It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”
The path to philosophy is paved with polemic and fueled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosophical theologian 25 years ago, I imagined the world’s (and the church’s) problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us.
This change is bound up with my biography. As a convert to the Christian faith at age 18, I immediately sensed a call to what I could only describe as “the ministry.” In retrospect, what that meant was informing people of the Truth. It’s as if I felt Christianity was a secret that had been kept from me, so my ardor was to let others in on the secret. Ancient Mariner–like, I would buttonhole people to make the case.
This started on street corners with a friend. He would strum his guitar on the sidewalk and sing songs by Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel to draw a crowd. I would then utilize what we called a “sketch board” that looked a bit like a Jeopardy! board: blank squares waiting to become words. With a few strategic dashes of a paintbrush, I would unveil a secret message about sin and salvation. We were decoding the truth. I’m not sure we convinced a soul. This seems like a lifetime ago. It almost feels like someone else’s life.
Converted through the Plymouth Brethren, a low-church sect of evangelicalism suspicious of ordained ministry, I preached my first sermon at 19. This snowballed into a kind of 20th-century circuit rider ministry in tiny churches dotting villages in southwestern Ontario—Gorrie and Alma, Wingham and Wallenstein, Tavistock and Exeter. I would drive to town on a Sunday morning, preach a first service, spend an afternoon in a family’s home, nourished by a meal and a nap, return to the chapel for the evening service, and then drive home. I did this alongside my undergraduate and early graduate studies, shuttling between the worlds of the university and the fundamentalist chapel.
As I imagined a call to pastoral ministry, all I really imagined was preaching. And the only thing I could envision as preaching was teaching: didactic induction into the truth. The pulpit was where one dispensed instruction. I look at my sermon notes from this period and cringe. I want to go back to these congregations and apologize—for boring them to death, sure, but also for a youthful selfishness, imagining my abstractions and speculations had anything to do with living the Christian life. Here were people quietly burying their elders, terrified for children bent on destroying themselves, facing death and loneliness and loss, never given permission to doubt, carrying any number of secret burdens and sins they longed to confess; and here’s a 22-year-old kid who’s read a lot of books trying to parse trinitarian personhood through 19th-century scholasticism as if it matters.
It was during this period that I started to get an inkling that my calling might take a different tack—into not the seas of pastoral ministry but the more staid waters of academia. When I read Alvin Plantinga’s inaugural address at Notre Dame, “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (published in the first volume of the Society of Christian Philosophers’ journal, Faith and Philosophy), I felt like Augustine did when he read Cicero’s Hortensius: it “changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities” (Confessions 3.4.7). What better way to pursue the truth than this discipline that was (supposedly) animated by the love of wisdom? Having applied both to seminary and for graduate study in philosophy, I sensed that God wanted me to study philosophy to bring its analytical gifts to theology and the church.
Nothing beats the love of wisdom out of you like a graduate program in philosophy. It is an apprenticeship in polemics. Philosophy begins in wonder, Plato tells us. But a doctorate in philosophy is where wonder goes to die. What begins as a quest for wisdom ends as a search for a job. And a job is the reward for repressing wonder and pursuing mastery. The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardor of the apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. Stand back: I’m here to teach.
As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manichaeans and Pelagians with ironclad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.
It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”
What changed my mind?
In some ways, it was a philosophical appreciation for the limits of philosophy—a rational conclusion about the limits of reason. A decade ago I read Marcel Proust’s early critical work Contre Sainte-Beuve and was jarred by the opening line of his prologue: “Every day I set less store on the intellect.” This is the sort of thing that makes philosophers nervous, the charge of “irrationalism!” on a hair trigger. But as I listened to Proust consider the failures of the intellect to evoke the past or probe the depth of emotion, an insight was rumbling to the surface. Proust’s poetic prose was doing something propositions could never do. “Compared with this past,” he concluded, “this private essence of ourselves, the truths of intellect seem scarcely real at all.”
While Proust never intended it, a theological insight was welling up in my imagination: that the “truths of intellect” were inadequate to the fullness of grace experienced in friendship with Christ and his body. While Proust’s focus was artistic, I was sensing important parallels with theology and the importance of recognizing what Proust called “the relative inferiority of the intellect.” And yet, he emphasized, there is a paradox at work here, since “it is the intellect we must call on to establish this inferiority. Because if intellect does not deserve the crown of crowns, only intellect is able to award it.” I found myself nodding in agreement with Proust and worried that I was becoming a traitor to my discipline.
However, I have just enough Augustinian self-suspicion to suspect I’m fronting this philosophical reason for my change of mind when, in fact, there are more personal, more existential factors that led me to see the limits of logic and finally understand the irreducible intelligence of love. Perhaps naming it is just the sort of philosophical risk that performs the point I’m trying to make.
The other catalyst was a season of dark depression. None of my analytical skills helped me claw my way out of the lonely trench in which I found myself, alienated from those right next to me. I won’t adequately capture the despair of realizing that my intellectual strengths were powerless to dispel the black sun that oppressed me. It was a profound experience of puzzlement and bewilderment: What’s happening to me?
I wondered. Nothing in my external circumstances should engender sadness or disappointment. To the contrary. But why am I sobbing in the middle of the afternoon? Why am I either a monster of anger or a lethargic shell? Why do my wife and children feel a million miles away, and why do I keep pushing them even farther? I didn’t understand, and that in itself was an affront to my philosophical confidence.
This experience was humbling on a number of registers, including intellectually, because I confronted a challenge that refused to be solved by analysis. All of my vocational confidence in the power of reason was quite literally humiliated in the face of depression. I couldn’t think my way out of this.
Instead, a hand reached down into that dark pit. It was the hand of a Christian counselor, and he didn’t just reach down into the pit; he jumped down there beside me. I can’t help but recall here a scene from The West Wing. White House chief of staff Leo McGarry reaches out to his deputy, Josh Lyman, who is struggling with PTSD. Leo tells him a parable:
This guy’s walking down the street when he falls down a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey, you! Can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription and throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts, “Father, I’m down in this hole. Can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by. “Hey, Joe, it’s me! Can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”
My therapist helped me find the way out. But it took a while. I think that’s because I brought my philosophical prejudices to our first meetings, expecting he’d give me the information I needed to figure out my problem.