LEARNING AUTOBIOGRAPHY
God, I’m afraid of looking pretentious. I am not using Augustine’s style because I think I am in the same league with him. You know I don’t. God, you also know part of me cannot believe that I am flatly stating that the sole motivation in all of my life and all of my development, intellectual included, is that I want people to know Jesus better. I feel very naked and open to ridicule for that. In any other course, in any other degree program, I would have stated my interests and goals in very non-religious, professional, intellectual terms. It took a class which insists that my learning come from my entire being for me to confess openly that my entire being is grounded in my relationship with You. I am sorry.
Preparation
How could You not at least loom large in the story of my life? I remember the church building across the yard from our house in California better than I remember our house itself. I was the preacher’s kid, so I probably spent more time there. Even when we moved to Louisiana when I was nine, none of the houses stuck strongly in my mind. Houses came and went. The church was home.
I have lots of memories of listening to Dad preach. Maybe I would doodle in the bulletin or play my Tetris watch, but apparently I caught what he was saying. Little I heard during my first year at Bible college came as a surprise. My dad sought You in the details of the text. He was the kind of preacher who parsed words, diagrammed sentences, and analyzed thoughts and structures. While his analytical style did not earn him any entertainment awards, at least he knew the right theme to preach—grace. Like a single vein running through a quarry, this theme was stamped across all his decades of ministry. That is probably why I escaped the condescending attitude towards non-Christians so common for those whose growth involved flight from organized religion.
Unfortunately, part of that is also simply because my parents were not so discriminating in their condescension. Our house should have had an embroidered plaque hanging over the front door which said, “People are Idiots.” The liberals are idiots, the organist is an idiot, mom’s high school students are idiots, the guy trying to turn left on a busy street is an idiot.
And they called each other idiots.
My parents taught me how to think analytically. I am grateful for that. But all the counterexamples, precise defining of terms, and exposing of fallacies happened in shouting matches. Often. God, forgive them. I love them—and they both made sure I knew that they loved me—but that has to be why I have always been terrified of not knowing the answer. Why else would I still remember my kindergarten screening exam? The guy behind the desk asked me to point to different body parts, and I did not know “ankle.” It was the only one I did not know, and it is the only one I remember. I had to know the answer.
I did not want to be one of the idiots.
The Call
My junior year in high school, I was at a youth rally at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri. A session had just let out of the chapel, and I was walking very slowly to the library for the next little workshop. As students my age streamed around me, I thought about what it meant to follow You. It did not mean that You wanted me to show up to church on Sunday, then try to be a good kid the rest of the week. No, You wanted more. You wanted everything. But what could it possibly mean to give You every minute of every day, every moment of my life? Lightning struck me, took the strength out of my knees, and I sunk onto the stone bench just outside the library. Those conditions could only be fulfilled by giving my life to full-time vocational ministry.
I understand now that my reasoning was fallacious. People do not need You in their job descriptions in order to live for You. But that doesn’t change anything for me. You have a calling on my life, and I will always try get as close as I can to doing work that is explicitly related to Your kingdom. When a friend of the family suggested that I become a teacher at a Bible college (the perfect synthesis of my father’s preaching and my mother’s teaching), the road of my destiny lay straight and clear before me.
From then on, my intellectual and personal development was intimately intertwined with the idea of communication. All my lessons were either about the sender (me), the receiver (other people), the process of communication itself (specifically persuasion), or the message (You).
The Guardians
My guardians were Mormons. They functioned as the powerful forces standing on the threshold. To deal with them was to take an irrevocable step into the unknown.
As my first serious encounter with a group not of my tribe, Mormons were “others” of the most dangerous sort. They shared many of my tribe’s traditions—much of the stories, the vocabulary, the ceremonies. Yet in crucial ways they were unacceptably aberrant. In other words, they stood on the identity line—that line which lets us know who is “us” and who is “them.” They threatened to blur the distinctions that defined my community.
During our senior year, my best friend at school converted to Mormonism. God, even now I do not think I fully understand how this crisis shaped there rest of my life. One night, I went to the playground across the street from our house. Like so many nights before, I climbed on top of the tunnel made of giant tractor-tire halves. On that night I cried out to You, literally shaking my fists at the heavens, wailing at my inability to keep my friend from stumbling down a dead-end path. I didn’t know enough to stop him. I didn’t understand enough. I didn’t have enough facts and arguments. I didn’t know the answer. And if I didn’t know the answer, people were going to hell.
