The Darkness of Faith: Coping With Uncertainty
How does theology engage with the deepest questions of human life? For the second-century theologian Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), Christ represented both the fulfilment of the Old Testament law and the classic Greek longing for wisdom. Others followed in Justin’s footsteps. Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo both explored how the gospel connects up with the wider human search for truth, beauty and goodness. Theology did not merely help us to understand our world and our place within it; it was also able to bridge the gap between the Christian faith and the world of human feelings and longings.
Let’s reflect more on the various ‘worlds’ we occupy, drawing on some ideas developed by the philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94).
Popper stressed the importance of what he called ‘ultimate questions’, which are vitally important to human flourishing yet lie beyond the reach of the natural sciences. Human beings, he argued, inhabit three distinct worlds.
1 The world that consists of ‘physical bodies’, such as stones, stars, plants and animals. This is the physical universe that is studied by the natural sciences.
2 The ‘mental or psychological world’, by which Popper means the world of our ‘feelings of pain and of pleasure, of our thoughts, of our decisions, of our perceptions and our observations’.
3 The world of the ‘products of the human mind’, such as religious and moral beliefs, scientific theories, understandings of the meaning of life, and mathematical constructions such as Newton’s theory of gravitation.
Popper’s point is that these three worlds are different yet they’re all part of the human encounter with reality and they’re all in some way connected.
While some criticism can be made of Popper’s approach, most people find it really useful. It’s certainly helpful in thinking about the value of theology. One of Popper’s most important points is that theories (located in World 3) have the capacity to interact with and alter the other two worlds. In other words, ‘conjectures or theories’ can serve as ‘instruments of change’. They help us see our world in new ways and inspire us to want to change it for the better. Although Popper is primarily concerned with scientific theories, his analysis can easily be extended to political or theological engagement. My point is that theology offers us a framework for connecting these three worlds and a way of understanding how this helps us to flourish and live well.
As we shall discover in this second part of the book, theology offers us a distinct way of seeing and understanding both the objective world around us and the subjective world within us. Faith is about accepting and inhabiting this new understanding of ourselves and our world, which helps us to find meaning, value and fulfilment. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about some kind of self-actualization or self-fulfillment but, rather, about seeing ourselves in terms of what God wants us to be and is willing to help us become.
Let’s now focus on how theology helps us to reflect on the first of our three classic themes: wisdom.
What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) pointed out, someone who is ‘merely well-informed’ may turn out to be ‘the most useless bore on God’s earth’. Yes, you need to know something to be wise, but it’s clear that someone could ‘easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom’. Whitehead sees wisdom as going far beyond the mere accumulation of facts. Wisdom is a ‘mastery of knowledge’, which enables a wise person to engage with a complex and uncertain world using deep insight and reflective judgement. Whitehead’s philosophical judgement can be supplemented by more psychological accounts of wisdom as an integration of knowledge, experience and deep understanding, coupled with a willingness to live with the uncertainties of life.
The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021) pointed to a sense of despair at the close of the twentieth century as people found themselves overwhelmed with detail, unable to discern any big picture in life: ‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.’ For Wilson, we can’t see the wood for the trees. Wisdom is about achieving depth of understanding rather than settling for superficial engagement. We need to appreciate the interconnectedness of things rather than focus on isolated ideas. And perhaps most difficult of all, we must come to terms with ambiguity and uncertainty and learn how to cope with a complex universe that refuses to accommodate itself to our demands for simplification.
It’s clear that many are questing for something deeper than the ephemeral opinions and values of our day, which so often turn out to be little more than the intellectual posturing of self-important groups being presented as if they were the permanent truths of the future. But this is nothing new. We find the same concerns about shallowness expressed throughout human history, including in the ‘wisdom literature’ of the Old Testament and the letters of the New Testament. Indeed, early Christianity was widely understood at the time as a ‘philosophy’ – a love of wisdom, a trustworthy and reliable mode of thinking and living that people were invited to embrace. Early Christian artwork occasionally depicted Christ as wearing a pallium (a philosopher’s cloak) for this reason.
