I’m an agnostic
Apologies at my slowness at getting back to the blogging board. It turns out that two and a half weeks of vacation make getting back into good habits a difficult endeavor. It’s not much help that my girlfriend is visiting this week, too. Not that I’m complaining.
While I get my head back on straight, enjoy this quote from the always-intriguing David Dark from an article in the latest issue of Relevant Magazine. And, once again, file it with that topic that I’ve talked about many times.
If we think we have faith, because we faithfully protect ourselves from anything that might call it into question — as if God is counting on us to keep ourselves stupid, closed off to the complexity of the world we’re in — I’d like to argue that we don’t have faith in God at all. We have faith in our own faith rather than the God who transcends it, faith in a faith that will somehow save us. Not faith in God, but faith in a false god of our own conceptions, a god too afraid to entertain a question or a doubt.
If we think certainty is what drives success and, in the end, the very faith (so-called) that saves us, our honest confusion will become a source of shame and a sign of weakness. We keep our honest doubts hidden. As I understand it, this is precisely where the biblical urges what I’m tempted to call a mandatory agnosticism. This is where we’re summoned to know that we don’t know. This is where we’re called to confession, not self-congratulation.
I like calling myself an agnostic about things. It’s become a loaded word, so I use it in defiance more often than not. But, despite my own rebellious tendencies, it’s a word we could all learn and use more often.
- July 16th, 2009 at 10:43 am
- Category: Faith
Preach it Josh. What do they call “knowing that you can’t know”? – that’s where I believe we are…embracing smallness.
It’s the American way to want more though and knowledge fits into that tenet of our belief system. The idea that we will ever know what God knows is ludicrous. Even in an afterlife with God, we will not see what He sees. That will drive the faithful crazy, but the truly content in God will have peace in it. My guess is St. Francis embraced the smallness immediately and that John MacArthur types will be really disappointed at first. : )
Comment by Tim — July 19, 2009 @ 7:21 amCertain aspects of orthodox Christianity are, by their nature, agnostic in some uses of the word…if you consider its opposite, gnosticism – which is inherently antithetical to Christianity.
In my philosophically uneducated opinion, there are some things we can know about God (via divine revelation, etc.), but some things we are incapable of knowing as participants in God’s creation, however higher up on the “food chain” we are as the imago dei. For instance, I’m of the Plantinga (maybe Aquinas?) camp that knowledge constitutes a certain type of internalized knowledge that is virtually unprovable to anyone outside of ourselves – but within our internalized mechanisms it would qualify as “correct” knowledge. That’s to say for us this “knowledge” of God’s existence/properties is sufficient enough for proper belief, i.e., we’re not “fooling ourselves” with respect to a belief in God but we are convinced enough to hold that belief fairly strongly.
Comment by Jay — July 20, 2009 @ 1:05 pmAnother thought on this…Dark might be walking on dangerous ground using “agnostic” this way, because an orthodox belief in the Christian God doesn’t really fit any of the 6 “denominations” of agnosticism. I mean, I understand what he’s saying and cautiously agree with him, but a religious studies student would look at him rather strangely.
Comment by Jay — July 20, 2009 @ 1:08 pmMan, I’m sorry.
Another thought on this. Dark might agree with some forms of “agnostic theism,” which is a type of agnosticism where the person believes in an xyz god does not have knowledge of it – which comes awfully close to fulfilling the silly “blind faith” argument that skeptics throw around. I can understand having a blind faith in a pre-belief sort of way because there could be a trust fulfillment prior to an intellectual/spiritual movement towards God, but I think a true faith in God constitutes that proper knowledge I mentioned in my first comment and doesn’t involve that kind of agnosticism.
Comment by Jay — July 20, 2009 @ 1:16 pm