Christians today hold the hope for recovery from bad faith, cheap grace, and shallow piety.
Two forces come together when Christians gather in an academic setting. One is the power of the things of the spirit, the other the power of the matters of the mind. Things of the spirit include faith in God, the grace of Jesus Christ, and piety—the desire to live a holy life. Matters of the mind are the facts, feelings, and actions that result from intelligent human behavior.
It is dangerous to separate those two. Charles Frankel, a humanist only interested in the matters of the mind, cites three problems facing higher education today: a “new irrationalism,” which substitutes subjective feelings for sound thinking; a “new egalitarianism,” which rebels against any differences in authority or achievement; and a “new individualism,” which demands personal freedom without social responsibility. When students do not want to think rationally, be graded objectively, or be responsible socially, higher education is in trouble.
Michael Novak, the columnist, has made a similar diagnosis of the things of the spirit. He observes that the current born-again movement encourages “bad faith, cheap grace, and shallow piety.” Bad faith means subjective Christian experience without the rigor of sound thinking and critical testing. Cheap grace indicates the easy acceptance of Christ’s forgiveness without the sense of tragedy in the redemption cost. And shallow piety denotes a small, self-centered devotion that does not address the larger issues of societal and institutional evil.
In the Christian university, we strive to avoid these pitfalls by melding the things of the spirit and the matters of the mind. We work for reasonable faith, realistic grace, and responsible piety.
Our first goal is a reasonable faith. Anyone who pits faith against reason fails to understand biblical truth. In a pithy book, Your Mind Matters, John Stott buries the idea that faith and reason are enemies. He says that he wanted to subtitle his book, “The Misery and Menace of Mindless Christianity.” Stott daringly calls the antiintellectualism cultivated by some Christian groups evil. He says, “To denigrate the mind is to undermine foundational Christian doctrines.” What are they?
Creation: God created us thinking beings.
Revelation: He communicated with us through language.
Redemption: He renews our mind and gives us the mind of Christ.
Judgment: He holds us responsible for the knowledge that we have.
Faith, then, is not what H.L. Mencken defined as “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” Nor is faith the attitude of the Christian who wrote, “Whenever I go to church, I feel like unscrewing my head and placing it under the seat, because in religious meetings I never have use for anything above my collar button.” That attitude is distressingly similar to the state of the TV addict.
To avoid that we must strive for examined, tested, and reasonable faith. Stott defines faith as “reasoning trust.” This means more than the power of positive thinking or possibility thinking. You don’t get out of bed every morning, stretch your arms, and repeat “I believe” three times. That has more in common with self-hypnosis than reasoning faith. You should ask “In what do I believe?” “In whom do I believe?”
Lloyd-Jones says that “little thinking” leads to “little faith.” For example, Jesus taught, “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?” (Matt. 6:30). You can almost hear Jesus pleading, “Think, man, think. Use your powers of observation. Look at the grass. See the birds. Watch the lilies. Apply the logic of deduction and you will believe in God.” In direct refutation of mindless faith, Jesus challenged us to examine our faith by the study of his creation and by the logic of our thoughts. He urges us to have reasonable faith.
Our second goal is realistic grace. Cheap grace merely poses as spiritual. Novak caustically refers to cheap grace as the “molasses of sentimental love.” He suspects the false gladness of being born again that has no sense of the pain of sin. Somehow, in cheap grace the meaning of Christian love gets snarled with the romance of “Loveboat,” where a forgiving kiss and a promise or two magically dispel sin.
Paul addresses this issue in his letter to the Romans. After an intricate legal argument in which sin and death are weighed in the balances against grace and life, Paul concludes: “Yet, though sin is shown to be wide and deep, Thank God his grace is wider and deeper still!” (Rom. 5:20, Phillips). The scales tip to the side of grace, but not without an understanding of the width and the depth of sin in human nature.
We cannot ignore the human condition. Augustine, for instance, probes the depth of his nature in his Confessions. He asks himself why he stole some pears when he was a boy.