As I see it, theology is what I like to call ‘a reflective habitation of the Christian faith’, which is grounded in and nourished by the Bible and the long Christian tradition of engaging with and interpreting the biblical text. There’s no doubt that the New Testament takes the believer’s cultivation of wisdom with great seriousness, emphasizing that Christ is the one ‘in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2.3), and criticizing other approaches, such as the self-serving pretensions to wisdom that Paul notes in his Corinthian correspondence (1 Cor. 1.17–20).
For Paul, Christ is the ‘wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. 1.24), embodying and manifesting wisdom not as a set of abstract principles but as a lived life, which can be a model and encouragement to others. Christ is not, therefore, simply to be understood as a ‘teacher of wisdom’ but as someone who embodies that wisdom.
We know that many early Christian writers, particularly orators and philosophers who were converted from paganism, felt uneasy about (and were possibly embarrassed by) the simple language of the New Testament. It seemed to lack the rhetorical elegance and conceptual sophistication of classic philosophical literature. It’s noticeable that the two New Testament letters that show most interest in the conceptual world of wisdom – the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians – were perceived as more sophisticated, perhaps because of the greater complexity of their vocabulary and style.
How does theology come into this? A good place to start is Augustine of Hippo’s reflections on Christian wisdom. In his important early work, Instructing Beginners in the Faith, probably written in 403, Augustine sets out to deal with many of the questions asked by those who were new to the faith and wanted to understand what they had embraced. It’s a remarkable work, notable for the clarity of its exposition and the extent to which Augustine discloses his own anxieties and concerns. For example, he confesses his disappointment that he’s unable to communicate the excitement that theological ideas had aroused in his mind to his students.
However, Augustine is more concerned with the apparent tension between the simplicity of the New Testament’s vocabulary and the rich response the text may be expected to create in its readers as they interpret and assimilate it. Augustine stresses that the main purpose of Christ’s life and death was to show humanity the full extent of the love of God and that, having discovered this, people might ‘come to be set on fire by the love of the one by whom they were first loved.’
Augustine’s point is that Christians are drawn into a transformed mode of living and thinking, which arises because we are drawn towards a loving God. In drawing closer, we gradually come to discover, and then be shaped by, the nature of this God. The desire for wisdom, like the desire for righteousness and holiness, arises from this powerful yearning to be like God, who is the source of all wisdom, righteousness and holiness. Augustine’s concern is thus to help evoke a passion within us to reflect the character of God, not simply to explain these ideas and the benefit we can gain from them.
As my Oxford colleague Carol Harrison (b. 1953), one of Augustine’s more insightful recent interpreters, remarks, essentially, he ‘replaces the “art of delivery” or effective speaking with the “art of reception” or effective hearing.’ The simple words of the New Testament thus become the channel through which a more sophisticated and individually adapted vision of wisdom emerges in individuals, perhaps catalysed by the teacher or preacher but ultimately reflecting the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. The simple words of the New Testament draw us into a divine mystery that cannot be expressed in such simple terms yet enthralls and captivates believers, motivating them to want to become like God. Wisdom is not presented here as a tabulated collection of virtuous habits but, rather, in terms of developing a mindset, an integrated Christian framework of thought and action, grounded in and conforming to the example of Christ.
Augustine is aware that people are drawn to Christianity for a variety of reasons, some laudable and others decidedly less so. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, he suggests that someone’s motivation to become a Christian or join a church is of little significance. What really matters is that the church is the place in which our desires are converted, in that they are redirected from a lesser good to the supreme good. The task of the Church is to enable this desire to flourish in new believers even if they do not have such a desire to start with.
As Augustine makes clear, Christianity enables us to see things in a new way, with important results for what we consider to be wise thinking and wise acting. The Christian gospel ‘heals the eyes of the heart’, leading to an imaginative and affective transformation of the way in which we understand ourselves and our world. Augustine sets out the Christian interpretation of the world and the place of human beings within it and offers his own account of how we can and should live well within that world on the basis of this interpretation.
