Last week, I posted a few reflections on how Christians should respond when they experience horrendous evils.  My interlocutor replied with this additional concern:

“I have to admit…I gave a bitter sigh when I read this, because not a week ago I quoted [Psalm 37:13] to a friend of mine while exclaiming that I wish it helped, but I simply did not believe that I would “see the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the living”.

I’m interested in what you think about this.  I understand that often our experience of God’s goodness in the face of evil is ultimate; seen only in the end as we come to realize the enormity of God’s work and the Good He has wrought out of the evil in our lives.  What really hits me though is the seemingly deep-set belief expressed throughout the Psalms by David that God *will* right the wrongs here on Earth, in our lifetimes. I “believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living”.  He prays that his enemies be destroyed, that those who seek his life be stopped, that those who scheme against him be put to shame, that God rise up and defend His people and work justice in the land here and now.

And that’s where, frankly, I lose heart…because I don’t really believe that He will.”

My response was as follows:

I think your intuition about David’s prayers in the Psalms is correct:  fundamentally, he does express a desire to see the justice of God executed here and now.  I tend to think that this desire is not eliminated by the New Testament, either.  The questions, it seems, are what is to be done with such a desire, and how we should respond when it is not fulfilled.

As to the former, I sometimes suspect that the desire for justice needs, like all of our desires, to undergo a purification.  Vindication is, after all, God’s–not ours.  The desire for revenge is a separate thing from the desire for justice, yet I wonder how much we confuse the two . There is good reason, then, to be suspicious of our own desires for justice and their sanctity.

But a purification of a desire does not entail that it should be eradicated.  When the gold ore is refined, it remains gold.  Fundamentally, our longing for justice here and now must become a longing for God, for only in Him and in His Kingdom will vindication occur–for this sin and for the sins of others.  This does not entail that offenders should not be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  They should.  But the preservation of public justice is, I would argue, a separate consideration from the flourishing of our souls, and in this case it is the latter that concerns me.  The desire for justice finds its home in God, and in his eschatological victory–and then here and now.  “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.”

Then we come to the problem of lack of fulfillment.  The question we must ask ourselves is on what terms we would see justice done–on ours or Gods?  We pray “Thy Kingdom come,” but if we set the terms for its coming than we shall certainly miss it.  The Lord’s justice, in fact, may sometimes be hidden from our sight.  We are not allowed to know everyone’s stories, including those who hurt us.

I would suggest, then, that you not give up seeking the Lord’s justice here and now, but if anything renew your efforts.  But ensure you are seeking the Lord’s justice, for a transgression has been committed against His child, within the boundaries of His kingdom, and it is much his responsibility as it is his right to avenge it.  What does this look like?  You resisted my quotation of David’s cry that he would have despaired unless he saw the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  What of the next verse?  “Wait for the Lord.  Be strong, and let your heart take courage.  Wait for the Lord.”  It is in waiting for the Lord (while following the course of the law) that our hearts find peace.

Will God act?  Yes.  Will he act on our terms, in our ways–will he necessarily act here and now? I don’t know.  I suspect sometimes he does, and sometimes he does not.  But our desire and our faith in his goodness and his faithfulness to his people should not waver:  we serve a God who, after all, did act in human history in the person of Jesus Christ to take sin upon himself.  The world, says John, is already judged through him.  And we simply await that judgment’s fulfillment.

Remember the opening to the Heidleberg Catechism:  “What is thy only comfort in life and death?”

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, (a) am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

Please continue the conversation.  I will continue to pray for you both.

Today we celebrate the beginning of the Lenten season.  Ash Wednesday, the most penitential day of the year, ushers in the “bright sadness” (to use Alexander Schmemann’s phrase).  Sad because the next six weeks we shall be confronted by our sin–bright because the next six weeks we shall be reminded of the death and resurrection of our Lord.

