from falling under the tyranny of the factual and the real.

Two roads not to take

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It is difficult at the outset to know which direction to take: to discuss how/why evangelical Christianity has value, or to hold this in abatement and examine how (and how much) evangelical Christianity is broken.  I’ll explain my choice by way of analogy.

After completing my graduate studies I ran across something that I had never experienced or had an interest in: a community dance.  I fell in love.  After so many years of living “in my head” I was suddenly aware of just how much of me simply could not be expressed through my intellect, or even my voice or pen.  Unlike church I attended regularly for several years, finding it a catalyst for catharsis: within my dance I could bring out my pain, my frustration, and loneliness.  I did not dance them away, but let them be.

Before I left Vancouver I had a chat with the founder.  He had started this dance—a family-friendly, no drugs / alcohol, not-for-profit event—because he just wanted to dance.  No club scene, no strings.  I was considering starting a similar community dance in my new town but had no skill as a DJ.  The best tip he gave me was this: play what you like.  You won’t please everyone, so if you can’t into it then it’s not worth doing and really, it won’t work.

As with dancing, so too those who read these entries may have diverging views about what should be said first in a blog making such big claims (i.e., Christianity is real—prove it!  Evangelical Christianity is deeply flawed—prove it!).  Yet in keeping with my favourite DJ’s perspective, I’m going with what’s on my front burner at the moment and will move on from there.

But my story about dancing is more than a long-winded analogy.  Beyond being cathartic for my negative emotions dancing was also the space where I could best express my response to the fullness of the love and truth that I encounter: through my existence, my family, my world, and my experience(s) of a God who actually shows up.  Joy.

And that too is why I’m doing this—why I’m writing.  (As an aside I think it should be odd to us, and evoke some suspicion, that the word joy itself is weird nowadays and that its connotation seems, somehow, deeply awkward).  So if you’re expecting me to start by laying down proofs you’ll be disappointed, or perhaps happily surprised.  Because being intellectually convinced of something, as important as that is, comes second.  Or rather, where any truth claims to be absolute—making a claim on my existence and on all of existence—and also to be supremely about love, it must be as philosopher Søren Kierkegaard notes: truth that is “for me,” and intimately so.

In my own experience the greatest “truth-for-me” is to be deeply beloved on one whom I deeply love.  Thus my view that truth and love are co-central to both human existence and Christianity / the Christian God comes not out of intellectual intuition or theological obligation, but because it has been my experience, and this experience has transformed my life.  Absolute truth may be such, but as I have no absolute access to it, it means nothing to me unless it is true for me.

So which road am I taking?  Neither.  I refuse the view that the binary opposition between proving Christianity or disproving it is the only way to go, nor do I believe that “proving” in any modernist sense even represents a valid option.  Instead the path, full of detours and discursions, will take love and truth as joint polar stars towards a way of being that looks for validation through reason and experience, even the experience of joy.

Another Christian option?

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On the one hand I’m loathe to type it.  How many times has Jesus been presented as the “answer,” irrespective of the problem?  How many times have people been naïve, been of “good faith,” or perhaps gone out on a limb with this Jesus only to be let down, or even abused?  So the problem—before even beginning with this course of discussion—is huge.

I’m particularly sympathetic to the dis-ease (and at times, disease) that this Jesus can wreak because I was an evangelical Christian for many years.  I repudiated my Christian beliefs after a series of profoundly evil and destructive events led me to the irrefutable conclusion that evil is more powerful (and more real) than God.  In these clutch moments God fell short.  Or more accurately, from everything that I could perceive, God simply didn’t show up.

So where the cost of any belief system is one’s sanity and intellectual integrity, such a cost is too high: paying this price is effectively divorcing oneself from one’s personal history, one’s culture, one’s world.  In short, it is embracing irreality.  I was a truth-seeker and Christianity was a lie, so we really had nothing in common.

Yet while not ignoring or denouncing the preceding, I am, on the other hand, actually writing in favour of Christianity and its Jesus.  Why?  Because over the course of nearly 7 years as a hostile agnostic I had new experiences and understandings (of the world, myself, Christianity, and God) that are as real—and more powerful and compelling—than my experiences of evil.  In short, I am writing in favour of Christianity because the Christian God actually showed up in my experience.  This claim requires much more explanation and validation than I can offer here, but the end result of such experiences and understandings of God was that Christianity was possible, and in fact more than possible.

Before going on to present this specific Christianity and its “more,” let me state two caveats.  First, Christians, best not to applaud at this point: if you presume that I’m another sinner who has “turned back” to what you understand as Christianity or that I’m simply “in your camp,” then what follows will be an even chillier proverbial ‘bucket of cold water’.  And second, Non-Christians, best not to insist that I must be lying about either my initial, negative claims about Christianity or deceived about the validity that I find in my current Christian belief (as though no one who truly thought the one could ever again really think the other).

You’d be dead wrong in supposing the first.  And as to the second?  Well, I suppose that will depend on what you get from what you read here.  It depends, in other words, on whether there is another Christian option.