But what is this wisdom? Augustine suggests that it’s a recalibration of our desires in the light of who we now realize we really are, and what we really need:
Holy Scripture speaks like this: ‘People are like grass; their glory is like a flower in the field. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord endures for ever’ (1 Pet. 1.24–5). So if anyone longs for true rest and happiness, they ought not to set their hope on things that are mortal and transitory, but rather fix it on the word of the Lord, so that, by holding firm to that which endures for ever, they may endure for ever with it.
How does theology help us to become wise? Even these brief reflections allow us to begin to give some kind of answer. Theology, by setting out a vision of the world and our place within it, helps us to to make decisions about what really matters. It helps us to identify goals in life and how these might be achieved. We need to find ways of bringing together theology and practice in the form of Christian lives that are lived well.
Yet for many, what really matters is escaping from superficial forms of religious faith, which lack any significant depth and grounding. We’ll explore this important theme further in what follows.
One of the downsides of our increasingly scientific culture is a tendency to disparage pre-scientific times. What did anyone then know about anything? The literary critic and public intellectual Alan Jacobs (b. 1958) is one of many writers to question this dismissal of the past. The past teaches us, not least because it allows us to see beyond what our present moment can offer. Reading the classics means allowing someone from another world to speak to us and offer perspectives that might at first seem strange and distant, yet could hold the key to new insights and peace of mind.
As Jacobs points out, this wider cultural principle needs to be heeded by the Christian churches, which so often prize innovation and pay attention only to familiar voices and what brings instant gratification. Theology involves a dialogue with the past. We’re not required to retreat into some kind of nostalgic paradise, but we do need to heed the challenge to consider approaches and outlooks that might be new to us but were well known to earlier generations. Superficiality is the abiding cultural deficit of our age, evident in Christianity as in so many other areas of life. That’s why taking past writers seriously is so important. Let me elaborate.
‘Just trust God and read the Bible!’ As I recall, this was the conclusion of a rather dull sermon that I heard preached by a student preparing for ministry. The preacher referenced no one other than himself and offered some rather trite answers to the big questions of life. He had, he told his audience, once had difficulties with the problem of pain, but he had prayed about it and now it didn’t bother him any more. Some older members of the congregation were unimpressed and offloaded their irritation on me afterwards. What about the problem of doubt? How were we to make sense of some difficult biblical passages? Their basic complaint was that the sermon was superficial, failing to recognize the genuine problems people experienced in the life of faith. They were hoping for wisdom and, instead, were offered a series of banalities. ‘We need more depth than that!’
There’s a problem here – not with Christianity itself, but with the calibre of so many of those who preach and teach it. Looking back on my own journey of faith, I now see that I was fortunate in those I chose as my theological mentors. I discovered C. S. Lewis and initially relished his rigorous intellectual and imaginative account of the Christian faith. Yet Lewis served another function for me: he acted as a gateway to a tradition of wisdom, pointing me backwards to writers he had found helpful – such as Augustine of Hippo, G. K. Chesterton, Dante, George Herbert and Thomas Traherne. As I explored this rich territory of theological wisdom, I found myself being anchored to the past, not in the sense of being restricted and confined by the limits of that past but, rather, in the sense of being connected with a long history of interpretation and reflection on the great themes of faith, from which I could learn.
This discovery of the importance of the Christian past took me by surprise. As a scientist, I was taught that there was no point in reading research articles that were more than ten years old, as the field would have moved on significantly since then. I had grown up in the 1960s and, like many shaped by that decade’s ephemeral cultural mood, I saw the past as an irrelevance. Lewis helped me to realize that other Christians had thought about matters of faith for 2,000 years and there might just be something to be learned from reading them. I would still forge my own personal vision of faith, but my ideas would be enriched and given depth by this tradition of reflection.