Lent is only Lent because it falls in the shadow of Easter.  The fasts which we begin today–from food, music, or other media–are not negations in themselves, but instead opportunities to cultivate hearts that seek God.  We cease from eating food from the earth that we might instead be filled with the Bread of Heaven.  Fasting is only Christian if it is joined with prayer.  The strengthening of our human wills through the discipline of fasting is a secondary benefit.  Our primary aim can not be attained by such efforts–we have no strength in ourselves to have springs of Living Water rise up in our souls.

The pentitential season of Lent, then, must be embraced joyfully, for it is a time to embrace dependence upon the Word of God and to acknowledge that it is His Spirit that produces fruit in and through us.  This, too, is the meaning of Ash Wednesday, wherein we are reminded of our abject poverty, our mortality, and our wretched sinfulness before God.  The shadow of Easter prohibits despair, for the acknowledgment of our sinfulness before God necessarily entails that we acknowledge the redemption which that same God has attained.  Indeed, such an acknowledgment demands carrying only the burden of a joy which we do not deserve–a burden which brings us into the “bright sadness” of Lent.

This Lenten season, take the opportunity to seriously and intentionally pursue the God who has first pursued you.  Prepare your hearts for Easter by relinquishing the deadly and seductive attraction of pleasures that are not rooted and grounded in God alone.  Join prayer with your fasting, and the Word of God with your prayer, that you might be sustained by spiritual food.  Follow hard after God by intentionally committing yourself to Him, and do so with the blessed expectation that God in his divine freedom will respond.  This is the promise of the Gospel, and this is the blessed hope of Easter, which we look forward to with eagerness, sadness, and joy.

From time to time, I will get an email with questions about how to live the Christian life.  While I am not a pastor, former students or sometime readers of this blog will occasionally seek my opinions.  One such individual recently emailed me, expressing her struggles to believe in the goodness of God.  Below is my response (and here are some related thoughts).

I don’t think I understand the depth of your struggle, but I have shared in a minor way in your questioning. For me, the pertinent question has never been whether God exists. The more pertinent question is whether he is good, and then whether he is good to us. Denying his goodness affords you an outlet for your anger and frustration (albeit one who isn’t particularly interested in you), while denying his existence I think would only allow you to fall back on the Stoicism that comes from believing in fate, or the universe, or some other semi-deity.

Of course, you have proposed the semi-Christian route of affirming God’s goodness, but not affirming that he is good to you (of course, semi-Christian is probably the same as sub-Christian).  I have at points in my life adopted a very similar view of God. At times, in order to justify my own struggles at my job, I told myself that God was interested not in my success, but in my holiness. Functionally, what I meant was that He is interested in my holiness, but not interested in me. It is sometimes easy to comfort ourselves with half-truths, rather than waiting patiently to have the full truth revealed to us.

I think it is important, then, to ask these questions, but to ask them of God. If He is interested in us, then he is interested in providing answers to them–not answers, necessarily, in the sense that we know what the events mean and how he will use them, but answers in the sense that we know that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

There may be, then, a tension right now between faith and reason. But the difficulty of our current situation is that if there is to be reconciliation, if there is to be meaning, if there is to be goodness that comes out of evil, we sometimes do not see it until the end of our lives (or if not then, at the end of all things). We are asked to believe, not irrationally, but in hope (the knowledge of things unseen). And as Paul points out, “in hope we are saved.”

Your questions are, then, important to ask for your own sanctification’s sake. However, in G.K. Chesterton’s commentary on Job, he penned the famous line, “The questions of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.” Of course, Job’s encounter did not come until he had aired his complaint before God. Whether he is right to do so is an open question–from my vantage point, I don’t see that he had another alternative. But then, I am young in the faith.

One further point: horrendous evils like you have experienced are nearly impossible to comprehend because fundamentally, they are grounded in and characterized by irrationality. They are deeply chaotic. So also the Cross. It is for this reason that it is the most significant and reasonable “answer” to the problem of evil. And it’s meaning is not clear until the Resurrection, which restores order to the universe by exalting the King to his rightful throne. I suspect that your longing to have your questions answer can only be met with any real satisfaction here–in the experience of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

For this reason, I would encourage you to read the Psalms, particularly Psalms 27 and 37. The ESV translation of the end of 27 is good, but I have always preferred the NASB: “I would have despaired had I not believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the living.” I have always found great comfort in Psalm 37 as well. Additionally, 2 Corinthians might be of some comfort to you during this time and, of course, the Gospels.

