The new millennium began for me with multiple disruptions to my life, in my marriage, my career, the experience of being in a new culture in which I did not feel entirely at home, and the subsequent failure of my faith to provide an adequate response. The latter compounded the experience of disorder and chaos in every significant part of my life. In one sense, the distancing from my previous role in the community of faith was a liberation from the obligation or expectation of what or how I ought to be. Over time, the community of the church ceased to be relevant, and ultimately I found myself distanced from and unable to maintain faith in God. The following period was one in which I simply bracketed the question. It was not relevant while I sought to reassemble my life from what was essentially a wreckage. I experienced stages of denial (the initial shock), grief (as the extent of the wreckage became apparent), anger, to be followed by a determination to do something about it (could this be described as acceptance ?) My determination was to not be the person I was becoming, to take control, and implicit in that (although I don’t remember actually thinking it) was the determination to be true to myself and become more of the person I was. (I do remember in psychotherapy deciding that I liked myself and I was not willing to become something different from who I fundamentally was – for anyone, and this applied personally and to the social entity of which I was a part).
Re-establishing my life entailed moving back to the UK, and establishing a new career – ultimately this became a business which fulfilled many latent skills and interests. This business enabled me to express creativity in several ways. At the workaday level it was in design – the transformation of neglected properties into beautiful homes. One such was a completely wrecked building which was perhaps a metaphor for what my life had become. I found creative expression too in the challenge of making the resource of money and finance work productively. Perhaps the most significant avenue for creativity was in the opportunity to be innovative and entrepreneurial. This was transformative. Both in the church and in secular jobs, I had found my ideas constrained by the lack of vision and the insecurities of those that I worked under. The transformation was in the freedom to turn ideas into reality, essentially creating something new and good out of the raw materials. And this was without the need for permission. Whilst by nature inquisitive of the world around us, and questioning of why things are done the way they are, I was socialised into a tacit acceptance that there is an order to things and there are others (more experienced, talented, knowledgeable, or authoritative) whose role it was to decide what should be done. The internal rebel was kept firmly in check. Was it upbringing ? Or the church? Or my faith? Probably all of these to some degree, although both my parents were always encouraging that I should follow my interests and talents. I tend to think that the church and my faith were what held the rebel in check in early adulthood and into my early 40’s.
After college, in my first jobs in the electronics industry I was no doubt respectful of authority but I think I would have discovered sooner the freedom that came with the disruption of my faith. Despite the presence of vision-restricted and challenged egos in the ranks of managers, the moral dimension of the Christian community means that the constraining bonds are far stronger. Does this mean that the church or community is essentially restrictive, oppressive or resistant to genuine human growth ? Not necessarily. From the perspective of growing up and from psychotherapy it is clear that people go through stages and at different stages there are structures and ways of being that are appropriate. It is also clear that structures (or at least the way we indwell them or make use of them) need to be changed or cast off. I think this is a way of understanding my own experience of reaching the end of faith. However, it was my faith – and this is always constrained by our own limitations, of experience, of understanding, of social context.
What was wrong with my faith ? It had served well for many years but was found wanting when I encountered the multiple manifestations of chaos. Evangelical faith is an enlightenment expression of christian belief, and as such has always tended towards rationalism. It’s assertion that the Bible is a book capable of being understood by all, its tidy set of explanations of the way the world is and the scheme of salvation, its disavowal of imagery and architectural style. For sure, Evangelicalism has it’s movements of the heart and it would take a book or at least a chapter of a book, to justify what I am saying. But this is a personal account, and despite the “affective” dimension of my faith (both evangelical and more exuberantly, charismatic) it still remained constrained within a rationalistic framework. The return to faith has for me centred on an awareness of the absolute mystery of being. There are mysteries that stare us in the face everyday with the result that we fail to take account of the sheer beyond-ness of aspects of our existence. Prime amongst these is the fact of consciousness. This is not just sentience, but out consciousness of being conscious. There is no scientific or rational way of explaining this fact of our human existence. Other mysteries of being include the unimaginable vastness of the universe, the threat of death and destruction represented by the material world, the profound depths of human depravity and evil (to dwell on which is existentially overwhelming) but also the nature of human goodness and morality, our existence and experience of persons capable of knowing other persons.