Initially, Lewis became my gateway to this tradition, identifying sources that I could explore and engage with. When I began actually studying theology, I encountered new names and writers who excited and challenged me. Yet it was when I was reading one of Lewis’s later works, dealing with the intellectual virtue of entering fully into the opinions of others in a process of ‘good reading’, that I encountered an intellectual framework which helped me to make sense of what Lewis both commended and practised:
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others . . . Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
Lewis thus did more than encourage me to read the riches of the Christian past and to reject dismissive gestures of ‘chronological snobbery’, which declared that the past was irrelevant and unusable. He helped me to see that I, as a reflective individual, could overcome the limits of my specific historical location and cultural perspective by tapping into a rich tradition of reflection, which expanded my vision of faith. Christian theology is a corporate undertaking in which the voices of the past have a welcome and necessary place, challenging ephemeral orthodoxies and offering alternatives that demand constant reconsideration.
Having said this, Lewis is not encouraging an uncritical acceptance of theological and spiritual ideas of the past (which might contain error and misunderstanding as much as wisdom). His point is that ideas originating in the past that have been tried and tested can be retrieved quite easily, dusted off and given a new lease of life in our own thought, which is enriched as a result. I find it helpful to read recent writers who, like Lewis before them, have found certain older writers useful, and note which authors they perceive to be valuable and how they use them.
A good example of this process is found in Rowan Williams’s extended reflections on the ideas of Augustine of Hippo. Williams, a professor of theology at the University of Oxford who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury, offers thoughtful readings of a number of major theologians, highlighting certain aspects of their thought and making fresh connections with contemporary questions. For example, consider this comment on the importance of Augustine’s Confessions for the human quest for wisdom:
Left to ourselves, we can fantasize about gaining wisdom by effort, but in fact we shall only be locking ourselves up still further in our illusions, admiring not the eternal wisdom but our own spiritual skills.
Here, Williams underscores three important theological insights. First, wisdom is not something we achieve but something that gradually arises within us as a result of our transformative encounter with the greater reality of God. It is a work of grace, not a human achievement. Second, natural human notions of ‘wisdom’ are often self-serving and self-referential. We need to be challenged by a new vision of both what it means to be wise and how we can become wise. Yet there is a third insight, too easily overlooked. Engaging with past writers can illuminate and enrich our present by allowing us to tap into past wisdom that has proved its value over time.
Wisdom is about being rooted in the past – not retreating into this past but being able to draw on its insights and put them to fresh use in the present, especially as we face an uncertain future. In her remarkable account of the importance of ‘being rooted’ for human identity and flourishing, the French philosopher and religious writer Simone Weil (1909–43) highlighted the need for a sense of connection with the past in facing the future:
Being rooted (enracinement) is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the most difficult to define. A human being has roots by virtue of a real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in a living form certain treasures of the past and certain expectations for the future.
Theology helps us to grasp a vision of reality, embodied in the community of faith, which is rooted securely in the past, enabling it to retrieve and present the wisdom of the past to the present. Weil helps us to think of the Christian Church as a school of wisdom, providing both context and content for growth in faith.
Wisdom encompasses questioning slick and shallow simplicities and respecting complexity. We need to resist the temptation to limit or reduce reality to the intellectually manageable because the truth is that both our universe and God lie beyond our total comprehension. Theologically, this principled attempt to safeguard the depth of reality from shallow interpretations is best seen in the desire to ‘preserve mystery’ by insisting that we respect its integrity, affirm its fundamental unity and, at the same time, identify its multiple aspects.
As I noted earlier, the philosopher Mary Midgley, who stresses the importance of doing justice to complex realities, suggested thinking of ‘multiple maps’ to make sense of a rich and deep world. Midgley also suggests that we need to use ‘multiple windows’ on our world, each with its own angle on reality. She illustrates this idea using the analogy of a large aquarium with multiple viewing windows to allow observers to see each aspect of its extensive underwater habitat:
We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. But if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far.
Each window offers us its own distinct and significant view of this greater reality, which is to be valued in its own right and for its own sake while at the same time being part of a greater coherent whole. We need to work out how to bring these partial viewings of the aquarium together.