Additionally, if you do not have a worshipping community where you can pray, confess sin, and read Scripture together, find one. As you see God working in other people’s lives, it can either frustrate you (why not me?) or give you hope. I trust it will be the latter. If you are seriously questioning your faith, do not cease worshipping as long as you have it. You may find that your faith is reinforced through the discipline of worship.

I am grateful to Gary Hartenburg for his detailed and thorough response to my article.  My hope in writing the article was not to offer a final verdict, but another perspective in what is already a long conversation about the nature of evangelicalism, both past and future.  In this, my aim was more modest than most commentors noticed:  I offered my reflections not as an expert, but as an insider.  I am, after all, within the young evangelical circle and many of the trends I articulated I have seen in my own life.  Hartenburg’s sensitive reading produced the sort of criticism I hoped for-careful, thoughtful, and constructive.

To the substance of my response, then:

Hartenburg articulates my main thesis this way:  “Because of a deeply rooted desire to be accepted both personally and culturally, young evangelicals increasingly reject, among other things, partisanship, patriotism, their parents’ values on romance and marriage, and old evangelical theology (esp. eschatology).”  While this is a fair reading of the text, which lacked an explicit statement of my project, it is a bit stronger of a thesis than I wanted to make.  While I certainly hit on the young evangelical’s desire to be accepted, I did not mean to suggest that every aspect of the young evangelical ethos was motivated by such a desire.

Indeed, there are two frames of reference in which we might situate the new evangelicals, both of which might be correct.  On the one hand, we might situate them with respect to the surrounding culture.  In this respect, I think that acceptance is a significant motivation.  On the other hand, we need to situate them against our parent’s generation of evangelicalism.  The cosmopolitanism of young evangelicals, for instance, seems to be primarily driven by a reaction against the patriotism of our parent’s generation.  Hence, in the closest statement to a thesis I have, I state, “This new ethos is largely a reaction to the abuses, failures, and excesses of our parents’ generation and contains significant clues as to the future of evangelicalism in America.”

As for the first of Hartenburg’s observations, I think it is exactly right, and in some ways get at the underlying premise or idea of the essay and provide me the opportunity to dispel the notion that I am an uncritical defender of the old-evangelicalism (as some of my critics seem to think).  As a proponent of discussion, I understand the need for authentic questions. Indeed, it has in the past (as Hartenburg knows) been a project of mine to promote such questions. However, my concern is that the methodology of questioning has been released from its proper epistemic moorings (foundationalism).

Additionally, while Hartenburg is right about the failures of old evangelicals to articulate a viable and robust notion of faith, and to articulate how that faith can coexist with ‘doubt’ (though I might call it something else), my concern is that in their reactions to these problems, young evangelicals will fall too far on the other side of the pendulum and praise doubt for its own sake, without situating it properly within a pedagogical (and soteriological) framework.

This gets at, I think, the undergirding idea of my essay.  In their reaction against the excesses and abuses of evangelicalism, young evangelicals have overreacted and have rejected elements of evangelicalism that are worth keeping, and have offered the world an alternative that shares many of the same problems (hence the title of the essay, which was not meant to be a repudiation of Noll’s classic, but to signal the extension of it into a new generation).

As for Hartenburg’s second observation, it is true I did not highlight the distinction between appearance and reality in politics (or life).  I have made similar observations here at Mere-O in the past, particularly in reference to Mitt Romney’s struggles to appear authentic as a candidate.