At the time that I experienced my all encompassing disorder, there was no one I knew that either had the spiritual understanding or the insight into the extent of what I was facing. Not that there are no evangelicals for whom their faith does not incorporate these mysteries of being. But my faith at the time did not. The abyss is not something we should avoid peering into. Perhaps this is the valley of the shadow of death. Any faith worth having must be one that is able to face the mystery of being, including the abyss. There is no easier alternative. The Jews look for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom (so said St. Paul) but both manifest the desire for a neat solution to the human dilemma. Paul goes on to say that God in the foolishness of Christ has confounded the wisdom of the wise. Reason or rationalism is incapable of penetrating the veil. Immanuel Kant demolished for all time the notion that human reason could speak meaningfully of what is transcendent. Metaphysics is no longer an option.
So, what of faith ? We are left with hints, and imitations. The rationalism that supposed Christian faith could be supported by reason and natural science is bankrupt but so is the rationalism that ends in atheistic materialism. Both are bereft of adequate answers to the mystery of being. Some find solace in religious experience or the fellowship of the Christian community. Is faith still possible ? Only if it truly is faith and is capable of prostrating itself in an awe that is magnified to the limits of our experience (the word is too tame) and it is one in which the mysteries of faith are allowed their proper place – as mysteries. The central mysteries of the Christian faith: the incarnation and the resurrection, are repeated and rehearsed to the point where familiarity has bred a kind of contempt – a contempt that is unwitting, but leaves the believer able to speak the words without the utter speechlessness proper for a holy mystery. Perhaps that is why the prodigal son was the only one to truly recognise his father and prostrate himself. Only through the experience of being a stranger in a foreign land and reduced to eating from a pigswill could he come to the end of his confidence that he knew his father.
My journey has led me to think my way into, to indwell, different belief systems – in the manner of Atticus Finch for whom the only way to understand another man was to walk around in his skin. It has been an experience of cognitive dissonance, of one world tilting and colliding with another. One life is too short to do this many times. For others it may be different but for me it has been the path to arrive at a reverent not knowing, an agnosticism of faith, a way of arriving at an open mindedness about what the mysteries of faith actually mean. Some of those mysteries I have already referred to, but there are also the meaning of prayer, the meaning of a relationship with the divine. Evangelicals have diminished the Eucharist to a remembrance and neglect the mystical union with Christ. The hope of eternal life cannot be seen as another chapter in an individual human life as some kind of resuscitation. Death, as biological, is entirely within our capacity to understand but as a human experience it remains the profoundest mystery. Despite the claims of revelation, all we are left with is intimations from whatever transcendent realm there may be. Revelation is not the signs sought by Jews, neither is it accessible to rational thought. Truly, we are alone and only in faith are we not alone.
An answer to a question on leaving evangelical faith and rediscovering it through Hegel
I really appreciate you asking the question. I can think of very few others who have actually asked the question before. I suppose that for some it is out of disinterest in matters of faith. For others it’s probably a mixture of fear of what the answer might entail and a far too rigid understanding of the journey of faith. My observation is that faith for many is out-sourced, resting on the apparent faith of others to whom we defer or regard as wiser than ourselves. To truly take responsibility for our own faith is a step of courage from which too many shrink back.
I’ve attached something I wrote two years ago which is a sort of spiritual biography. The only comment I think I would now not make is the one regarding the Kantian impossibility of metaphysics. That’s down to Hegel, and I now think that whatever the difficulties of metaphysics it is not something we can avoid or evade. It seems to me that Kant sidestepped the implications of his subjective turn by introducing postulates, things that we must think despite the fact that his disallowance of things in themselves kept them beyond knowledge. But without these postulates he knew there would be no place for ethics, purpose and meaning.
