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Kelly James Clark is senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University; his many other books include Written to Be Heard, Return to Reason, and When Faith Is Not Enough.

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when faith is not enough

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Don't Skip This....................................ix1. Inside the Darkness.............................32. Moments of Light................................193. Moments of Darkness.............................374. Fear and Trembling..............................535. Hope and Human Suffering........................716. Help Thou Mine Unbelief.........................93Part II. Searching for My Self.....................1077. Sound and Fury..................................1098. What's in a Name?...............................1219. Searching for My Self...........................13710. Stages on Life's Way...........................15911. Home...........................................175

Chapter One

Fact is sonny, I've always had notions of my own concerning young David's harp. A gifted lad, to be sure, but not all his strumming kept him clear of mortal sin. Of course I know our poor dear old-fashioned scribblers, with their tuppeny Lives of the Saints, take it for granted that a fellow can find safety in transports of ecstasy, that he curls himself up all snug and safe as though he were in Abraham's bosom? Safe? ... Oh, I grant you there are times when it's as simple as pie to attain such heights. God sweeps you up. The real snag is to stick there, and know how to get down again—when you can't hold on any longer.... Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

The Bible knows of God's hiding His face, of times when the contact between Heaven and earth seems to be interrupted. God seems to withdraw Himself utterly from the earth and no longer to participate in its existence. The space of history is then full of noise, but as it were, empty of divine breath. For one who believes in the living God, who knows about Him, and is fated to spend his life in a time of His hiddenness, it is very difficult to live. Martin Buber, "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth"

    The Sea of Faith,
    Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
    Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
    But now I only hear
    Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
    Retreating, to the breath
    Of the night-winds, down the vast edges drear
    And naked shingles of the world.
    Ah, love, let us be true
    To one another! for the world, which seems
    To lie before us like a land of dreams,
    So various, so beautiful, so new,
    Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
    Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
    And we are here as on a darkling plain
    Swept with confus'd alarms of struggle and flight,
    Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

* * *

I went hiking many years ago with a well-known mountain guide. We took a lunch break in a wondrous canyon, surrounded on all sides by magnificent wildflowers in full bloom. I had recently read that one of America's most famous climbers, a pioneer of many extreme ascents, professed to be a Christian. Since my guide knew this famous climber, I asked him about the circumstances surrounding the climber's conversion. He sneered that the famous climber had joined the "cargo cult." Since I was unfamiliar with this exotic sounding cult, I asked him to explain.

During World War II, the guide explained, the United States military mistakenly but periodically parachuted supplies to a group of natives living on a small island in the South Pacific (they knew nothing of wars or rumors of wars). The supplies included food items, for which they were extremely grateful. I am told they grew especially fond of canned peaches. Once a week they looked to the eastern skies for the anticipated return of the cargo plane, which would miraculously deliver their tin bounty. They looked upon these deliveries as a sign of favor with the gods. When the war ended, however, the deliveries ceased. Nevertheless, the natives regularly gathered at the appointed time to await their sign of the gods' favor.

According to my guide, becoming a Christian is tantamount to joining the cargo cult—one must be misinformed and credulous while waiting for a messenger from a self-created God. We have all had the fear of joining the cargo cult. Although we have made religious commitments, we are often anxious that we may await his return as the natives awaited the return of the cargo planes—benighted and misinformed.

the shadow of a doubt

Authentic Christian faith is at once compelling and disputable. We live in a post-modern and post-Christian world, where certainty is an illusion and where many hold our deepest commitments in suspicion. For those outside of a religious community, faith seems monumentally absurd and to some, morally perverse. That many people whom we respect find the Christian faith intellectually deficient is a source of consternation. The world no longer seems solidly Christian. We are making our way through shadows of gray. We form our beliefs in a wilderness of darkness. Doubts seem inevitable.

