“almost the same moment he began to pray in this truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a torrent-spring from the fountains of the great deep—Was there—could there be a God at all? a real being who might actually hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses and shops and churches, amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and praising and backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to ends, while yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under laws most fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a hair’s-breadth,—was there—could there be a silent invisible God working his own will in it all? […] For now that Thomas had begun to doubt like an honest being, every ugly thing within him began to show itself” (George MacDonald, “Thomas Wingfold, Curate”).
In George MacDonald’s classic novel, Thomas Wingfold is a young, contented English Clergyman who has never seriously questioned his faith—until an educated modern man topples Wingfold’s faith like a house of cards. After a short conversation with the man, Wingfold discovers he has little grounds to put any confidence in what he had been calling his ‘belief’, and for half the book Wingfold’s crisis of faith consumes his thoughts. In the scene I’ve quoted above, Wingfold’s mind is burning, ravenous for any explanation or proof of God’s existence. He tries to pray, but his words fall flat. He tries to find solace in Scripture, and in his sermons, but the words seem to mock him more than console him.
Chapter eleven of this book is one of my favorites. It’s almost a completely introspective chapter on Thomas Wingfold’s agonizing doubts, as he wrestles with dread and despair after having his stained-glass faith shattered in front of him. It’s my favorite chapter because I can relate with Wingfold’s experience. Like every Christian in modernity, there comes a time when we can no longer put off wrestling with the messy details of Christianities bold claims.
We’ve heard it called, in the words of St. John of the Cross, “the dark night of the soul”, or “a crisis of faith”. What we mean is a sudden awareness that our Christian conviction does not match up with our experience—and as a result we find ourselves choking on an unsustainable belief. The crisis itself often emerges after something turns-up the top-soil of our faith and reveals that what we’ve called belief is actually a suspension of disbelief, a psychologically explainable mechanism we devised somewhere along the way to help us cope with an incongruent reality. Once that personal reality changes shape, the mechanism becomes insufficient to explain it.
You’ll hear this crisis spoken of among people who have left the Church, abandoned faith, or never adopted it for similar reasons. It makes us who are in the Church uncomfortable, especially people who have been grazed by the crisis in the past—like myself. If we’re honest, I think we’re scared of going near people who are in the middle of a crisis of faith—we look at them as if they have something contagious and incurable. It’s not out of hatred and a lack of love for the individual, but a fear of their condition. Without even trying we become like Job’s friends—joining in silence for a time, and then when the situation does not correct itself, we feel uncomfortable and rush to offer platitudes and explanations. In the end, we chide for persisting in willful unbelief and urge them to again suspend their disbelief in order to function as a member of the Church.
Subconscious Reality Filters
Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about doubts and faith-crises in a book about the Kingdom of God. I bring it up because I’ve seen this part of the internal life to be the fulcrum on which one’s life pivots between life in the Kingdom or life in the world—or more acutely, Spiritual life or death.
I believe this kind of crisis is unique to people in our time. Although doubt and disbelief are obviously not a new concept to human beings, there has never been a more thorough infrastructure to support willful disbelief than modern secularism; which I’ve described in detail in the first unit of this book. One of the greatest contributions to modern psychology is the concept of the subconscious—meaning the part of the mind we are not fully aware of, but which influences our feelings and actions. What’s most interesting about this part of the mind is how vulnerable it is to external influences. I’m not just talking subliminal messages in popcorn advertisements or hypnosis, I’m talking about the subtle influence of culture and environment on our minds. This influence becomes the filter through which we view reality, and therefore the standard with which we measure what is true and what is erroneous and not worth our time.
In the 1998 movie, “The Truman Show”, Jim Carrey plays an insurance salesman who discovers that his whole life is a reality TV show. In a chilling scene, the producer of the show makes a comment to an interviewer who asks him how Truman has never figured out that he’s the star of a reality TV show. The producer says coldly, “We accept the reality with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.”. Although we don’t live in a TV show, we in the West live in an environment which offers us endless variety, near endless opportunities, an abundance of distractions at our fingertips, and a general escape from pain and unpleasant experiences. For us in the west, this creates a subconscious model of reality which assumes these luxuries to be human rights. In many contemporary Christian conversations on this topic, you’ll hear this succinctly described as, “world-view”.
If you don’t believe you have a world-view informed by these western privileges, I urge you to read the book of Numbers, or Judges, or most any book of the Bible, and see if nothing in them offends your sensibilities. They certainly do mine! An epiphany occurred to me during a class I took in college surveying the Old Testament—the whole Bible, not limited to the Old Testament, of course, was written from the perspective of suffering.
Nearly every character I can think of in the Scriptures encountered a level of pain and grief which I pray I will never have to experience. It’s a book filled with refugees, widows, orphans, rape-victims, critically-ill, emotionally-scared, physically tortured, starved, and financially ruined; and those who had to witness these kinds of things. If I think I can relate to Daniel in the Bible, I’m fooling myself. I’ve never had to see my nation of birth get ransacked by a brutal and godless regime, let alone been demanded to recant my belief to save myself from being fed to ravenous animals. The question which should immediately pop into our heads is, “how could they have seen a world like that, and still believed in a good God”?