The New Testament makes use of a number of ‘viewing windows’ into the rich and complex Christian understanding of salvation. Theologians tend to refer to these as ‘soteriological metaphors’, meaning analogies or illustrations that help to capture some particular aspect of the Christian understanding of sōtēria (salvation), often using language and images that were accessible to ordinary people.
These images and analogies served two important purposes. First, they enabled those who had responded to the Christian proclamation to understand what had happened to them by giving them maps of the new territory of faith they now inhabited. And, second, they served an important purpose, apologetically or evangelistically, in helping to explain the Christian understanding of salvation to those outside the community of faith using accessible cultural analogies, such as a slave being set free or two people being reconciled so that their relationship can be restored and renewed.
There were many religions and mystery cults in the multicultural world of the New Testament, each offering its own distinct account of the nature of salvation and how this could be achieved. Christians needed to be able to explain what was distinct about their own beliefs. Each of the New Testament’s ‘soteriological metaphors’ is like a snapshot of a panoramic view, capturing some – but only some – of its features with particular clarity. Let’s look at four of these briefly to help us appreciate this point. Others can be added easily to provide greater depth but, for our purposes, the important thing is to appreciate the diversity of these images and the richness of understanding that they enable.
1 Salvation brings healing to wounded humanity
The Greek term sōtēria (normally translated as ‘salvation’) bears a rich range of meanings, including ‘healing’, ‘restoration’ and ‘rescue’. There is an important connection here with the healing ministry of Christ, which was entrusted to the early church. Luke records that Jesus gave authority to the disciples to teach and to heal: he ‘sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal’ (Luke 9:1–2). The human predicament is thus understood as that of being ill or wounded and unable to self-heal. The Christian gospel brings healing at multiple levels: physical, social and relational. This point was emphasized by Augustine of Hippo, who compared the Church to a hospital in which the ill and wounded were restored to wholeness under the care of a competent physician. This aspect of the Christian understanding of salvation naturally leads into a reflection on the link between theology and wellbeing. Christianity offers to heal, renew and transform a broken and wounded humanity. We shall explore this point further in the next chapter.
2 Christ is the proper satisfaction for human sin
The context now shifts from a medical to a legal context. The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) argued that a central purpose of the Incarnation was to allow a righteous God to cancel the debt of sinful humanity through ‘satisfaction’. Our predicament here is portrayed in terms of being trapped, as we are unable to make the necessary payment or reparation for human sin. By becoming incarnate, God was able to deliver us. Although Anselm’s approach has been criticized at points, his fundamental concern was to emphasize that God acted in both justice and compassion to liberate humanity from sin. Redemption was the outcome of God’s righteousness.
3 Christ is a sacrifice for human sin
The context now changes again, this time to the religious cult of the Old Testament. The dominant theme here is that humanity is separated from God by the impurity of sin. If we are to be able to draw close to God, this contamination must be purged through an appropriate sacrifice. Christ is depicted, especially in the letter to the Hebrews, as both the sinless high priest and the perfect sacrificial offering, allowing impurities to be cleansed so that people can draw close to God and thus making the sacrificial system redundant.
4 We are adopted into Christ’s family by faith
It’s important to know that we belong somewhere. This theme of ‘belonging’ is brought out particularly well by Paul’s soteriological metaphor of ‘adoption’ (Gal. 4.5; Rom. 8.14, 23; 9.4). This image invites believers to imagine their conversion as a transition from belonging nowhere to belonging somewhere and being welcomed, valued and incorporated within a family. We need to appreciate both the legal aspects of this act of social reallocation and redesignation (such as a new legal name and the remission of debts) and also the emotional impact on the person who is adopted. What does this feel like?
Someone who was once an outsider becomes an insider, gaining a status and new identity. That person feels accepted, valued and potentially empowered. This is a powerful theological theme, which is deftly explored in an early essay by the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf (b. 1956) reflecting on the adoption of his own son and its impact on the birth mother.
These four metaphors all illuminate part of a greater picture of what Christians understand by salvation. What one observer might regard as a series of disconnected and incompatible ideas is seen by theologians as an integrated vision illuminated from multiple perspectives. Different perspectives may be important to different groups. For example, one particular perspective might engage a Jewish readership wondering whether Christianity is inconsistent with Judaism or brings it to fulfilment.
