Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship

I have read a lot of Christian books about the end of modernism and the beginning (or imminent demise) of postmodernism, mourning the losses and probing the resources that this shift means for the Christian. There's a startling consensus among many: that we won't miss modernism too much but that postmodernism is fraught with both opportunity and danger. And this quest has led me through thickets of nasty prose, clunky terms, and allusions to theorists I've never heard of before and want to forget as soon as I do. Lesslie Newbigin's book is fourteen years old at the time of this writing, but it is easily the best primer on Christian epistemology I have ever read. It's short. It's clear. It treats each great intellectual movement with respect, pointing out its strengths. It's informed by a pastoral (or, as he says, missionary) heart. I had encountered most of these ideas elsewhere, but this book pulls them all together and articulates that consensus I mentioned earlier--I cannot think of one thing I'd heard elsewhere and wish he'd said. Pastors, college or grad students, professors, avid readers--this is the main book you need on how the Bible and the Gospel intersect with today's intellectual culture. The last chapter is the best. Newbigin shows how the flaws in the broader culture have insinuated their way into Christian movements. He defines his stance (which I think is perhaps the only legitimate one for a Christian in response to the postmodern critique of modernism) against Catholic natural theology, Protestant fundamentalism, and liberal theology. Acknowledging the gifts each bring to the Christian community, he nevertheless points out how each has crippled itself by compromise with merely human elements. In the end, things are simpler than they seem. God calls us to discipleship. We know anything of importance, really, because we have heard His voice talking to us.

Newbigin's little text from the final years of his life is a brilliant analysis of the history of religious epistemology. He critiques the spectres of Enlightenment rationalism that still dominates theological discussions today and offers an alternative form of knowing that withstands the scepticism of postmodernity. He opens with a clever look at the worldviews of the ancient world. The certainty founded in the logos of Greek philosophy and that in the Israelite anthropomorphic God were suddenly challenged by the ultimate reality that was knowable in Jesus Christ. This led to Augustine's affirmation that he believed in order to know, an affirmation which Newbigin is essentially trying to resurrect. Chapter 2 explores the Thomistic synthesis, in which natural theology and the proofs of God create a cleavage between truths demonstrable by reason and truths known only through faith. This, Newbigin says, was a mistake, because it implies that more sure grounds than the biblical narrative should be sought in the communication of the faith. This in turn led to the rationalist of Descartes which, he says, erodes inevitably into nihilism, because no knowledge can claim the kind of certainty that Descartes insisted was essential. Chapter 4, the philosophical center of the book and foundation for Newbigin's epistemology, is an analysis of Michael Polanyi's writings. Polanyi argues that knowledge is "personal," that it is never objective and removed from the subject which claims it. Later in the book Newbigin will cite a helpful analogy from William James, that knowledge is like hanging on a breaking branch on the side of a cliff and deciding whether or not to leap to another branch. Knowledge involves personal commitment and risk. The conclusion, then, is that biblical faith can not be defended through the wrong-headed doctrine of verbal inspiration, which rests on the foundation of Cartesian objectivism. Nor is it subject to the historical-critical challenge of liberalism, which, he says (with little explanation), is just a faith commitment of another kind. Instead, we believe in order to know, and faith in the person of Jesus is that hanging onto a branch which validates itself by holding us up. The book is beautifully written, taut, and profound. If this is your first reading of Newbigin, you're bound to read more. I'm not altogether convinced that he has worked out a kind of religious knowing that is not just blind faith, though he says it is not. At some point, he would have to explain why a satisfying illusion is not equally as plausible as Christianity, or why Christianity isn't one. But truly a great read for all modern thinkers and church leaders. James W. Miller is the author of God Scent

I spent this morning with two of life's great pleasures, a great cup of coffee and a really good book. The coffee was Kenyan Kiaguthu Peaberry roasted to the City+ level. Mmmm. The book is called Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin. If you knew me, you would've heard me talk about Michael Polanyi, the 20th century scientist and philosopher whose work was the subject of my Master's thesis. Newbigin's book is a great quick reference for the application of Polanyi's thought to the Christian life, and I highly recommend it. It's only 105 pages and is written in a very accessible style. I read the whole thing this morning. If you're curious about how Christian thought fits (or doesn't fit, as Newbigin shows) into classical, modern, or post-modern ideas about knowledge, you should read this book. If you're one of those young evangelicals that is disenchanted with the hyper-rationalistic hyper-individualistic concepts of Christianity, you should read this book. If you want to figure out whether truth is objective or subjective, you should read this book. If you want to know what is really wrong with "fundamentalist" Christianity or with "liberal" Christianity (perhaps surprisingly, it's something they have in common), you should read this book. A few weeks back, my friend Jon (who also introduced me to home roasted coffee) wrote an interesting piece for his blog about a recent trend among young evangelicals in which many are departing to more liturgical versions of Church, especially various Eastern forms (by the way, I think the Emergent Church is sort of a wimpy American-consumer version of the same trend). It's all a sort of pre-modern postmodernism. If we all read Polanyi (or Newbigin's short version of Polanyi), this trend would evaporate. Newbigin shows here that Christianity simply cannot just append itself to other plausibility structures, but is itself a plausibility structure which claims a place of judgment over the others. We do not make Christianity acceptable by fitting it into modern epistemological systems. This is because Christianity is not just a set of propositional beliefs, but a comprehensive personal reality (Christ), embodied in the life and message of the Church.

I believe Lesslie Newbigin is a great saint of the Church. His book, "Proper Confidence," is an invigorating defense of the synthesis of faith, reason and discipleship. He reclaims theology for the Church. What I found especially refreshing was his head-on challenge to the Enlightenment-rationalist boxes that modern scholars have constructed to contain Christianity. Newbigin confirms what I have long suspected from my Biblical studies classes at seminary; that instructors rule out certain possibilities that do not fit in with the paradigms that press down upon most seminaries like a totalitarian dictatorship. Since it is not "rational" to believe in supernatural events, the possibility that Scripture has been divinely inspired as it appears is ruled out. The funny thing is, the professors have no more evidence for their theories than I do for a claim that the Holy Spirit is responsible for the similarities between various Gospels. Instead, the professors literally must *invent* a common source (that no one has ever found) in order to shoe-horn the Bible into an Enlightenment framework. Thus, instead of the academy serving the Church and God (which is really what a seminary should be doing), God's Word is made to serve the biases of the academy. Instructors who formally profess belief in the Trinity fall at the feet of the "historical-critical method" of Biblical interpretation. That is, I believe, tragically misguided. Lesslie Newbigin's book gives faithful people the intellectual skills to finally fight back and hopefully reclaim academic theology for the Church.