However, Hartenburg’s ruminations on the idea of ‘authenticity’ are provocative.  He writes, “The self – as distinct from the soul – is pretty much indefinitely malleable.  This means that being authentic means “being” whatever one fashions oneself to “be.”  On this scheme, choice wins out over nature, at least until soul – as something real and ineliminable – reasserts itself, as it always does, leading to crisis. ”  While Hartenburg attributes the point to me, I am not sure I’m ready to claim it.  My observations of the decisionism of young evangelicalism are not an endorsement.  And the “indefinite malleability” of the self is not something I think I agree upon.  Indeed, I think evangelicalism (which assumes the premise, I think) would be well served and still remain evangelical to reject it.  It is precisely that idea that has led so many young evangelicals to reject their relationship to evangelicalism, a step that (if the self is not indefinitely malleable) is much more difficult.  Like it or not, evangelicalism has shaped me in certain ways that I cannot undo.  While this is difficult for many young evangelicals to accept, it is also an opportunity to experience love and forgiveness.  One thinks of Chesterton at the opening of Orthodoxy:  “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

To Hartenburg’s criticism, then.  He writes, “My basic (and really only) criticism of Anderson’s argument is that it confuses what is prominent in young evangelical with what is unique about young evangelical.  In particular, the desire for acceptability (and respectability) is not unique to young evangelicals.  It is a deep part of human nature.  What then is unique about young evangelicals among religious groups?  It is their desire for acceptability coupled with a lack of any kind of institutional or widely-accepted theological basis for controlling the desire for acceptability.  In the absence of these two things, it is no wonder that young evangelicals come to prize self-styling as highly as they do: If they don’t decide, no one will.”

There is significant wisdom in this point, and it is frequently made as an argument against evangelicalism (though Hartenburg, thankfully, does not use it as such).  While I think Hartenburg basically correct, I do not think the lack of institutional or widely-accepted theological basis a feature of evangelicalism per se, but rather evangelicalism in current practice.  This was really lurking behind my criticism that young evangelicals have largely neglected the evangelical history and tradition.  Additionally, I wonder how particular this is to evangelicalism.  The self-styling that I argued pervades young evangelicals exists, no doubt, among mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic quarters as well (I am less familiar with the Orthodox, though I have my suspicions that it exists there too).  While institutional and theological controls might exist in Roman Catholicism (to pick them as an example, though others might do), it is not clear that they have actually shaped the young Roman Catholic laity in any meaningful sense.  Catholic (and mainline Protestant!) young people quit going to church at similar rates as young evangelicals, after all, which suggests that the problems are not necessarily tied to the lack of institutional or theological framework that might control the desire for acceptability.

If I failed to point out the uniqueness of the young evangelical situation, then, it is largely because I am not convinced it is unique.  On a simplistic level, it’s possible to read the essay and think my point is that young evangelicals are just like everyone else.

As for Hartenburg’s second criticism, I wish I had written it myself.  My aim was to point out some of the ‘pre-critical’ assumptions of young evangelicals, not necessarily to articulate their motives perfectly, but to get them to ask a different set of questions to examine some of their own assumptions.  Hartenburg’s point, I think, goes further in doing so than I was able, for which I am grateful.

All this bodes to Hartenburg’s question of whether the picture I painted of evangelicalism was bleak enough.  In one sense, it clearly was not bleak enough:  planks in our eyes abound, and until they are removed evangelicalism will always be dying.  My hope was simply to point out some of those planks (as I saw them), and trust that someone (Hartenburg!) would point out the planks in my own eye.  The situation will always be bleak until our self-deception is removed.  But in that bleak picture is our hope, for such planks are not ours to remove, but God’s, and while evangelicalism is dying, it will also be renewed.   

Gary Hartenburg, a good friend and a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, penned the following response to my recent piece on the young evangelicalism.  With his permission, I’m posting it here.  I’ll write a response sometime this weekend (I hope).

Commenting on Anderson’s article is difficult because it is easy to slip from commentary on and criticism of Anderson’s presentation of young evangelicals to criticism of young evangelical itself.  Similarly, it is not easy to disentangle the beliefs of young evangelicals from Anderson’s own beliefs.  I attempt to avoid such slippage by organizing my comments under three sections.  The first is an explanation of Anderson’s theses as I understand them.  The second is a loose collection of observations about young evangelicals that neither confirm or disconfirm Anderson’s account of young evangelicals but are prompted by it.  The third section is a basic criticism of Anderson’s account of the young evangelical problem.