The answer must be that the way they saw reality and the way they saw God had a connection so robust, so sustainable, so durable, that no external circumstance could make the two seperate. Although I do believe there is merit, and tremendous benefit to separating oneself today from the subconscious influences of secular modernity, and that Christ actually does expect His followers to separate themselves starkly from the world, that is not the point I’m making here—although I hope to expand on this in a later chapter. The point here is for us to take a serious look at our belief and a serious look at our reality—meaning our environment, our connections, our experiences—and boldly mark where the two do not match up. To leave this task unfinished is to leave your faith a “nice idea”, but not a conscious reality.
Rational, Autonomous Beings
You are not an authority on reality. This is one of the most insidious and damaging lies behind modern thought—that you can have a clear view of truth through your innate rational faculties alone. It’s another tendril of secularism’s experiment to replace God, and in His place to set up human beings as rational, autonomous selves. In a podcast about this concept, Mark Sayers says,
“This is such a challenge to our contemporary western concepts of our own individuality. Because since the enlightenment we’ve built this concept of self that we are these rational beings, and we can just stop and disengage from the world and rationally think about everything. But really the anthropology that we understand as humans is that we are driven by desires, we are driven by emotions.”
When I first enrolled in college, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a marketing major. This seemed like a sincere and honest direction to me, until I began learning the nuts and bolts of how marketing works. I quickly learned the art of sealing the deal is by subtly manipulating the fears and desires in the minds of the viewer or reader in order to evoke an intended response—namely, punching in their debit card numbers. The worst part was, I quickly became aware of how my own psychology had been influenced by marketing majors—and although I was tempted to feel violated, I knew I had no right to, because I had allowed myself to be manipulated. It sounds funny, but my sense of reality was shaken by this new knowledge. How could I tell which of my convictions were genuine, and which were programmed into me by upbringing, society, advertisements, entertainment, etc. I was becoming aware of the fact that the reality I now knew I had experienced—being psychologically manipulated by marketers—did not match up with what culture had taught me to believe about myself—that I am a purely autonomous, rational being, capable of making choices independent of external influences.
Return to Reality
Okay, a lot has been said in this chapter, let’s recap what we’re talking about. Nearly every Christian in western modernity will or already has come to grips with the “dark night of the soul”. This crisis of faith comes when what we profess to believe does not match with the reality we are faced with and we go into a mental fit of shock. However, how do we define our reality? In the modern west much of our reality is defined for us, packaged and delivered conveniently and sanitarily. The rest is constructed by our own personal experiences with reality.
We build a model of reality in our minds, true or not, from the experiences we are presented with in a culture which promotes subversive philosophies to the way of Christ. Such philosophies push us to believe we are autonomous, that we are purely rational, that our preference carries authority, that we are ‘entitled to our own opinion’, and that promoting pleasure and escaping pain and discomfort is the greatest good for human beings, to name a few. What results is a custom-made, meticulously curated model of reality—that is not true—but allows us to fulfill the secular mandate to live a life of justified unbelief.
The consequence of this among professing Christians, who unconsciously buy into this model of reality, is that when something breaks our model, our vision of God also shatters. This is because we have unknowingly crammed our idea of God into that fragile model of reality. Although disbelief and accusing God is not a modern phenomenon—Job for example—it has become the societal norm through the unanimous acceptance of secularism. It creeps its way into our churches with the very notions which have us cowed into silence when a brother or sister is going through suffering, when there is grief, when there is pain—in short, whenever there is a reminder of the human condition under sin in this world that is gripped by the powers of darkness (Rom. 5:12; Eph. 2:2).
So where did we get off? When did we begin to fit God into our world instead of us fitting into His? Much insightful Christian literature has already been written about this topic by people far smarter than me, so I will not endeavour to go much farther into the history of the decline of Christian thought in the west. For those of you who want to pursue this topic in greater detail, I recommend the first few chapters of Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option”, Francis Chan’s “Letters to the Church”, and Francis A. Schaeffer’s “How Should We Then Live?”. To summarize the fallacy we’ve fallen into as modern Christians, Pastor Matt Whitman puts it succinctly well, “If your primary mental task in Christian faith is to take all that you already know to be true, and figure out how to make Jesus fit into it, it’s backward.”
Today, although we would all like to claim it isn’t the case, we have at large bought into this backward system. We take it at face value that when we see and experience the world we see and experience reality. Even as Christians today, we have little doubt in our minds that everyone is seeing the same thing. We have accepted that our rational faculty is the measure of reality, and is therefore absolute—thus it follows that the Word of God must yield to it. Our reliance on our own culture to interpret reality for us, and to validate our personal experiences within its model, is one of secularism’s most deadly tools. By it, a clear view of God and faith is self-defeating as we are encouraged to drop His true model of the world as soon as it grates with our own. We are lulled into trusting our own experiences as reliable data with which to accuse God—a crooked tool which has leant much to the debate over God’s goodness and His allowance of human suffering. The secularist mandate encourages society to “follow your heart”, and to take its fickle murmuring as authoritative truth.