What was it then that in my wretched folly
I love in you, O theft of mine, deed wrought
In that dark night when I was sixteen?
Once I gathered them, I threw them away,
Tasting only my own sin and savoring that with delight.…
O rottenness, O monstrousness of life and abyss of death!
Could you find it only in what was forbidden,
And only because it was forbidden?
No cheap grace attended Augustine’s conversion.
What do we find in Melville’s Moby Dick, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, or Camus’s Plague? Henry Zylstra says that these writers confront “the moral issues of man, not in the skeleton of theory or the bones of principles, but in the flesh and body of concrete experience.” Karl Menninger, in Whatever Became of Sin? writes “What shall we cry? Cry comfort, cry repentance, cry hope, because recognition of our part in the world’s transgression is the only remaining hope.” Even Charlie Brown knows this. When his teacher asked him to give a report in class, he stood up confidently and said, “My report is on Africa.” He pauses.
“Actually what I mean to say is that my report would have been on Africa if …” His voice drops. “Well, my intentions were …” Another pause. “It seems that I just never quite got around to it … well, you know how it goes sometimes … I just … I just never.…” He throws his hands into the air and bawls, “I THROW MYSELF ON THE MERCY OF THE COURT!” Charlie Brown stands ready to receive realistic grace.
Our third goal is responsible piety. Novak uses the phrase “shallow piety” to show that holiness can come in small and selfish packages. As with Frankel’s “New Individualism,” morality is private and responsibility is personal. Personal piety cannot remain self-contained once you study history. How well I remember a student who took her junior year abroad. As a part of the experience, she visited the concentration camp at Dachau. She saw the ovens, smelled death. The chiseled words on the thorny monument—“Never Again”—haunted her. “Before I visited Dachau,” she said, “I sat, unmoved. After Dachau, I must say, I watch, aware!”
Harry Blamires in The Christian Mind contends that if you think as a Christian, you will be a nuisance. Solzhenitsyn proved this when he spoke as a Christian thinker at the Harvard commencement last year. We did not want to hear him say that rational humanism, legalistic morality, and materialistic motives have robbed us of our spiritual life. We were incensed when he said that he could not recommend our society as a moral model for the transformation of Communist Russia.
Ronald Sider, author of Rich Christians in a Hungry World, has the same image in many Christian circles. He comes from a tradition where social conscience cannot be separated from personal righteousness. He shocks and irritates the shallow pious when he points out the evil of a social structure that permits us to be bloated with food while more than half the world is bloated with malnutrition. As Novak says, “A genuine revival may be distinguished from a false revival by how deeply faithful it is to the drive to ask questions. It is this drive that makes us restless with reality as it appears to us, and makes us examine everything for the reality beyond the illusion.” He adds that no greater tragedy could come to Christian higher education than to have our students attend class after class of sociology, economics, psychology, literature, philosophy, and the rest, and hardly become aware that we are dealing with the issues of life and death, good and evil, love and hate, growth and pain. Even then, we may sit unmoved.
Last year I watched with shock and guilt the week-long series, “Holocaust.” But I soon got over it. At dinner one night I asked an acquaintance, Arthur Kreisman, if he had watched the series. “I started to,” he said, “but I got sick. You see, I am a Jew and I was there.” He shamed my shallow piety by his deep experience with evil.
Dare I say that Christians today hold the hope for recovery from bad faith, cheap grace, and shallow piety? We must realize that faith and reason are not in conflict. We cannot escape the pursuit of the tragic questions behind “Roots” and “Holocaust.” We must recognize that Christians have a God-given responsibility for the world around them.
Elton Trueblood once wrote, “It is the vocation of the Christian in every generation to out think all opposition.” Paul also called it a battle of ideas. He wrote, “Our war is not fought with weapons of flesh, Yet they are strong enough, in God’s cause, to demolish fortresses. We demolish sophistries, and the arrogance that tries to resist the knowledge of God; Every thought is our prisoner, captured to be brought into obedience to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4, JB). In the things of the spirit, your mind does matter.