Anderson’s Theses:

Anderson’s major thesis seems to be the following: Because of a deeply rooted desire to be accepted both personally and culturally, young evangelicals increasingly reject, among other things, partisanship, patriotism, their parents’ values on romance and marriage, and old evangelical theology (esp. eschatology).  But young evangelicals themselves do not express their desire for acceptance as such.  Instead they express it as (1) a commitment to a certain conception of authenticity (according to which simply adopting the values of their parents’ generation without a justifying struggle is seen as inauthentic) that requires or assumes (2) vesting the power of choice in the individual (so self-styling is “decisionism” (Anderson’s wonderful term) applied to one’s own life).  Anderson alludes to the fact that young evangelicals do not themselves articulate the fact that they are committed only to one version or conception of authenticity.  Rather, as he notes in passing, they see themselves as committed to being authentic without expressing the slightest notion that being authentic is compatible with, say, submission to authority, though that last point is my suggestion, not Anderson’s.

There seem to be two other minor theses embedded in the article, too.  I don’t have anything to say about them other than to note them and set them off as somewhat beside the main point.  (Of course, they’re related to Anderson’s major thesis, but they, especially the second one, deserve much more attention than I can give here.)  The first–which, since it leads off the article, seems to have mislead some commentators as to its significance in Anderson’s thought–is that some of the things young evangelicals reject, e.g., their parents’ values on romance and marriage, have been on the refuse heap for a while, but others, such as partisanship and patriotism, are lately finding a similar fate.  The latecomers to evangelical interest (e.g., cosmopolitanism and nonpartisanship) will continue to be of interest and may devalue the “traditional” cultural and political concerns of evangelicals.  The second minor thesis is that the “gnosticization” of the Gospel is often used as a coping strategy by young evangelicals for holding on to what they prize when it leads to potential conflicts with their professed commitment to evangelicalism.  Gnosticization is expressed in the young evangelicals’ deep conviction that their consumption of media “has no effect on their lives.”  Their “flawless decision-making abilities” are, in their minds, good enough to protect them.

Anderson, in a response to various replies to his article, states that his article is not a piece of sociology but of “cultural pathology.”  If I’m correct about Anderson’s thesis, then the pathology at work among young evangelicals is both the refusal to admit that they are driven by the need for personal and cultural acceptance and the dominance of that drive as it works itself out in ecclesiastical, theological, personal, and interpersonal ways.

Observations:

On authentic questions and faith:

I was not expecting to be surprised by Anderson’s comment that young evangelicals think that “Being right is less important than asking authentic questions.”  The idea is certainly not new.  But upon reflection, I realized that in some sense, the young evangelicals are absolutely right.  It is a truth of therapy and education alike that unless a person asks authentic questions, he cannot begin to understand.  But then why was I initially disposed to be uneasy with this young evangelical commitment to authentic questions?  The difficulty is not so much a tacit rejection of “being right” — though that is an ever-present and increasing danger among young evangelicals — as it is that asking “unorthodox” yet authentic questions stymies those evangelicals who have no experience of (much less a reasonable account of) how to be evangelical while asking genuine questions that lack readymade evangelical answers.

A fundamental source of this problem is the fact that old evangelicals have not articulated and promulgated a viable explanation of faith.  In addition to a clear statement of what faith is, the articulation of faith among young evangelicals is lacking on two fronts.  The first is the relation between faith and knowledge or reason.  In general, and despite the best efforts of numerous evangelicals, young evangelicals tend to see faith and knowledge as either opposed to or irrelevant to one another.  The second front, which is more relevant to the issue at hand, is the relation between faith and doubt.  A genuine question usually implies some doubt about a proposed doctrine, teaching, or idea.  Such doubt need not be hostile or overly skeptical, but without an explanation of how faith and doubt can coexist, young evangelicals wind up without the ability to ascertain whether being right is less important than asking authentic questions because it is not clear how genuine questions coincide with faith.