What does it mean to be an authentic religious believer when we are called to have a sure and certain faith but see our present believing reality plagued with ambiguity and doubt? Our traditional confessions of faith are a reproach when we mouth words that do not resonate deeply within our hearts. The classical creeds and confessions seem to give witness to a distant era when belief was somehow easier. We are left to find our way in this world with little guidance and, so it often seems, with little honesty from our religious leaders. Doubt is the secret sin buried deep within our souls. We are all afraid to touch it, to unloose the monster. But authentic Christian belief demands that we uncover it, name it, understand it, and make our peace with it. We must learn to live as sincere believers in an age of unbelief—honestly acknowledging the enemy that lies within. This chapter will consider the major sources of doubt and their recent expressions.

the hiddenness of God

In The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos there is a remarkable interchange between a young country priest and a wizened priest near his parish. The ancient cleric is more worldly wise than his younger counterpart and has clearly struggled his whole life with matters of faith and doubt. While conceding the ease of belief that attends those privileged mortals who catch momentary glimpses of the divine—"curl[ed] up all snug and safe as though he were in Abraham's bosom"—he is also aware of the difficulties that attend ordinary believers on the descent from Mt. Carmel: "The real snag is to stick there, and know how to get down again—when you can't hold on any longer...." It's easy to believe during a moving worship service, upon hearing a powerful sermon, or while watching the sun set during a retreat. But how are we to believe when our children are squawking, our finances are a mess, and a beautiful and talented teenager in our church suddenly dies in her sleep?

Deus absconditus—the hidden God. While we long for assurance of God's presence, God often seems distant, even nonexistent. Our prayers go unanswered. Worship feels rote and meaningless. Suffering seems senseless and gratuitous. God's hiddenness is not without biblical witness. Job, in the midst of his sufferings, calls out: "Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! ... If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him" (Job 23:3-4, NRSV).

Pascal writes: "Truly, thou art a hidden God." The hiddenness of God is a topic seldom discussed by Christians, but it is a prime source of our anxiety. In it are rooted the problems of religious doubt, human suffering, and the meaning of life. If God were tangible, or if easily identifiable signs of his existence confronted us everywhere, we would rest in a sublime and confident faith. But so often we look for God and, like Job, discover that he is not there. We are left to find our way in a world dimmed by sin and suffering.

God's silence

Human suffering would be infinitely more bearable if we knew the purposes it served, but we do not. Some suffering seems to have no point except to dehumanize us. God's hiddenness while we suffer is particularly vexing—just when he is most needed, he seems most absent. Some people, of course, find God an ever present help in time of need. Others, including many biblical writers, hear only silence in their sufferings. While we long for the faith of the triumphant, who cling to God even in the silence, our suffering is often exacerbated by God's very hiddenness. Our physical and emotional pains are magnified by God's refusal to answer our "Why?" We cry out with the suffering Psalmist, "O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God!" (83:1).

The silence of God is a recurring theme in the so-called lament Psalms. Nearly half of the Psalms are lamentations of God's apparent abandonment of his people. They are cries of complaint to a God who seems indifferent to Israel's wretched plight. These Psalms are written out of human misery by people who wonder whether God is faithful or good. Is God really on the side of justice? Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous perish? Where is God in the midst of all this? The lament Psalms are honest expressions of despair concerning God's silence in the midst of human suffering. They are often desperate attempts to remind God of his promises, to persuade him of the worthiness of their cause, and to cajole him into action. They are expressions of doubt typically followed by affirmations of faith.

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, "I have prevailed"; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Psalm 13

The meaning of life is veiled within the cloak of human ignorance. We seem constitutionally incapable of attaining lasting peace and happiness. Our lives are a frantic scramble from one momentary pleasure (or avoidance of pain) to the next, as we search for fulfillment of our human potential. We are sailing, so often it seems, in a ship on a vast sea with neither pilot nor destination, hoping for a time when the seas are sufficiently calm to grant us a moment's reprieve. Most of us, however, have developed habits that deaden us to these ultimate issues. When these issues are resurrected—by a mid-life crisis, for example, or by losing a job or a spouse or a child—we are desperate for divine guidance. Yet we often discover the divine absence. Why do God's answers seem enigmatic or unattainable?

