Wesley Hill is one of those extraordinary writers whose words always manage to inspire. Even the use of a word like “exvangelical”—a word that I’m a little too excited to add to my vocabulary—becomes an opportunity for genuine insight, for the encouragement of a critical thought life that is always also longing for and returning to its “naive” faith. From his recent essay on the novels of Chaim Potock:
Even so, the Evangelical faith in which I was nurtured continues to beguile, inspire, and compel me in ways I am still discovering. I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want still, very much, to be a Christian. Potok’s characters help me understand my complicated feelings. They are not only interested in the deconstructive moment, in which childhood certainties are relinquished. They strive also for the chastened second naiveté, on the far side of the desert of criticism, that will make it possible for them to go on being faithfully Jewish.
The eighteenth-century aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg says there is “a great difference between believing something still and believing it again.” The novels of Chaim Potok show us what the latter looks like, and in doing so, make believers like me feel much less alone.