On authenticity:

There is a certain irony, to which Anderson does not draw attention, in the propensity of young evangelicals to choose a political candidate based on his or her ability to appear authentic.  The fact that a candidate appears authentic is taken as evidence that the candidate is authentic.  However, it is no keen insight to say that the distinction between appearing and being is nowhere brighter than in politics.  Politicians who appear authentic are not always authentic, and the suggestion that now we have a new kind of politician has always been the plea of those destined to be disillusioned.

Perhaps this is too harsh, and perhaps Anderson did not point out this irony because its barbs are sharp.  Of young evangelicals, then, it is more polite to say that they are in favor of giving authentic-appearing candidates the benefit of the doubt.  That may be true, but it doesn’t adequately capture the level of commitment to Obama by a majority of the 26 percent of evangelicals who voted for him.  They are not just giving him the benefit of the doubt.  They are enthusiastic supporters.  Time will, of course, tell whether we actually have a new kind of politician among us.  The judgment of time, however, may be diminished by the already approaching notion that no one could maintain the expectations Obama has coming into office.

Setting aside the application of authenticity to politics: Given the flexible nature of the self, the appeal to the paramount status of authenticity in general runs the risk of ignoring the distinction between appearing and being, especially among leaders.  The self — as distinct from the soul — is pretty much indefinitely malleable.  This means that being authentic means “being” whatever one fashions oneself to “be.”  On this scheme, choice wins out over nature, at least until soul — as something real and ineliminable — reasserts itself, as it always does, leading to crisis.  (This point — apart from the distinction between soul and self — about the flexibility of the self is one that Anderson makes in different words.)

Furthermore, and perhaps striking the political note once more, given the flexible nature of the self, “being true to one’s self” is a desire bred and fed by those who would manipulate others.  Again, no new insight here, but often those who most celebrate their individualism are dressed like everybody else.  And if they’re not dressed like everybody else, it’s likely they’re taking their fashion cues (for example) from the trendsetters the rest of us cannot afford.

This is not to say that authenticity is a sham, only that (1) the desire for authenticity cannot be paramount and (2) authenticity is misunderstood and misapplied when it is put solely in terms of the self.

One point that Anderson brings out nicely is that imitation of exemplars doesn’t make sense in this way of thinking; instead, identification is more powerful than imitation.  Anderson highlights this point by referring to Peter Jackson’s reconstruction of Faramir in the cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings.  Though the example may seem trivial, it betrays a significant working principle of one of the brightest and hardest working people in film industry today: An invitation to audiences to imitate a moral exemplar will be rejected; identifying with the struggle of a character is the surest way to generate sympathy.  This is not to say that the principle is mistaken, only that its codification in an entire generation of movies indicates that moviemakers have recognized what connects with and moves their audience.

Criticism:

My basic (and really only) criticism of Anderson’s argument is that it confuses what is prominent in young evangelical with what is unique about young evangelical.  In particular, the desire for acceptability (and respectability) is not unique to young evangelicals.  It is a deep part of human nature.  What then is unique about young evangelicals among religious groups?  It is their desire for acceptability coupled with a lack of any kind of institutional or widely-accepted theological basis for controlling the desire for acceptability.  In the absence of these two things, it is no wonder that young evangelicals come to prize self-styling as highly as they do: If they don’t decide, no one will.

This is related to the diffuse nature of evangelicalism.  So, of course, some evangelicals have adopted better institutional or theological curbs to the excesses of self-styling.  Others have not.  Some might criticize Anderson for casting the net for evangelicals too widely.  But in some sense he’s right to do that.  For consider a parallel with current Roman Catholicism and Augustine and Aquinas.  To what extent does current Roman Catholicism align with those two giants?  In many ways, but not perfectly.  So why quibble that John Wesley isn’t evangelical?  For that matter, no current practice is going to imitate perfectly what was laid down by its predecessors.  There might be greater and lesser degrees of consistency over time, but that is a matter of degree and not one of kind.  (Note that this argument is not a theological one.)

