Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10
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Having devoted several blogs to Bart’s opening salvo in the Campolo book, I now move on to Tony’s description of his own background and Christian conversion. Admittedly this will be a bit of an easier installment for me to write, because where I may demur from Tony here and there, it will be by only a little and not a lot.
Tony was raised in a strong Christian home, and doesn’t much remember a time when he was an unbeliever. Before getting into subsequent developments in his narrative, he makes a point of emphasizing that his faith today “remains grounded in personal experience” that began as a kid. “I’m still a fairly good Christian apologist, but at the end of the day, I have to admit that the primary foundation of my faith is not what I know, but rather what I feel. As Blaise Pascal once observed, ‘The heart has reasons that reason will never know.’”
I think I understand the import of what he’s getting at here, but admit to a bit of ambivalence over the way he puts it. He seems to press the parallel between knowledge and reason, on the one hand, and between the heart and feelings, on the other, whereas I’m inclined to think the picture of how things actually go doesn’t lend itself to quite so neat a demarcation. I suspect knowledge involves both the head and heart, as it were, and certain deep experiences, which may (or may not) involve our emotions, can fall within the category of rationality broadly construed. William Wainwright and William James (and ever so many others, including Pascal) have pointed to a phenomenon like passional reason—an integrated amalgam of reason and emotion, of experience and rationality. In my work in moral apologetics, owing to the ineliminably experiential aspect of morality, there’s an almost constant blending of cognitive and affective dimensions.
I don’t mean, though, to belabor what is perhaps more of a semantic concern than anything else in this case, but I retain at least a bit of worry that it might be or become more than that—if not in Tony’s case, surely in others whose operative understanding of reason leaves no room for affective, relational, aesthetic, moral, or interpersonal factors, or who associate feelings with nothing but unreliable, non-veridical emotions. My view is, truth be told, probably not too distant from Tony’s, but I might have tried avoiding a misunderstanding here by not referring merely to feelings, but to, say, “heartfelt and well-evidenced beliefs of deep ingression.” But then again, that’s just dang wordy. (Much of what he has to say, incidentally, likely also comports with a Reformed epistemology paradigm.)
Time and again Tony is reticent to move the discussion into apologetic territory. I don’t presume to know exactly why, but I suspect his heart generally seems to be in the eminently right place. He wants to keep the discussion warmly personal and relational and not allow it become a merely intellectual exercise to try winning an argument. But of course this is just where predicating apologetics on a model of passional reason and an expansive rationality can avoid its becoming what Tony wants to avoid.
One more word about this passage. In the context of discussing how the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are his disciples, Tony writes that by “the grace of God I have been given the gift of faith.” Surely our capacity for faith is a gift, a provision made possible by God’s grace, but as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s unfortunate to take from this important truth anything like the notion that those with faith have been given the gift and those without it have not. Gifts presumably can be rejected. Of course here my theology is a distinct departure from Calvinism, but it’s an interpretation that I think bears up best under critical scrutiny and exegetical analysis, and avoids the utterly unpalatable implications otherwise (an issue we have discussed and to which we will return).
It was during high school that faith came alive for Tony even more. In through this part of his story he shares a touching account of his ongoing and growing relationship with God. Then he wonders how folks like Bart, who no longer believe in God, are able to handle their guilt. As a social scientist, Tony is aware of how, say, Freud thought guilt, after suppression, emerges from the subconscious in the form of phobias and neurotic behavior. But for Tony the Christian faith offers a much more effective solution to guilt via God’s grace and forgiveness.
When I discuss the performative variant of the moral argument, I have taken in recent years to do more than address what John Hare calls the “moral gap” between the best we can do and what we are called to do—by morality or God. I back up and first discuss our need for forgiveness, then for moral change, and finally for moral perfection, and then emphasize how Christian salvation provides for all three: justification for our forgiveness, sanctification for our moral transformation, and glorification for our moral perfection. This is one of those junctures where moral apologetics, it seems to me, lends itself impeccably well not just to an argument for theism per se, but Christianity in particular. So I resonate with Tony here quite a bit in this strong emphasis on divine grace at every step of our journey.
Then he shares how his vision of what his Christian vocation was to be expanded in the ensuing years, as he became increasingly cognizant of his call to fight for social justice, “changing the world from what it is into what Jesus called the Kingdom of God.” Although I admit to finding such language a bit grandiose, I don’t want to be dogmatic in eschewing it too quickly. Surely we are called to pray for God’s will to be done in this world, and for his kingdom to come. And we are indeed called, all of us, to fight injustices, feed the hungry, and promote love. Too often evangelicals, at least as popularly conceived, can fall into the trap of holding too small a view of what salvation looks like in this world. If we neglect the least of these, we are neglecting Jesus himself. It’s an important reminder that there is some special sense in which God identifies with the poor and needy, oppressed and marginalized.
Still, a danger of overly politicizing this looms, if we assume the means by which these tasks are done are centrally political. Surely on occasion this is true—Wilberforce’s lifetime political mission is a marvelous example. Still, politically liberal professing Christian believers can fall into the trap of lionizing the Democratic party every bit as much as certain conservative Christians can do so with the Republicans, and this is no small worry where Tony is concerned.
With what realistic expectations can we expect to see a “reconstructed society” here in this world? Surely strides can be made; the evangelical view of sin arguably brought slavery to its knees, for example. Christian convictions and principles functioned at the foundation of the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, and a whole range of social improvements. Paul Copan has done a nice job in years past chronicling such historical twists on the moral argument. But the idea that we can expect to see God’s kingdom ushered into this world prior to the eschaton—save for within the church itself—strikes me as a bit naïve. The temptation to assign a kind of primacy to political solutions has been a temptation of the church since her inception.
So after admitting that he had come to see his faith as a call to be involved in a revolutionary movement that can transform the world into the kind of society God wants it to be, Tony anticipates my sort of objection by denying he is motivated by anything like utopian idealism. He admits his ultimate hope resides beyond the grave and not here and now. And sure enough, Tony’s always been an interesting figure in this way by conjoining his liberal political proclivities with orthodox theology—at least until his change of mind on homosexuality, previously discussed.
Tony’s chapter touches briefly on a few more interesting issues, but since they will come up again later, I’ll defer discussing them until then. One last point for now: Tony notes the way Bart’s inspired by certain of life’s realities, what Maslow might call “peak experiences.” Then he adds this: “It just might be that what Bart has really rejected is not God, but rather the way so many of us Christians usually talk about God.”
Tony has a point here, although he’s tempted, I think, to overly press it and let Bart off the hook too quickly. It wasn’t just the way others talked about God that might have contributed to Bart’s departure; I’ve argued that some of his own bad theology mistakenly made him think that he had to depart from the faith. But the larger point for now is even more important: not every ostensible rejection of God and Christianity is likely a pure rejection of the true gospel of Christ. I suspect, as Tony intimates, that on occasion and perhaps not infrequently what is getting rejected is something of a garbled version of the truth, a twisted conception of Christianity, a warped view of God.
Of course we are not the judge; it’s a bit beyond our pay grade, but this is, I think, a good reminder for us to bear in mind: the importance not to presume to know more than we do as we observe the spiritual pilgrimage, stumbles, and struggles of others. This is why coming alongside of them and listening carefully and attentively to what they have to say can often prove more than a little illuminating.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.