A distinction that has enabled me to find place for faith is the Hegelian one of the three ways we are able to know something of truth, the Absolute, the Idea, the divine, or God. These are art, religion, and philosophy. In art the spirit (self consciousness, rationality, purpose) is revealed in sensuous form. Hegel’s particular example is of classical Greek sculpture. In religion (and particularly in Christian religion), there is a turn inward, and truth becomes much more affective, touching the heart through the picture language, or metaphor, of story and ritual. In philosophy, the same truths are expressed in purely abstract and rational terms. It is in being reminded that the same truth can be expressed in different ways that for me the log-jam has been removed. As I say in the attached article, Evangelical Christianity is overly rationalistic (being a post Enlightenment form of faith). The place of mystery has been squeeezed out. An idea of propositional truth has weakened the sense of belonging to a story. I don’t doubt the genuine spirituality of many evangelicals but I find its expression too much on the naive side of child like. The answers are too easy and there is an over familiarity with God.
I never lost my admiration for some of the foundational doctrines or for the person of Jesus. What I could not do what was to reconcile faith with intellectual thought. However, whilst doing the MA I encountered the question of self consciousness and realised that materialistic atheism really has no answer. This leads me back to Hegel, and the idea that thought is in the world, it is not just an epi-phenomenon, an accidental result of increasing organic complexity.
Hegel begins Science of Logic with thought, the thought of pure being, immediate and indeterminate, undistinguished from anything else. Such indeterminate being leads thought into non-being, and the dynamic of being and non-being leads thought to becoming. That’s just a very simplistic recital of some thought that requires a great deal more exposition. But what’s important is the fundamental unity of thought and being, that reason is so essentially the nature of reality. There is an interesting trinitarian shape to Hegel’s thought which I intend to develop, but briefly this is the idea that God, as being, self-others himself, creating if you like a space for something that is not God to exist. The Word of God proceeds from the being of God in the act of creation, and in this proceeding there is the becoming of all that is. Father, Son and Spirit are the way Christians speak of this act of creation, and then also in the implicit act of redemption through the incarnation and the sending of the Spirit. There are also thoughts here of the dynamic nature of the being of God reflected in reality, of the existence of differentiation within the being of God also reflected in creation, and of self giving love in the divine that is expressed if only imperfectly in the rich profusion of life and in human self consciousness. Lots there to unpack, but it may give you a flavour of my thinking.
The trinity I have referred to is expressed in Christian theology as the economic trinity, in other words the way that the being of God is understood in the act of creation, and in the way that God walks with his people. There is also the immanent trinity, which theology reads back into the eternal being of God. I think Hegel’s beginning in SL is a parallel to the immanent trinity, and perhaps Phenomenology of Spirit can be seen as an economic outworking of the rational life of the Spirit, God amongst us. In the faith of the church, trinity is certainly expressed in picture language, in terms of ousia and hypostasis, as persons that are three but are one. But as I hope I am conveying, there is also some profound philosophical thought.
I am still unsure how orthodox or un-orthodox a christian Hegel in fact was. His panentheistic thought is certainly strongly represented in the tradition. Even his idea of becoming being part of the nature of God is reflected there too. Whether he saw this “becoming” as eternal, or whether it was only through the history of the emergence of human self consciousness – that is for me an open question.
Paul Tillich described God as our ground of being, and St Paul on Mars Hill said “in him we live and move and have our being”. In the face of a post-Enlightenment alienation from being, a reality that seems to us to be tragic, cruel, wasteful, destructive, red in tooth and claw, these quotations remind us that even in a world that as yet imperfectly expresses divine love, we are nevertheless at home in a universe that has at its heart the unity of thought and being, that we exist in God and in his love. We are capable of loving the other, it is God’s love that has brought that other into existence by othering himself from himself, and in the ultimate othering of himself in the incarnation and crucifixion God has united God and man in redemption. This is picture language, but nevertheless I think it puts into other words metaphysical truths that are essential to our well being and our, together with our other, being at home in the world. Kant’s critical philosophy rightly exposed the inadequate foundations of earlier metaphysics. What Hegel has done, in my opinion, is to take that criticism further back in showing that in beginning to think we must forsake all foundations, all presuppositions even that of the distinction between the subject and the object. In philosophy, that is to begin with thought, pure thought. In religion, it is to begin with love, the love of God, and in art is to begin with beauty that expresses spirit. It is a disposition of humility before what is, and an acceptance of the mystery of being.
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