Do Christians need “second opinions” about their faith?

Last post I raised this question and concluded it by connecting physical / mental healthcare and spiritual healthcare. I noted three parallels. First faith, like health, is ultimately my personal responsibility to maintain and develop. Second faith, like health, is complicated and so requires expertise to understand and interpret. Third faith, like health, is impacted by the environment.

This post I want to reframe the above question to: When do Christians need a “second opinion” about their faith, and then consider How would Christians go about getting one?

To answer these questions I want to assess two preliminary concerns: a) What is a second opinion? and b) How would I know that I need one? On the one hand this seems easy: a second opinion is another viewpoint. But clearly we want more than that. We want not only a different but an insightful viewpoint, and ideally one offered by an expert who attentively engages with the matter at hand.

Yet on the other hand, the very notion of “expertise” when it comes to Christian belief and practice is complicated. How is such expertise determined? Asked differently, what legitimates someone as an “expert” in this area? Is my pastor or minister an expert, or a professor at seminary or maybe a devout, long-term Christian? Are there perhaps degrees or areas of expertise? If so, what are they and how are they acquired? More worryingly, how do I adjudicate when experts disagree?

Let me refocus this using my three earlier points about faith: faith is ultimately my personal responsibility, it is complicated, and it is effected by my environment.

So hopefully I have shown that not only faith but the very notion of expertise is complicated. This means that assessing one’s faith more objectively (i.e., with the help of outside, expert opinions) is as inherently difficult process. As such, beyond any accusation of Christians being insular or close-minded, it is understandable when Christians abdicate some of their personal responsibility for their faith and allow their churches or Christian subcultures (e.g., their environment) to play an overly larger role in informing them.

Yet where churches and Christian subcultures then not only explain what Christianity is but what individual Christians should believe, how they should act and, more generally, how they should think (or even what they should think about), my wager is that most Christians abdicate too much of their personal responsibility and so become our over-reliant on their Christian community. The result is that such Christians will then have built-in opposition to the very process of “seeking a second opinion.” In other words, many Christians are not neutrally but negatively disposed to the notion.

This is very important to recognize from the outset, not least because it has enormous implications for my second concern: b) How would I know if I need a second opinion? The simple answer: most Christians would not know. Through being habituated to relying too heavily on Christian community for their understanding and formation Christians have essentially been trained not to seek second opinions by our most basic orientation / attachment to our communities.

Sound bad? Well, I think it actually gets worse before it gets better.

In other words, where they have abdicated too much personal responsibility and become over-reliant on Christian community, many Christians have developed habits that run counter to seeking the help that they need to fortify and / or rejuvenate their faith. Yet compounding this is the fact that such second opinions are not simply about gathering information but also about embodying formation. And this is key.

In other words the process of seeking, obtaining, and evaluating a second opinion is developing one’s own expertise on such matters by becoming more adept at living the Christian life. This is reflected in that the resources that I value most for second opinions are those that “walk me through” their thinking and the processes by which they adjudicate the matters that I bring to them—they not only inform me but train me.

So given this rather dire picture, how do we answer our preliminary questions:
1) When do Christians need a “second opinion” about their faith?
2) How would they go about getting one?

Let me propose two ways.

First, Christians need second opinions all the time, because “second opinions” are indications that we live in a complex reality but also assurances that truth itself is diverse! On many, many subjects Christians simply are not bound to one single answer but need to become conversant with many truly viable responses in order to distinguish the good from the bad and from there to adjudicate, choose, and embody the best among the good.

Second, if there is even a little accuracy to the picture that I have painted, above, then the process of getting a second opinion is not separable from the rest of our faith but is itself an integral (though missing) part of that very faith. As such, our understanding of Christian being and living must itself be expanded. Put differently, Christians do not so much need to learn how to get second opinions on their faith as to adopt a faith within which this notion is an everyday component.