The troubling thing about this method is that there is no way to discern whether or not our perception of reality is even reliable for discerning truth! Under this method we become like astronauts floating in space, trying to jump up to reach an object by pushing ourselves off another floating surface that is smaller and lighter than ourselves. We push the surface away and remain relatively fixed in the same spot, suspended in space, no closer to reaching the object. Our unaided vision of reality is so distorted by our wayward thoughts, motives, desires, and those of others, that we, on our own, have no right to make any meaningful judgement on anything in reality. The human mind is incapable of actually forming a model of reality because we are not capable of discerning truth for ourselves.
This has always been the view of orthodoxy. It was the view of the prophets, apostles, church fathers, and ultimately of Christ Himself. It may sound retroactive to support this line of thinking in today’s world, which has been shaped and run by the deification of human reason, but this is the view of Scripture. It’s crucial to realize that Scripture never refers to truth as something that can be grasped from observation of reality. This is a fundamental tenet on which modernity is built, and it is at fundamental odds with the view of Scripture. We are told by Scripture that mankind is born in darkness and incapable of seeing the truth (Jhn. 8:44–45, 14:17; Rom. 1:18; 2 Thes. 2:10–12; Tit. 1:14; 1 Jhn. 1:6), and that we need a savior to show us reality as it truly is (Jhn. 1:17; Rom. 9:1; Eph. 4:15; 1 Jhn. 5:6).
A grasp of truth, and consequently a right grasp of reality, can only be given by the creator and sustainer of truth. In the vein of Psalm 36:9, “For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light”, Thomas Aquinas writes this in his Summa Theologica on “Whether a Man can Know any Truth without Grace”,
Again, Augustine says (1 Soliloq. 6): “the most certain sciences are like things lit up by the sun so that they may be seen. But it is God who gives the light. Reason is in our minds as sight is in our eyes, and the eyes of the mind are the senses of the soul.” Now however pure it be, bodily sense cannot see any visible thing without the light of the sun. Hence however perfect be the human mind, it cannot by reasoning know any truth without the light of God, which belongs to the aid of grace.
While Aquinas would not deny the reason within the mind of Niche, by which he envisioned the inescapable void, Aquinas would question the illumination of that raw and frayed mind. According to a biblical view of the human being, reason is never a light source, but a light receiver. By the light of God, all the bleak imaginings of pagan civilization, all the cold theories of modern philosophy, and all the existential conclusions of popular culture can be measured. This “light” is not something achievable by human means. It is not something to be discovered or invented, it must be received from God. John tells us exactly what this looks like at the beginning of his gospel, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
In Christ we see an alternate model of reality. If the possible ranges of knowledge were placed on a three-tiered podium like at the olympics, with a first, second, and third place, Christ takes us out of first and puts us in second. Where before we were the ones who decided truth, now Christ steps in to reveal that we could never make that claim. As the only one who is “full of grace and truth”, He is the only one capable of revealing the truth and granting us a reliable view of reality.
Up until now we’ve talked about the problem of the world and the solution of the Kingdom at a distance. But here we begin to reach our Rubicon. Back in Chapter four I spoke about “Truth as a Way”, and how following Jesus is the only way to access truth. Hopefully now we see that this is not a decision anyone can make passively. Choosing to follow Christ is not just admitting a collection of doctrines into a corner of your mental library. You’re not downloading a program, you’re installing a completely new operating system. As we begin to know Christ, to love Him, and to obey Him, we will find our old models of reality dissolving around us like a dream into something more and more real.
With this growing knowledge of Christ, you might begin to experience some strange symptoms. You may find that things of the Kingdom which before looked like unendurable exercises will become as natural and pleasurable as breathing fresh mountain air. You’ll find threatening notions which once crippled your spiritual momentum will become just a crack in the road. You’ll find the fear which once dictated your life—and by which you once yielded to caesar that which was God’s—will become something unrecognizable, not shrinking but transforming into something that does not cripple but emboldens you to serve God. You will find yourself a citizen of heaven long before your heart stops beating—filled with a strength that is not your own as the life of the Kingdom of God carries you from glory to glory. You will find yourself thinking the thoughts of a people more ancient and informed than the greatest minds of modernity and secularism, in a nation which began at creation and will never die.
You will begin to know first hand what Christ meant when He said, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (Jhn. 8:31–32), and what Paul spoke when he said,
but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:16–18).
While these are things only really discoverable from experience in following Christ—and little I could write would provide this experience—I do believe a clear mental understanding of how we enter into the truth is essential. In the chapters that follow, we will take our next steps into the firestorm, fixing our eyes more and more on Christ. It may be difficult, it may burn, you might feel tempted to turn back and content yourself with just looking—but if you are truly hungry, if you are filled with holy desperation and discontent for the solutions of the world, Christ is your only answer. The Kingdom of God is more available than you might think.
The Paradoxical Kingdom