Why, when our suffering seems capricious and our lives meaningless, do the churches only read and sing the happy Psalms? Why don't we incorporate honest expressions of doubt and anguish into our modern worship? Why don't we proclaim from our pulpits and pronounce from our pews exactly what we often feel—that God has ignored us? Psalm 88 expresses deep anguish at God's absence and does not resolve itself with even a feeble affirmation of faith. Consider the last six verses:

But I cry to you for help, O LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you. Why, O LORD, do you reject me and hide your face from me?

From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.

Psalm 88:13-18, NIV

Christians, of all people, should be honest about their plight, but they are curiously silent on the topic of honest and sincere doubt. It is, for many, an unspeakable sin. We should heed the comment of Leslie Stephen: "Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?"

the tide of history

We live in an unbelieving and increasingly pluralist generation, and we are products of our culture, whether we want to be or not. Philosopher Steven Cahn considers the status of modern atheism through a character in Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers: "Well, the tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history.... There is presumably a calendar date—a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it." Cahn believes that this calendar date coincides with the publication in 1779 of David Hume's powerful critique of arguments for the existence of God, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. While his dating of the turning point may be debated, there has been a decisive turn towards unbelief in Western culture (at least among intellectuals); the "noes" have it.

Each advance in science, declares the modern atheist, signals just another retreat for religious belief. As knowledge in science increases, the necessity for a divine architect and unmoved mover decreases. Nature, moved by internal forces such as inertia and natural selection, no longer needs Supernature to account for it. According to the scientific high priests of our culture, the battles fought by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and especially Darwin have spelled decisive defeat for belief in God. Richard Dawkins, professor of biology at Oxford University, has recently written, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." While there is no logical connection between accepting evolutionary theory and atheism, there are few who have not felt an awkward tension between science and religion.

In his poem Dover Beach, which is subtitled The Eternal Note of Sadness, Matthew Arnold writes of the retreat of faith and the spread of doubt in his generation. For Arnold this lack of faith is no cause for celebration; the world now lacks a loving and redeeming center to reconcile all things. There is now, he writes elsewhere, no place to lay one's head. Where people once heard the voice of God crashing in on the waves, now Arnold hears only silence. The sea of faith is no longer "at the full," and its loss is a reason for melancholy. Long gone are the days of Arnold, when the retreat of faith was a source of lament. We must find our way, these days, in a culture only too eager to embrace life in the wake of lost faith.

perils of pluralism

Many Christians also find themselves doubting that they have committed themselves to the one true God. This doubt comes in many forms. Some may feel that, had they not been born of Christian parents in the West—in "one nation under God" (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob)—they might have grown up Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, or Hindu. Is it merely a fluke of birth that makes Christianity seem true and Jesus real? Is one's religious identity merely an accident of history or geography, like having a southern accent? We grow into accents; do we simply grow into religious belief? Our Judeo-Christian culture prepares us to prefer monotheism, rising gods, forgiveness and sanctification, baptism and biblical ethics. Are we Christians simply because of our sociocultural upbringing?

In a famous article, H. L. Mencken presents a long, sobering list of gods that no longer commend belief. A small sample of his list includes such notables as Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tialoc, Centeotl, Mixcoatl, Mullo, Tarves, Damona, Esus, Silvana, Ogmios, Sutekh, Resheph, Ashtoreth, Nebo, Melek, Addu, Osiris, Baal, Morrigu, Mulu-hursang, Ops, Vesta, Zagaga, Llaw Gyffes, Mu-ul-il, Qarradu, and Merodach. He concludes: "You may think that I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity—gods of civilized people—worshiped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead."

While Mencken refrains from drawing any conclusions, he surely means to cast doubt on the existence of any gods and on the assurance of commitment to the one, true god. How likely is it that we are right in our religious convictions and everyone else is wrong? At times, Christians doubt that they have gotten religious matters right—that their god alone of these thousands of dead gods is alive and well and worthy of adoration.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from when faith is not enoughby kelly james clark Copyright © 1997 by Kelly James Clark. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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