I highlighted this from David French’s The Third Rail newsletter last week:
I can name many people who know who Jesus is and embody those virtues as well as imperfect people can.
But when the Church leads with its moral code—and elevates that moral code over even the most basic understandings of Jesus Christ himself—the effect isn’t humility and hope; it’s pride and division. When the Church chooses a particular sin as its defining apostasy (why sex more than racism, or greed, or gluttony, or cruelty?), it perversely lowers the standards of holy living by narrowing the Christian moral vision.
The result is a weaker religion, one that is less demanding for the believer while granting those who uphold the narrow moral code a sense of unjustified pride. Yet pride separates Christians from each other, and separates Christians from their neighbors.
Millions of Christians are humble and hopeful. Millions are also prideful and divisive. Why? One answer is found in the LifeWay-Ligonier survey. In the quest for morality, they’ve lost sight of Jesus—but it is Jesus who truly defines the Christian faith.
Along with Alan Jacobs and I’m sure many others, I say a hearty “yes and amen!”
Buuut…
It’s fitting that Jacobs decided to quote French and the survey on his blog, since Jacobs is the first person I thought of when I read it.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I would be very curious to see Jacobs do something similar with the data from the Lifeway-Ligonier survey as he has done with the romanticized ideas of lost literacy and readership. He says, in nuce, that we don’t know enough about the history of literacy at any given point in any given society to make any meaningful comparisons, and therefore there is no point in making comparative judgments between us and our ancestors. And, perhaps even more relevantly, he adds another point:
I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s [on the subject of Literacy Lost] is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.
Again, it might be a stretch, but I think that very similar questions can be asked, and criticisms made, of this new survey on “orthodoxy.” Maybe there are other studies to compare here, but I would very much like to know: When exactly in the past did we, as Christians (self-identified or otherwise), have a clear grasp on orthodoxy?
That seems like a question worth asking. But the main point I would like to make is this: I would not be the least bit surprised if there is absolutely no significant correlation between “orthodoxy” and genuine Christlike conduct.
A few years ago, while I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, I took a history class called “Genocide in Our Time.” One of the assignments each week was to respond to a given question in our own journal-essays. One week’s question was on the topic of “raising awareness” and its effectiveness.
I don’t remember the exact question that was asked, but here is my response, titled “A Cynic’s Take on Awarenesss”:
I’m no scholar of the Protestant Reformation, but I grew up being taught that the reformers believed in three distinct but related elements of conversion: notitia, assensus, and fiducia. A person could hear all the details (notitia) and agree that they are true (assensus), but it was not until people actually placed their confidence in that truth—had “cast themselves upon it”—that they could be said to have faith (fiducia). I’ve never heard them used outside of the Reformation, but those three little Latin words seem to me to have significance far beyond the ecclesia.
I mentioned in the discussion this week that I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to the topic of “raising awareness.” If I was being truly honest (and more willing to risk offense) I would have said that “raising awareness” is almost an entirely meaningless phrase to me. Even now I’m a little hesitant to admit this, partly because I’m afraid that what someone will hear is that I am somehow against truth or justice, or that anyone who operates under the task of raising awareness is doing meaningless work. This is certainly not what I mean. I think one way to say what I mean is this: in the same way that the reformers believed that notitia and assensus were nothing if they did not include the commitment of fiducia, hearing the details about genocide and believing them to be true are (almost) meaningless acts if they do not include the “faithfulness” required to prevent or respond to them. That in no way means that awareness doesn’t matter. Sticking with the analogy: if raising awareness amounts more or less to the notitia and assensus of the truth of genocide, someone need not fear that I’m in any way calling that task meaningless, since the reformers also believed that one couldn’t have fiducia without first having the awareness.
Here, however, just when I think I’m starting to clarify myself, is where I make a slight turn.
In some ways I’m not entirely faithful to my reformed roots. Without getting into too many of the details, I am (these days) inclined to reverse the above formulation—much to the chagrin of my own father, Reformation man that he is. Though it seems at times very counterintuitive, I think that fiducia almost always comes first, and that you can have it without—strictly speaking—having the other two. Put simply: if one doesn’t have the character of commitment (fiducia), then notitia and assensus won’t really matter. Character is infinitely more important than any amount of knowledge or awareness. T.S. Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Somehow we have learned—though this is not a new problem—to speak about the truth without becoming wise. Or, more to the point, we often act as though getting all the facts straight will somehow make us wise, but ages upon ages of humanity tell us that this is simply not true.
I believe as much as anyone in the importance of calling a thing by its true name, especially when it comes to genocide, but the question is not so much about how we can get more people to admit of atrocities or to acknowledge the word “genocide.” Instead we would do better to ask how we might, each and all, be and become a people who are, in the words of Albert Camus, “resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” Forget those who consider themselves “aware.” Give me ten men and women who know nothing about the history of genocide but who live truthfully and sacrificially today, and I think it will be those faithful (fiducia-filled) people who prevent the next genocide long before anyone else. A people who live in this way will know what to do with the truth when they find it. For those who do not, the truth may not matter at all. As Norton Juster’s character Canby laments in Phantom Tollbooth, “You can swim all day in the sea of knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.”
As mentioned before, I am not saying that spreading the truth about genocide awareness is unimportant; indeed, I think it is massively important. But no matter how important it is, I do think that the truth about genocide at least can be meaningless. We must speak the truth, but if we don’t do more than that, all the awareness in the world will not help the Rohingyas of today or the Yazidis of tomorrow. And in that way, unless some sense of fiducia is central, no awareness project will be, in any meaningful sense, successful.
While in this case I was borrowing an idea to answer a question about genocide prevention, I think, for obvious reasons, that every single word I wrote in that short essay could be said about “orthodoxy” among the “faithful.” In fact, it seems to me that this is one of the core elements that make up the stories and teachings of the Bible, and particularly every encounter with Jesus: Your ability to pass the test—on sexual morality or on theology—is irrelevant.
Again, there could be some more informative data out there that I’m not aware of, so I say this as humbly as possible. Maybe there was a time, in the near or distant past, when a majority of proclaiming Christians had there theological i’s and t’s dotted and crossed and italicized. And maybe these orthodox practitioners were the ones most likely to be sacrificing life and limb for the glory of God and the love of neighbor. But I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.