Why is theology so important in reflecting on salvation? Two points may be made in closing this section. First, Christian theology integrates and weaves together the New Testament’s complex witness by insisting that salvation is a rich, multifaceted and coherent reality. Each individual aspect is appreciated and acknowledged. It is, however, seen as part of a greater whole, which can only be grasped adequately using multiple windows of perception or described using multiple maps. And, second, growth in faith is about coming to identify, understand and appreciate each of these elements rather than being satisfied with the partial account of salvation offered by only one window or map. Theology thus gives depth to our understanding of the Christian faith.
Some people express concern that theology is insular and disengaged from the wider world of human knowledge and culture. In fact, wisdom is about making connections and theology is very much about dialogue. It’s true that many early Christian writers of the second and third centuries were suspicious of imperial Roman culture, which often saw Christianity as subversive. Today, forms of North American fundamentalism that fear contamination by the secular world often create countercultural communities. Yet there are other ways of inhabiting and engaging with the world.
Most Christians realize that having a robust theological foundation enables and encourages their active engagement with culture, particularly in the areas of literature, art, poetry, politics and ethics. We find this, for example, in writers such as George Herbert, C. S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson and Dorothy L. Sayers, all of whom frame and ground their literary vision theologically. Marilynne Robinson, for example, understands theology to be the ‘level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.’ What better context could there be for creative writing?
Yet for many, the most important relationship – and potentially the most problematic – concerns Christianity and the natural sciences. The rise of a scientific culture, some argue, is necessarily antagonistic to theology. Yet this is only one option among many. There are certainly points at which Christianity and science find themselves in conflict, particularly if either or both present themselves as complete accounts of reality that leave no space for the other. In the past decade, my own professional career has tended to home in on this intellectual and cultural relationship, focusing on scientists such as Albert Einstein, Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, who have very different takes on the relation of science to theology.
I believe that a theological perspective affirms the importance of the natural sciences, allowing us to perceive them as a means of enhancing our appreciation of this complex world, which Christians see as God’s creation. This perspective helps to explain both the success and the limits of science. Science is very good at showing how our universe works, but struggles to engage with questions of meaning and value in life.
Over the years, I’ve developed three main ways of framing the relationship of science to theology, and regularly explore their potential (and their limits) with scientists and theologians who want to bring together their disciplines in an intellectually robust manner. Each way has an imaginative depth and intellectual reach that cannot be conveyed adequately in this short account. None of them is original; in every case, I draw on existing ideas, even if at times I develop them in new ways.
The first approach is to regard science and theology as offering different perspectives or windows on a complex world (the analogy used by the philosopher Mary Midgley, mentioned earlier). The two perspectives allow us to see different aspects, but neither on its own can do justice to reality.
The second is to regard science and theology as engaging with questions about reality at different levels. In developing this approach, I often draw on insights in the form of ‘critical realism’ developed by the social philosopher Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). For Bhaskar, each intellectual discipline engages with reality in its own way and at its own level, which is determined by the nature of its object of study. As Bhaskar puts it, ontology determines epistemology. The nature of an object determines how we investigate it and how much we can know about it. There is no universal method that applies to everything so we have to find out how we can unify or integrate insights developed from different disciplines using their distinct methods.
The third approach also draws on Midgley, who argued that reality is so complicated that we need to use ‘multiple toolboxes’ to investigate it and ‘multiple maps’ to represent it. No single research tool or map is capable of engaging with or depicting reality in its totality; a range of research methods has to be used and their results coordinated somehow – for example, by superimposing different maps so that a richer vison of reality can be attained.
Why is it so important to find ways of framing and encouraging a dialogue between science and theology? Stephen J. Gould gives a good answer to this question in his capacity as a reflective scientist: it is because we ‘recognize the different light that each can shine upon a common quest for deeper understanding of our lives and surroundings in all their complexity and variety.’ While more could be said on this, Gould helps us to see how theology can help put together a deeper and wider vision of life. For me, theology demands intellectual and personal engagement across disciplines as a means to achieve wisdom, and offers both a motivation and a means to do this.