A related criticism: Anderson doesn’t articulate the depth of the desire for self-styling.  In particular, he claims that in evangelicalism “the individual” is prominent, but that is not quite right.  In evangelicalism, the individual is not prominent, “I” am.  This distinction is essentially one between theory and practice.  One wants to say that theory is one thing and practice another, but the trouble is that there is no theory about individualism among rank-and-file evangelicals.  There is only the practice of maintaining the centrality of the “I.”  This distinction is just one way in which the older evangelical scandal described by Mark Noll reveals itself.  By preventing intellectual reflection on individualism and its presence among evangelicals, anti-intellectualism keeps on running.  This lack of reflection about individualism indicates that the desire for self-styling is really very deeply embedded in the ethos and practice of young evangelicals.  The desire escapes notice because it is unquestionably acted on.  One reason it remains unquestioned among rank-and-file evangelicals is that those evangelicals who are thinking about and reflecting on individualism are the evangelical intellectuals whom evangelicals have by and large ignored for reasons having to do with their historical anti-intellectualism.  Thankfully, anti-intellectualism is losing its grip in some areas of evangelicalism, and one hopes that this trend continues.

It is important to note that it appears that no Christian group in North America today (in history?) is free from individualism in practice.  Even those groups — e.g., Eastern Orthodox — that are committed in theory to anti-individualism are often in practice individualistic.  Some of this has to do with the number of converts from Protestantism to Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism who take their Protestant practices, which are often deeply embedded in body and mind, into their new faith.

Is Anderson’s picture of the current and future evangelicalism too rosy?  Who knows?  I certainly don’t.  But the current state (and so future) isn’t portrayed as bleakly as it could be.  And the bleaker picture doesn’t have to be of young evangelicals completely selling evangelicalism down the river.  It just needs to portray the deep-seated problems as still undetected and undefined by both the young evangelical intelligentsia and the people in the pews.

All people by nature desire knowledge. The vehicles by which people endeavor to know things are basically two: the senses or the mind. The objects which people endeavor to know are of only a few kinds.

Historically, there has been a ‘constant battle’* between those who endeavor to know by the senses (and therefore know whatever objects they can know by the senses) and those who endeavor to know by the mind (and therefore know whatever objects they can know by the mind).

Each “side” in this battle agrees on three points. A) There are people. B) They desire to know, by whatever means possible. C) Knowledge (of some kind) is possible for people to attain.

They disagree on what kind of knowledge is possible. They disagree on the means by which knowledge is attainable. But, most importantly of all, they disagree on what People Themselves are.

The Sensory People say people are just another sensory object. They are bodies – systems, organs, cells, proteins, molecules, atoms, quarks, tachyons, or strings. The Mental People say they are (mostly) minds – selves with identity, personality, thought, feeling, longing, hunger, and desire for knowledge.

Sensory People are fond of saying things like, “If it isn’t tastable, touchable, audible, visible, or smellable, then it isn’t testable. If it isn’t testable it isn’t knowable. If it isn’t knowable, it probably isn’t real.” (Or, “if it is real, it doesn’t matter much because we can’t know anything about it.”) Hence their list of “Things That Are” is relatively short, basically consisting of things derived from their own sensory experience, which turn out to be just One Thing (matter-energy) in a wide variety of structural arrangements.

The Mental people are fond of saying things like, “If it isn’t directly apprehensible to the intellect, then it isn’t testable. If it isn’t testable, it isn’t knowable. If it isn’t knowable, it probably isn’t real, or if it is real, it doesn’t matter much because we can’t know anything about it.” Hence their list of “things that are” is fairly long, consisting of a variety of things derived from their own mental experience, which turn out to be a wide variety of distinct things.

The Sensory People are also fond of pointing out, rather confidently, that you can’t see Intelligible Things, but only Sensible Things, as if this proves something. The Mental People might as confidently point out that you can’t Intellect Sensible Things, but only Intelligible Things.

Let us take a look at things that are, and ask which is truer to our own daily experience of ourselves, the objects we interact with, and know, and that are. (more…)