5. The Balcony and the Road
5
The Balcony and the Road
A Framework for Understanding Christian Discipleship
Discipleship is an integral part of the Christian life. In this chapter, I want to reflect on the way we think about—or, better, how we imagine—this process of growing in the Christian faith. What framework is helpful as we reflect on how we might deepen our own faith and help others to do so as well?
I came across some words of the English church leader and theologian William Temple some years ago that have helped me to think about this important question: “Faith is not only the assent of our minds to doctrinal propositions: it is the commitment of our whole selves into the hands of a faithful Creator and merciful Redeemer.” Temple here highlights two of the fundamental elements of faith: grasping and exploring core Christian beliefs, and enhancing and deepening our personal commitment to God and Christ. We are called to think about our faith and absorb its living realities, so that they become part of our being. This, I think, is what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard meant when he spoke of an “appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness.” We need to inhabit the truth of the Christian faith, not see it as if we were external observers, viewing it disinterestedly from outside.
So what way of seeing the Christian life might we use to help us to think about this process of growing in our faith? I want to begin by reflecting on the framework developed by the theologian John Mackay (1889–1983) while he was president of Princeton Theological Seminary, which focuses on two core images—the balcony and the road. Mackay set this out in his Preface to Christian Theology (1941), in which he tried to recapture the significance of Christian theology in terms of “bringing back meaning into life” and “restoring the foundations upon which all true life and thought are built.” The context, of course, is the Second World War, which shattered human dreams of a “new age.”
Mackay suggests that we, like those first disciples of Christ, find ourselves on the “road to Emmaus.” We yearn to “listen to a Voice from beyond and catch the outline of a Face.” We are on a journey through a hostile world, struggling to progress either in reaching our goal or becoming better and deeper people as we travel. If we are to grow in our faith, Mackay argues, we need to see ourselves and our journey of faith from an “appropriate perspective.” For Mackay, there are two perspectives that human beings bring to the business of trying to make sense of life and live meaningfully within the world. Mackay designates one “the balcony” and the other “the road,” seeing both as symbols of the “state of the soul.”
To understand Mackay’s choice of these two “symbols” for these quite distinct attitudes to the quest for meaning in life, we need to reflect on his background. Mackay had a long interest in Christianity in Latin America, and had learned Spanish in Madrid in 1915 to enable him to work as a missionary in Peru. While staying in Madrid, Mackay noticed that Spanish families often gathered on a balcony to look at the bustle of the street below. The balcony, he explained, was a “little platform in wood or stone that protrudes from the upper window of a Spanish home,” from which the observers can watch all that happens on the street below. The balcony thus represents an observation point that is at some distance from what is being observed.
Mackay contrasted this kind of detached “balconized existence” with life on the road below. “By the Road, I mean the place where life is tensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, where choices are made and decisions are carried out.” For Mackay, the church and individual believers live out a pilgrim life on the road. The Christian is not a lone traveler but, rather, is part of a “fellowship of the Road,” which seeks and hopes to find truth and meaning: “Truth is found upon the Road.”
Mackay’s point is that Christian discipleship happens on the road. The balcony is an idealization, an intellectual aspiration that can never be achieved in practice. It is an “ivory tower,” beloved of armchair philosophers. Philosophers of the past may have believed it was possible to take a God’s-eye perspective and see all things clearly and distinctly, yet we now realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from the historical process. We cannot stand above and beyond it, so that we can see where it is going and judge our place within it. We have to figure things out from within the historical process itself.
For Mackay, Christians have their existence on the road and must come to realize and accept the limits that this places on their grasp and vision of reality. They cannot see the “big picture” of reality, in that their horizon limits what can be seen. They may yearn to stand on the balcony and see that “big picture”; that option, however, is simply not available to them. We are journeying on the road, seeking a knowledge that will illuminate our situation as we travel and help us become better people as we do so. For Mackay, there can be “no true knowledge of ultimate things” unless this arises from a concern and is “perfected in a commitment.” This leads to a set of questions emerging from the Christian life that might be described as practical rather than theoretical—questions such as, “How can I become what I ought to be? How can I know God? How can I relate to the purpose of the universe? How can we make the world a better place?” The believer is a wayfarer—someone who is on the road and knows there is no possibility of rising above that road.
I have long found this framework helpful in thinking about Christian discipleship. Mackay encourages me to think of growth in faith in terms of the accumulation of wisdom that will help sustain me as I travel along that road and try—to the limited extent possible within the conditions of this life, even through divine grace—to make myself a better person and the world a better place. Mackay captures the tragedy of the human epistemic situation with elegance, inviting us to realize the limits of our situation and appreciate that our puzzling and complex world is best illuminated by divine revelation rather than analyzed by human reason.