Ever since then, I have had an insatiable appetite to understand just about every viewpoint—be it religion, culture, or philosophy—my own included. At that time, my most immediate necessity was to understand Mormonism, so I bought the best resources my local Christian bookstore had to offer. These were classic examples of what Mormons call “anti-Mormon” literature. These authors, like I, were using what I would call the “confrontational approach.” I was only interested in studying arguments against my enemies. It was only a matter of months before I started realizing some of the limitations of this approach.
First, when I went to talk with the dad of my friend’s Mormon girlfriend, the confrontational approach was unbelievably uncomfortable. I am not an abrasive person, but the very fact that I sat in his living room and tried to argue against his most deeply held beliefs just felt . . . inappropriate. (Please forgive me, God, for all my foolishness in this. I am pretty sure he did.) Beyond that, so many of my arguments seemed to evaporate in my hands, and the ones that did not had surprisingly little effect. So the questions stuck with me, “What makes a good argument?” and, “How come good arguments may not make a difference?”
The confrontational approach was even less effective as a mindset for reading a book about an opposing viewpoint. I realized that the arguments in my anti-Mormon books were like buckshot—dozens of pellets spewing out randomly hoping that one of them might hit something important. The authors had not even taken time to understand Mormonism well enough to attack it in any meaningful way. They were like atheists who point out geocentric language in the Bible, and then think they have closed the issue. The confrontational approach leads to bad thinking.
I did not need bad thinking. Bad thinking was not going to get the job done. No, I just needed to go to college so I could get the answers.
Helpers and Mentors
I went to Ozark Christian College because of what it does best. It teaches students to understand Your Word. Original languages, historical background, genre studies—these are tools I would not trade for the whole world. Because of them, reading the Bible feels like swimming for me. I can dive, soar, glide, and relax. When I read the Bible, it feels like coming home.
That is probably why it took me so long (maybe too long) to realize that Biblical studies or theology were not at the root of my interests. I was probably halfway through my graduate degree before I fully realized that my area of professional concentration had to be philosophy.
To be fair, when I first started navigating the hilly campus of Ozark as a freshman, I knew that my deepest area of interest was apologetics. I did not realize that apologetics is pretty much just philosophy of religion, except we assumed all the answers.
But apologetics did not truly scratch my itch. I think part of me was looking for a series of arguments I could use to compel assent in other people (in a shamefully Cartesian way). What was wrong with that? For starters, the first classes I had in that area were, quite frankly, not very good. They were not those professors’ areas of expertise (at least they had the sense to assign C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and Sire’s TheUniverse Next Door). I remember sitting down in my dorm lobby with a book-sized stack of handouts from class. I had a highlighter, pen, and paper at hand. My goal was to isolate, condense, and compile all the facts and the arguments. After going through twenty pages and hardly highlighting anything, I realized that there was almost nothing there. We had spent time talking about something, and it seemed terribly clever at the time. As I sat in the lobby, it all just looked like filler. This teacher clearly had not taken the time to understand. (This is probably why I am not content with my MA in Contemporary Theology and [a little bit of] Philosophy. I want to have taken the time to seriously understand my field—to interact intelligently with the most current issues being discussed. I have no intention of delivering filler.)
Moreover, the authors of some of our textbooks obviously thought they were building a deductively valid, sound, and undeniable chain of arguments for the truth of Christianity. I liked some of the individual arguments, but the whole structure didn’t feel like a tower made of iron. My gut suspected that the contractors who built the thing took shortcuts and that, hidden behind the walls, it wasn’t really up to code. About that time, I heard an anecdote about C. S. Lewis whenever he took part in actual debates over Christianity. He usually trounced his opponent, but he always left feeling less sure of his beliefs than he did going in.
Maybe the problem was in thinking that faith could be founded on propositional arguments. I remember those dreadful nights when I would go out to the field between the campus and the river to pray. Before I could say anything, I had to drag myself through all of the reasons I thought You even existed at all. It is a wretched faith that is built on nothing but intellectual arguments.
This was the main issue that led my interests to move beyond apologetics—if I can’t argue people into the faith, then what is the function of apologetics? What is it for? When I put this (not entirely rhetorical) question together with other swirling questions about truth, good reasoning, and belief formation, I started to focus on epistemology.
