In the next 10 blog posts I will offer responses to each of the 10 questions that I raised last post about the “stakes” for evangelical Christians to examine the question that the evangelical church is broadly dysfunctional.

In other words, what might it “cost” Evangelicals simply to consider this notion in the abstract, without yet taking the next step of considering that this might be a real problem and investigating whether (and to what degree) it effects their church or even themselves?

Let’s start with the first question:
1) What are your feelings and responses to such a claim and how strong are they?

The reason that I focus on “feelings” is that this is typically the level at which most evangelicals will find themselves “responding” to challenging questions / claims against their beliefs, such as the notion that evangelical Christianity is broadly “dysfunctional.”  In other words, while the claim to dysfunction has intellectual content the responses to such a claim will rarely be primarily (or initially) intellectual.  Their responses will instead be primarily (and perhaps purely) emotional.

This is because the claim / question is not often perceived primarily as a claim (or even as a claim that is threatening) but as a threat (or at best, as a threat that has some rational or explanatory content).  The reason that challenging claims are treated as threats is that most evangelicals hold their beliefs out of a combination of fear (of what might happen if they did not hold them) and ignorance (of what other, more valid reasons exist for believing these things and of how their beliefs relate to–or integrate with–the rest of life).

In other words, most Christians believe “on the basis of” (or as a matter of) faith seeking usefulness and as an expression of fear and ignorance, whereas the logic of belief is to believe “on the basis of” (or as a matter of) understanding, agreement, engagement and trust, which then manifest as an expression of truth-seeking requiring faith.  The two could not be more different !

Restated, most evangelicals focus on “having faith” (and the benefits that having such faith provides and / or the penalty that it avoids) rather than on “believing something one sufficiently understands and about which one is more confident of its truth than of other, competing beliefs.”

Quite literally, this is the difference between “faith in faith” and “faith in something.”  And a short pause should be enough to grasp that “faith in faith” is actually a contradiction: faith never has itself as a referent, or focus, because faith must have an object to be meaningful.

Instead, “faith in faith” is actually faith because of something and as such the belief content–the what that is believed–is essentially a “carrier” for faith, and so is actually irrelevant!  This is because belief as a matter of faith–or “faith in faith”–seeks not to believe something because it is true, but to believe something because it is useful.

The distinction is between “believing something” because it is useful versus “believing something” because it is true.  And my argument is that the best reason for believing something is because that thing is true.

My point, then, is that most Christians believe in Christianity “because of” or “due to” something external to the central content of Christian beliefs, such as believing in God in order to “go to heaven” and/or avoid “going to hell.”  (On that point, the most widely accepted conception of hell, as eternal conscious torment (ECT), is itself a view based on biblical interpretations that I view to be questionable at best, if not outright incorrect.  See Edward Fudge‘s excellent work by way of explanation).

Instead, however, my argument is that beliefs should be held because they are (or can be assessed to be) true.  From this vantage, a belief is held because the holder believes it has sufficient “merit” to warrant holding it rather than any other belief.  That is, in the holder’s view there is sufficient 1) clarity to understand the belief, 2) evidence for believing in the belief’s truthfulness, 3) explanatory power related to the belief’s domain(s) of relevance, and 4) coherence with other beliefs that have shown themselves to be truthful and “properly explanatory” of life and living in the world.

In other words, in my view only beliefs that are held as an expression of faith–and never as a matter of faith–are compatible with both a) the logic of belief as believing in something, b) biblical expressions of faith and c) human instantiations of faith in all other areas of life.

So how does this relate to the “question” of evangelical dysfunction?

The reality is that evangelical Christians will not be able even to consider the question of “evangelical dysfunction” unless they hold their beliefs as a expression of truth-seeking involving faith.  How can we know this?  Try it out.  Test it and see.  I have.  And the responses confirm that those whose faith is an expression of faith seeking usefulness (and a matter of fear and ignorance) continue

The irony, of course, is that the first approach assumes the second without actually carrying it out, whereas the second includes elements of the first but in a chastened form whose scale is more appropriate to the context.

The real issue?  For others, The beliefs of Evangelical who promote the “faith in the cause of usefulness” model will tend to be circular, and will create countless contexts for 1) alienation of those within the church who question–let alone criticize–this model or who advocate “faith in the cause of truthfulness” model, and 2) promoting further loss of credibility among outsiders to Christianity, the very ones that Evangelicals desire to reach.

For themselves, the faith of evangelicals who cling to the “faith in the cause of usefulness” model will be little more than an outer husk of personal piety devoid of any real content.  Hardly following the example of Christ.  Indeed, hardly Christian.

[1. Here I am cutting back strongly against, for instance, those expressions of Kierkegaard’s thought that emphasize not that faith is required because we cannot have full knowledge of the matter that the belief relates to but that faith is required because we cannot have any significant knowledge at all–the notion that Christian faith is to be held “as a matter of faith” precisely because we can hold it in no other way.  This is commonly know as “fideism.”  I believe that Kierkegaard’s position is not equivalent to Christian belief being a simple “matter of faith”–it is more complicated and substantial than that–but in my view the prioritization of faith “above all other things” misrepresents both what it is to engage with God (as depicted in the biblical text) and what it is to engage with any aspect of human existence.]