Wisdom, as we have seen, involves respecting complexity and resisting a simplifying reductionism. Yet it is also about coping with uncertainty in life. While we can prove shallow truths – such as ‘2 + 2 = 4’ – the dream of the Age of Reason to establish a set of universal moral and religious beliefs that could be proved to be true is no longer seen as viable. My Oxford colleague Graham Ward (b. 1955) remarked that the Age of Reason demanded that ‘we should aspire to knowledge “altogether clear and bright”’, characterized by certainty and transparency. Yet this intolerance of uncertainty is now behind us, as philosophy has finally caught up with the limits of human nature. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) observed, we have to learn to ‘live without certainty’ yet ‘without being paralysed by hesitation’.
A particularly influential TV series in the 1970s was Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, which was widely praised for its account of human cultural evolution. Bronowski (1908–74), a Polish mathematician who was regarded as one of the finest intellects of his age, insisted that the pursuit of human knowledge involves insight and interpretation, going beyond what can be shown to be right. He opened his presentation on ‘Knowledge or Certainty’ with these words: ‘One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to show that that aim is unattainable.’ For Bronowski, there is no ‘God’s-eye view’ of reality that allows us to answer all our questions definitively and finally: ‘Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’
So how do we cope with this situation in the life of faith? How can we live out an ‘unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty’? This, it has to be said, is a classic theme in both Christian theology and spirituality. Christians think of faith as a journey through an uncertain and puzzling world, trusting in the presence of a God, who accompanies us as we travel. Christian theologians have always been aware of the challenges arising from Paul’s declaration that we ‘we live by faith, not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5.7). To understand how theology might help us engage with this issue, let’s look at an approach developed by the American Presbyterian theologian John Mackay (1889–1983) during the 1940s while he served as President of Princeton Theological Seminary.
Like most preachers, Mackay was aware of how images can play a critical role in helping us to organize and coordinate ideas. Drawing on his experience of dwelling in Madrid in the early twentieth century, he developed the images of the ‘balcony’ and the ‘road’ as models for the Christian life. Mackay invites us to imagine a group of people who are standing on a balcony, high above a city street, and can see everything below them. They have a God’s-eye view of the world. They know where roads lead and what’s around the next corner. Yet the observers are onlookers, not travellers. They are detached and distant from what’s happening on the road below them. The ‘balconeers’ – to use Mackay’s term – who can overhear the travellers talking, try to work out what they are interested in or worried about. Yet their interest in these problems is purely theoretical; what’s going on down there has no relevance for them.
Those who are travelling on the road below, however, see things in a very different way. They are seeking wisdom to illuminate their situation as they travel and to help them become better people. They don’t have access to a God’s-eye view of the world, which would clarify what life is all about and what the future might hold. There are limits to their knowledge, arising from their location. They have to live with uncertainty.
Mackay’s image makes two important points. First, we have to learn to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty of being on the road rather than being granted privileged access to a God’s-eye view of the world. We can’t be absolutely sure which of our beliefs really matter, but that’s one of the reasons why faith plays a central role in Christian theology!
And, second, Mackay stresses that the community of faith exists on the road, learning and growing as it travels. We learn from one another and from the acquired wisdom of those who have gone before us. The Christian Church is a school of faith, imitating ancient Israel’s journey through the wilderness to the promised land, confronted with challenges yet sustained by hope.
We don’t learn from those who stand on a balcony, dispensing what passes for wisdom from on high without ever experiencing what life on the road is like. Rather, we learn from the pilgrim community of faith as we travel – the practical wisdom of Christian living that arises from experience and reflection. How do we cope with suffering? How do we relate to others who we find difficult? And how can we grow in our faith in an often puzzling world?
Mackay’s contribution to our growth in wisdom is that he offers a way of understanding how we can grow as we journey. And, as I know from many conversations over the years, people do find his framework of the balcony and road helpful. But others want more than this. They’re seeking specific guidance on coping with journeying through what so often seems like a dark and hostile world. Let’s turn to consider how a significant theologian engaged with this question and what we can learn from that.