Yet Mackay’s framework is helpful for another reason: it creates conceptual space for spiritual mentors, who, I have learned, are integral to the process of Christian discipleship. A mentor is someone who journeys alongside us on the road and shares the wisdom that he or she has gathered along the way. A mentor is not someone who stands on a fictional balcony, dispensing alleged wisdom from on high. Rather, mentors are part of the pilgrim community of faith, sharing the wisdom they have gained on the journey with those who accompany them on the road. Discipleship is about finding someone a few steps in front of us on the road and following that person. Mentors are usually—though not exclusively—older people who share their wisdom with those who are younger. So let me turn now to thinking about this notion of a mentor in more detail.
One of the most engaging French religious writers is François Fénelon (1651–1715), a Catholic archbishop, theologian, and poet. Although I have gained much from reading his “spiritual letters,” his best-known work is The Adventures of Telemachus, first published anonymously in 1699. This widely read work was a thinly veiled criticism of the autocratic rule of the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, who promptly banished Fénelon from his court at Versailles, confining him to his diocese of Cambrai in northeastern France. The book takes the form of an imaginative exploration and expansion of a passage in Homer’s Odyssey that recounts the education and formation of Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, who is accompanied by his tutor, Mentor, on his educational travels.
Where Homer presents Mentor as a somewhat ineffectual old man, Fénelon playfully represents this as a mere outward appearance masking a deep intelligence arising from his true identity as Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, in disguise. Mentor, for Fénelon, is the embodiment of wisdom and reflection—an older person who has internalized his learning and is willing to pass on that wisdom to younger people, such as Telemachus. For Fénelon, Mentor was someone who had accumulated wisdom over an extended period of time and acted as a source of wisdom, insight, and encouragement for Telemachus as he accompanied the younger man on his journeys of exploration and discovery. Mentor did not teach Telemachus specific skills but, rather, helped him to grow as a reflective and humane person. Mentor thus shaped the character of the younger man by challenging him to think differently, opening his eyes and mind to different perspectives.
This idea of the intergenerational transmission of wisdom remains important and needs to be distinguished from the notion of “coaching,” in which those with certain competencies aim to transfer this to those under their care. Today, the term “mentor” has largely lost its associations with Homer and Fénelon and is often simply equated with a coach. Few now know that Mentor was a literary character and assume that the word “mentor” merely designates someone who functions as a teacher of certain skills.
Some Christians are concerned that the idea of a mentor has its origins in a secular culture and thus lacks a Christian history of use, yet Fénelon was deeply concerned with the intergenerational transmission of Christian wisdom and—unlike Homer—presented Mentor as playing an exemplary role in this process. Fénelon subtly contrasts the inexperience and naivety of the young Telemachus with the wisdom of the older Mentor, showing how Mentor’s conversations with Telemachus as they journeyed together helped the younger person to develop virtue and insight along the road.
So how does this concept of mentoring, as Fénelon develops it, help the process of growing in faith and wisdom that we know as “Christian discipleship”? Let me share something of my own experience.
After discovering Christianity in 1971, I found myself struggling to understand what I had embraced. My difficulties as a novice Christian disciple did not lie only in making sense of the basic ideas of faith as these were set out in the creeds. I was someone who loved the natural sciences and had once believed that the sciences and religious faith were locked into a conflict that made it impossible for a real scientist to be a religious believer. I was unsure where my journey of faith would take me. Would it force me to compartmentalize my mind, allocating separate regions of it to science and faith, so that I could avoid thinking about their potentially irreconcilable tensions? Were there other intellectual options, at that point unknown to me, that could allow me to see science and faith as aspects of a greater whole? Who could point me to these options—or, even better, tell me about them?
Although there were many Christian students at Oxford working in the field of the natural sciences, most adopted an approach that I valued but found difficult to work out in practice. All truth is God’s truth, I was told. For this reason, scientific truth could not be inconsistent with the truths of the Christian faith. There might seem to be tensions between science and faith, but these were more apparent than real. At one level, I could see the merits in this approach, yet it seemed to me to be frustratingly abstract and generalized. I felt that I needed more help than this.
In the end, my difficulties were resolved through an imaginative leap, brought about by an older and wiser person who shared his own way of thinking with me. Charles A. Coulson, Oxford University’s first professor of theoretical chemistry, was a Fellow of Wadham College, where I was an undergraduate. A year or so after my conversion, I heard Coulson—a prominent Methodist lay preacher—preach in Wadham Chapel on the fundamental coherence of nature and faith. The intellectual framework he outlined in his sermon provided a radical clarification of the issues and allowed me to see a way ahead. I was able to talk to him afterward about his ideas concerning the coherence of science and faith. These remain integral to my thinking to this day.