God, in what ways do You work out the pattern of our lives? How do You take the chaos of the millions of little choices of the billions of people on this earth, and still weave a story for each one of us? How is it that some stories go awry without knocking others off their course? And how do I know which one I am in—one that is on target, or one that has been derailed?
My last few years at Ozark, things looked very on track. Serendipity peeked its head out too many times for me to not see Providence. During the fourth year of my five-year degree, the opportunity of a lifetime walked right up and jumped into my lap. The missions professor at Ozark had a friend at a small Bible college in the Caribbean who needed help. Some of the faculty were taking time off to further their own education, so the dean asked if my professor knew any promising students who could fill in for a year. Over lunch, he told me that he came up with five names. I was the one who said, “Yes.”
My personal growth in St. Vincent was immense. Not least of all, I verified that I deeply loved, and was quite good at, teaching. As far as my intellectual growth, I am very grateful that I nosed around in the computer room. I excavated a former professor’s series of introductions to 20th century theologians. I just wish I had found it before my last two weeks! Stretching my mind with the books on Barth, Bultmann, and Kierkegaard was good, though.
Most importantly, you dropped the next step of my life into my lap. Another professor there in the Caribbean was taking a distance learning course from Lincoln Christian Seminary. He let me watch the videos for “Ministering to Contemporary Mindsets,” taught by John Castelein. There was a little snippet about ministry in the last video. For the rest of the course, I sat enthralled as the professor unfolded the mindsets at work in the world today: premoderns—those who go to the elders of the tribe for truth; moderns—those who reject the elders and go to science and reason for truth; antimoderns—those who maintain that science and reason support the elders; and postmoderns—those who reject the search for any overarching truth (or metanarrative). The Universe Next Door had provided me a framework for looking at other worldviews, but this took it to a whole new level. I knew I had to study under this man.
So I did. Again, the odds were too great for me to not sense Your hand at work. For a small window of time, the philosophy professor at the seminary was a friend of the family. (He taught my Epistemology class and offered guidance as I read through Craig and Moreland’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.) I was his Teacher’s Assistant my first year. My second year, I was Castelein’s TA. I essentially wrote one of his classes. His “Hermeneutics” class (which was pretty much just philosophy of language) consisted entirely of discussion questions based on our textbook. He wanted to switch books, but did not have the time to plan out an entire class-worth of new questions. I did. Then he went on Sabbatical the second semester. I facilitated both of his distance courses and one on-campus class (the same one I saw in the Caribbean!).
More than anything, he pointed me toward Bernard Lonergan. A Jesuit philosopher (and one of the chief architects of Vatican II), Lonergan’s critical realism based on his cognitive theory changed my life. His cognitive theory describes (quite phenomenologically, I am told), the actual process we undergo whenever we acquire new knowledge. I take his point that any attempt to refute his theory is self-contradictory because it must use the very process the theory describes. God, You obviously know the theory better than I do, and I will have to beg my other readers’ forgiveness for not being able to adequately describe (much less defend) it here. The first step of knowing is to experience—and so I now make it my explicit and intentional goal to seek new viewpoints, to widen my perspective, and to experience as broadly as I can. Next is insight, which is pre-logical and pre-linguistic. It is entirely internal to the knower. If she or he puts forth the effort, great. If not, no experience I can provide (through sounds in the air or marks on a page) can ever be jointly sufficient to necessitate an act of insight. This killed forever my search for arguments that compel assent. (Let’s face it—I had been playing “Weekend at Bernie’s” with that one for a while, anyway.) This step of his theory walks side-by-side with the general postmodern critique of modernist “reason.” The modernist holy grail of undoubtable certainty, something all people would see and assent to, vanished like an illusion into the mist and fog. However, Lonergan’s final step in knowing is judgment. In judgment, the insight is verified in the external world. Truth is an attainable commodity (at least in degrees). In one breathtaking swoop, my hope for certainty and my fear of skepticism were both swept away.
Which is probably why my focus shifted away from epistemology. By the end of my school career (at least in my former life), the role of free will in the process of belief formation took center stage. People must choose to work for insights. What is choice, and what motivates choice? Aside from wanting a solid foundation in the major areas of contemporary analytic philosophy (not, I should clarify, early 20th century positivistic philosophy), I am currently acutely interested in the issue of free will.