What Am I Now?

Column by Brian McLaren on 16 May 2019 1 Comments

In my previous piece, I shared a bit about my past. This piece turns to the present. I’ve just begun work on two books, the second of which is tentatively entitled, Do I Stay Christian? As I sketch out the shape and trajectory of the book, I’m thinking more deeply about why I still identify as Christian and what I think Christian can and in fact must come to mean in the decades ahead.

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Question

 
If our knowledge of God can only be accessed through faith, and if the divinity of Jesus can only be affirmed through faith, why do we act and speak as if faith is the same as empirical knowing?

Wouldn’t we be further ahead in our spiritual journey and in our interaction with the world if we would present ourselves honestly by saying something like ‘I don’t ‘know’ God exists or that Jesus was divine in a greater sense than any of us? But I choose to live my life as if those things are true. That, to me, is faith and authenticity. It also protects me from the hubris of thinking that my tribe has the truth over all other truth claims. I’m interested in your perspective on this issue of faith vs knowledge.

Answer

 
Dear Ron,

I appreciate your question and observation, especially your ‘choice to live your life as if…’ which seems to be a wonderfully clear and authentic articulation of faith to me. Perhaps faith truly is less a question to be answered, and more a mystery to be lived. Unfortunately, part of the confusion you point out stems from the fact that the modern-scientific age of empiricism has co-opted the word ‘knowledge’, and our understanding of what ‘knowledge’ actually is. Knowledge in the ‘objective’ sense is very important for scientific measurement and forming the mathematical hypotheses that have brought miraculous advances across a diversity of fields in our age of globalizing and quantum technologies. The question is at what cost? Perhaps the cost of these advances has been the loss of the ‘deep subjective’ which is both experiential knowledge (gnosis in the Greek), and relational knowledge (intimate, as the Hebrew word yada insinuates; see Gen 3). The deep subjective is that ‘I-Thou’ relationship spoken of by Martin Buber, not to mention indigenous animistic peoples, religious mystics, and even many deep ecologists.

According to folks like Carl Jung and Stephen Galegos and others, there are four functions, or ‘windows’ by which we can know the world. Only one of those windows is the privileged thinking function. The others are sensing, feeling, and intuition, or imagination. Each ‘window’ let’s part of the light into the house, so to speak, but not all of it. They are designed to work together. It could be argued that Albert Einstein, for example, had a more powerful imagination perhaps than even his capacity for critical thinking. My opinion, partially drawn from the study of indigenous peoples, the ancient prophets, mystics and shamans of various cultures, is that real faith goes far beyond ‘thinking’ — the subject-object dualism of the strategic mind must be in a sense overcome for advances in faith and consciousness. To be whole we must incorporate all four ‘windows’ in the fullness of our capacities (I-the Self) in relationship to the dynamic world, other, God (Thou). It makes me think of the way jazz musicians improvise together when they make music in such a deeply intuitive way that they enter a flow state. They might even say that the music is playing them. In this way, it is the deep subjective, not critical thinking, that is the primary referent of faith.

~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal

 

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