Coulson became a mentor to me. Knowing that my specialist subject was quantum theory, he invited me to attend the annual conferences he organized on this subject at Wadham College, which exposed me to some of the latest thinking in the field. One of his core themes was that the idea of a “god of the gaps” was to be rejected. In its place, Coulson affirmed a Christian “big picture”—the articulation of a luminous vision of reality that offered insight into the scientific process and its successes, while at the same time setting out a larger narrative that allowed engagement with questions raised by science, yet lying beyond its capacity to answer. That notion of a “big picture” stands at the heart of my own thinking about the Christian faith and informs my research and writing to this day.
So would I have discovered such an approach without Coulson? Perhaps. Coulson, however, helped me to do more than understand his ideas; he embodied his own way of thinking. It had become part of him, shaping his attitudes toward science and faith. A few years back, I read a biography of the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), now remembered mainly as the “father of the atomic bomb.” One of Oppenheimer’s throwaway remarks has stayed with me: “The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.” Without people who are shaped by them, ideas remain abstract. To grasp the significance of an idea, we need to see what difference it makes to the way someone thinks, acts, and sees the world.
A mentor is not an authority figure but a person we come to respect and trust. Spiritually, we need people who can model for us what loving God and loving others actually looks like. Intellectually, we need people who have developed outlooks and practices that reflect their fundamental beliefs. Discipleship is better seen as a journey than something that happens in a classroom. It takes place relationally on the road, through observation, imitation, learning from mistakes, and the formation of habits and skills; it takes place intellectually on that same road, through collaboration and a sharing of practices with our fellow travelers, as we listen to how they understand the Bible, assimilate its ideas, and cope with the uncertainties of life.
Like any good mentor, Coulson embodied what he believed so that I could grasp the significance of his ideas through knowing him as a person. He died of cancer in 1974, so I never got to know him as well as I would have liked, but even our brief acquaintance was enough to help me grasp and then inhabit his way of seeing the relation of science and faith. The idea was expressed in his books, yet it was embodied in his life. Perhaps I was like an apprentice to a master, learning through both watching and listening.
That’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading (and sometimes even writing) biographies of people such as C. S. Lewis and other Christian luminaries. They help me to understand how theological ideas shape our lives through a process of reflective inhabitation. Such writers have journeyed on the road and passed their wisdom down to me. They challenge my judgments, constantly inviting me to see things in a new way and try out fresh approaches.
There are, of course, some people I would have loved to have known as mentors. Sadly, I shall never be able to know great writers of the past, such as Augustine of Hippo, Athanasius of Alexandria, or Martin Luther—to name only three individuals—or to journey alongside them in person and talk to them about their habits of thought, prayer, and adoration. Yet I can read their books. While this is no substitute for the living presence of a mentor, it allows me to absorb their ideas and work out how I might benefit from their wisdom. Though dead, they still speak to us, offering us encouragement and stimulus.
I now see books as providing a special category of mentoring, with a significant capacity to change and enrich our lives. I gladly acknowledge the importance of conversations with significant individuals in my early stages of faith. Yet, while my early conversations with Coulson opened up new ways of thinking, it was my subsequent engagement with his books that consolidated those ideas, adding breadth and depth to my new mental map of reality. As I grow older, I find myself relying more on books than I did, partly because my own growth in faith more recently has not taken the form of acquiring new ideas but of deepening my appreciation of ones that I already knew by reading more about them and the words of other wayfarers on the road about how they understood and applied those ideas.
In closing, let me return to the framework I set out at the beginning of this chapter—the balcony and the road. All of us are on that road, even if we might wistfully dream of being on the balcony. We journey along that road in company, however, developing relationships of trust in which we encourage and gently challenge each other as we travel. We are wayfarers on our way to the New Jerusalem, finding ourselves motivated to continue by the thought of finally reaching our destination. Yet we can also use the journey wisely, seeing this as a time of preparation, during which we acquire habits of thought and action that emerge from the Christian “big picture.”
Part of the process of discipleship is the expansion of our minds and souls that arises from a deeper understanding of the Christian faith, stimulated and enlarged by conversations with other wayfarers along the road and the books that have emerged from those journeys. The process of discipleship is nourished by the sharing of wisdom and acquired experience within the wandering people of God, who come to see their journey as a process of personal and spiritual growth.
We are also accompanied by our living and loving God, who does not stand above and beyond us as a distant spectator but travels with us in sorrow and joy, even when we pass through life’s darker moments. This insight is solidified in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which speaks of Jesus Christ as God incarnate, present with us, even to the end of time, as we journey through this world. As I began this chapter by referring to Mackay’s Preface to Christian Theology, let me close with its final words: “If the Road to Emmaus is still our road, the great Companion, who trod it then, treads it still, to lead the pilgrims of this twilight hour into the glory of a new dawn.” As Mackay reminds us, we do not merely journey with others; we journey in hope—a hope that, by God’s grace, we shall one day be in a better place and have, by then, become better people.
Based on a talk given to Christian academics at Hong Kong University on November 5, 2017.