Two Big Needs

Ever since I was a young person, I’ve felt two big needs:

(1) To reconcile Christianity with science and rationalism, broadly considered.

From the “old atheists” to the “new atheists”; from the Enlightenment, to the Critical Rationalists, to the Bay Area rationalists and so on…These things offer a critique of Christianity, and my inner skeptic has not been satisfied with the existing Christian response.

To be sure, Christian intellectualism has a whole apologetics industry, and multiple academic fields. Yet much of this is oriented around an epistemology which feels dated, and towards defending ground which feels undesirable.

I’m the product of a scientific and technological age, I grew up reading Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Isaac Asimov, and I find that this broad worldview offers a fittedness for life and the world that I’m neither able nor willing to shake.

For me, Christianity must make sense within this general picture, or it does not really make sense at all. I cannot go back; I can only go through. I can only go “further up and further in”.

And so, ever since I was young, I have hoped for a Christian answer that actually seems to land in the world it’s addressing.

(2) To reconcile Christianity with the intensity of its own proclamation.

The Hebrew Bible opens with the bold declaration that humans are made to be like God, made to rule all things, collectively and individually.

The Christian scriptures amplify this even further, promising and calling forth likeness to Christ—in his life, in his glory, in his rule over creation. And this is not taken as merely theoretical or abstract: Christians from the earliest times understood it as a revolution of heaven and earth, a challenge to every political and religious authority, a challenge to everything that stood between humanity and the rule of creation.

And so St. Gregory of Nyssa in the 300s railed against slavery, How dare you enslave a human called by God to rule the earth?!

And his brother St. Basil the Great built the hospital, understanding that the call to rule creation is the call to defeat disease and heal the body.

And down through history, Christian reformers have challenged every system of authority and power—including that of Christianity!—and advocated for education, and science, and learning, and technological progress. And they sometimes succeeded in building a bit of a what they dreamed, from the Carolingian Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution.

And all of that was driven by the understanding, at some level, that Christianity is a radical, revolutionary proclamation, calling forth a new arrangement of the universe; and that we are to become a microcosm of that new arrangement, that future, as best we can, as best we are able.

This is a challenging perspective to take up, because it runs against the grain of much of modern Christian thought. As NT Wright once encountered with a translator he employed—the articulation of the Bible sometimes strikes modern Christians as the rejection of it.

But it’s also challenging because of the history of Christianity itself, which has been in some sense the thorough-going compromise of the Christian proclamation. How can we stand in the stream of Christian history, refuse to deny it, and yet refuse to let go of the radical call of Christ himself?

Some resolution is had when we understand that Christ tells us his kingdom will grow like yeast, like leaven, like hidden grains among the weeds. The kingdom will at every turn be mistaken for its opposite; will even give support and sustenance to its opposite.

And we must refuse the temptation to “weed” before the harvest, to try to enforce some kind of imposed purity on a world and a community still in process.

And this means we must always be wrapped in imperfection and compromise; must always work iteratively in the world to bring the radical future into the present.

But if we resolve ourselves to Christian history in this way, we must also call upon Christianity today to embrace and practice and proclaim the revolutionary call of Christ. And we must do this in ways that were alive in the tradition itself, but now feel foreign and alien to Christians in today’s world.

Most modern Christians can scarcely imagine that the scientific revolution was understood as a religious duty, and populated by clergy and laity—that the call to heal the sick and cast out disease was taken up as a call to the most profound research program history has ever known.

Somehow this understanding, that was alive in the 4th century, and the 17th century, and in our institutional life up until only a few generations ago, must be renewed and brought back into the consciousness of the modern church.

For if it isn’t—if the Christian proclamation ever fails to generate hospitals, sciences, abolitions—then wouldn’t that suggest that the radical call of Christ has failed—and in fact, must never have been truly alive to begin with?

These two needs have challenged me, and perplexed me, and haunted me since I was young. But I am heartened because they seem almost to hold the answer to each other. It feels like the gap between the modern church and the historic Christian vision speaks precisely to the distance between scientific rationalism and modern Christian thought.

I don’t know what that answer is. Not fully.

But it seems as if it’s there. The connection is too alive for me to dismiss. And so I remain a committed Christian, with an inner skeptic who is very much alive. And I seek to be true to the Christian tradition, while seeing its essence as more radical than my own thinking could ever be.

My hope here is not to convince you of anything.

My hope is that you will help me to grapple with these paradoxes, and come to understand them more fully.

And perhaps together, we can attain some resolution that will be of benefit to us, and to the church, and to the world.