Throughout this book, I’ve explored the idea of theology as disclosing an illuminating, energizing and transformative big picture. But what happens if our experience of the world seems chaotic, dark and resistant to interpretation?
Many have a sense today of simply being overwhelmed with information and unable to discern meaning and wisdom. In a sonnet from 1939, the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) reflected on the dark events taking place in Europe and the absence of transcendent narratives that might provide anxious American observers with insight and guidance at this time of crisis. It seemed impossible to make sense of things:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned,
uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
Millay’s concern was that she knew of no ‘loom’ that would allow her weave these ‘facts’ together so that a pattern of meaning could be seen. No pattern could be discerned or created. How could she live meaningfully in a world that seemed to be meaningless?
This question is important theologically and is often taken up by spiritual writers. For example, we might think of John of the Cross (1542–91) and the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. Another interesting exploration of the theme is found in the early writings of Martin Luther, who achieved fame, both as a theologian and a church leader, during the period of the European Reformation. He was the first major theologian I engaged with in detail as I tried to grasp the core themes of his thought and reflect on their wider significance, so he’s important to me personally.
One of Luther’s primary concerns was to establish a secure basis for the life of faith in the midst of a troubling and often violent world. For him, the only reliable foundation was the God who was made known in and through Jesus Christ. Luther expressed the point like this in his GreaterCatechism of 1529: ‘Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, is really your God.’ Here, we find identified a core belief and attitude, a relationship that defines how we see ourselves and our world. Where others may place wealth, status or possessions at the heart of their lives, Luther argues that personal identity and security are both grounded in and shaped by God, as revealed in Christ.
Yet Luther concedes that God often seems to be shrouded in darkness and mystery in the life of faith. On occasion, like Moses, we seem only to catch a glimpse of God passing in the shadows (Exod. 33.18–23). Luther reminds us that many aspects of the landscape of faith remain shrouded in darkness. How, then, might theology enable us to view this shadowy world?
Luther’s answer to this question is found in a series of terse declarations dating from an early period in his ministry at the University of Wittenberg, most notably ‘the cross alone is our theology’ and ‘the cross puts everything to the test’. What did he mean by this? For Luther, the cross of Christ is both the foundation and criterion of faith. While he shares the Christian consensus that the cross is the basis of human salvation, his particular concern here is its subjective impact on believers.
As the behaviour of the disciples makes clear, God was not experienced as being present at Calvary, yet subsequent events showed that God was present and active in a hidden way. As Luther points out, we failed to perceive this divine presence and action for several reasons, mainly because of our preconceptions about how and where God could act. We were looking in the wrong place. Who would have expected God to be present and active at Calvary, a horrifying place of enforced suffering and death, designed to deter anyone from resisting Roman authority?
This is the theological lens that stands at the centre of Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’. God is present to the trusting believer in darkness and despair, in loneliness and lowliness. In his early lectures on the psalter, Luther was particularly drawn to Psalm 18.11, which speaks of God dwelling in darkness, implying that God is hidden and lies beyond understanding. Luther continued to develop this theme, understanding faith as trusting in Christ even in the midst of a dark world. God dwells in darkness, but is really present to us and for us, despite our inability to penetrate that darkness. We can thus inhabit this darkness, trusting and knowing that God is present in its midst – whether at Sinai, or Calvary, or the ambiguities and enigmas of the life of faith.
Luther, it has to be said, is not entirely consistent in his presentation of the relation between faith and darkness, so we must be cautious about overinterpreting some of his statements. Yet even this brief account of his early theology indicates how it engages with the question of ambiguity and doubt and allows them to be seen in a different manner. Our experience of the absence of God in life may, Luther suggests, represent a misreading of the situation, as in the example of Calvary above, where God was present in a hidden manner. Faith enables us to enter darkness and hold on to the God who is present within. For Luther, this ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty is what wisdom is all about.