Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

Continuing our perusal of Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism,” we left off discussing Bart’s secular chaplaincy at USC, geared toward those who hunger for a secular spirituality. The fact that Sam Harris a few years ago wrote a book on spirituality is testament to the reality of this movement among certain secularists. As Bart puts it, “If you want to fully actualize your noblest values, you’ve got to find like-minded people and band together. Nobody becomes or remains good in isolation. We have to help one another grow.”

Much of this seems to be a recognition of our communal nature as human beings, something that fellowship with like-minded believers and various shared habits and rituals can help facilitate and fulfill. Christians often speak of various “means of grace,” regular fellowship among them, as means by which to appropriate God’s grace for encouragement, support, direction, and the like. Undoubtedly there is a sociological component to this that can be isolated and pursued apart from explicit references to divine activity, and this seems to be the space that one like Bart has carved out for himself. Of course, such possibilities underdetermine whether relegating the divine element to obscurity or irrelevance is correct.

In fact, it’s likely predictable that some would look at church activities and religious practice and come to think that the sociological dimension is really the only actual dynamic in operation. Of course Christians shouldn’t succumb to this temptation, and rather they should bear in mind that the horizontal relationships, though vital, are not the only or even the most important relationships at play. To treat God as eliminable from the equation might seem to Bart a relatively small change, but potentially it’s quite a spectacular missing of the point. Investing our hopes in human relationships to fill the vacuum in our hearts that only God can fill is a pipedream. That said, though, to emphasize the relationship with God to such an extent that we neglect the relationships with our neighbors, is to misunderstand some of the import of our religious faith.

Bart doesn’t pursue a negative approach in his secular ministry. Rather, he writes that, first, “you have to teach your friends to love one another, and then you have to teach them how to attract and include outsiders by loving them as well. That’s why my new ideal ministry is practically identical to my old one, except that these days I rely on reason, science, and common sense to convince people that love is the most excellent way.”

Reason, science, and common sense. Perhaps this is a useful juncture to pause and subject this claim to a bit of critical scrutiny. The implicit suggestion here seems to be that reason, science, and common sense can be enlisted to the cause of an atheistic worldview and even of assigning primacy to love, and that somehow these sources, divorced from theism, provide enough resources for the job. I have my doubts about that.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

The notion that reason and religious faith are at odds is of course practically a mantra among many of the deconverted, but as a Christian philosopher I find such claims, either explicit or tacit, to strain my credulity. Time and again in this book both Tony and Bart say their dialogue is not going to be yet one more debate about the evidential merits of theism or atheism. In an earlier post we discussed their allergy to wade into those waters too deeply. Yet the result of this mutual dialectical choice seems to confer permission to advance large assertions without evidence. So it’s unsurprising that Bart seems to subscribe to the notion that reason is on the side of unbelief. The occasional times when Bart does at least gesture toward arguments in favor of naturalism or against theism, he invokes names like Dawkins and Harris, which do little to instill confidence that he’s considered the best thinkers on the topic. As for my own views, I think the case for theism generally and Christianity particularly can be made on several strong evidential grounds—from historical to scientific to philosophical.

I suppose that someone could suggest that all that Bart is advancing here is that his argument for the primacy of love is confined to resources garnered from science, reason, and common sense—and not that this triad collectively points evidentially toward atheism rather than theism. But even so, this less ambitious agenda would raise a serious question of whether science, reason, and common sense would be enough to bolster an assignment of primacy to love.

If love is understood in substantive fashion, involving essentially a deep regard for the well-being of others, even if on occasion such regard entails self-sacrificial behaviors, is this sort of phenomenon somehow a deliverance of science, reason, or common sense, either individually or severally? Science largely seems to be an effort at describing the physical facts of the world. Reason and rationality can mean a variety of things, but it’s unclear why it would entail the superiority of a life of sacrificial love. Superior in what sense? Reproductive advantage, peace of mind, flourishing? Does science confer on one of these anything like normative priority? Are there not times when sacrificial love would militate against such things? And what of common sense? Is it common sensical to sacrifice, if need be, one’s own interests for the sake of others? That would quite a hard sell to one not already convinced that love is the better alternative.

In all three cases, although I am not suggesting that science, reason, or common sense necessarily rule out the central importance or value of a life of self-giving love, I rather doubt they comprise the primordial source of such importance or value. And in fact, elsewhere in the book Bart concedes that on his worldview he’s no longer warranted to believe in objective values of any sort, so one is left wondering how deep his commitment to a life of love can really be.

It’s of course eminently possible that he’s better than his worldview—I suspect he is—but for him somehow to think that his commitment to a life of love is a function of his emaciated worldview strikes me as a mistake. Bart is an atheist who values love, but that doesn’t mean that atheism can make much sense of doing so, or of love as an objective value, much less anything like a best explanation of why, normatively speaking, we ought to pursue such a life. Bart seems content to speak of love as the most excellent way, in some sense, but pretty clearly not in anything like a metaphysical sense; perhaps he’s simply after emphasizing the instrumental value of such a lifestyle. Surely he’s not wrong to see some of that value, but once more this seems to show that he seems more at home in the realm of social science than anything like philosophy, which pushes us to ask about the ontological foundations and metaphysical reality of something like sacrificial love and genuine altruism.

A Christian perspective, in contrast, explains how something like love really can and does function at the foundation of reality. It’s not merely instrumentally valuable, but intrinsically so, and evidentially significant in pointing us to the right understanding of reality and the human condition. But so long as Bart remains averse to following where the evidence of the most excellent way might lead, it would seem he will remain content with merely preaching to the choir of secularists whose preference (laudably enough) is to gravitate toward pro-social attitudes, but without implying that those whose preferences are quite different are in any sense deeply mistaken.

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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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

We have now arrived at Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism.” There’s quite a bit of material to unpack, engage, and be engaged by in this chapter, so let’s see how this goes. It may take three or four blogs to encapsulate my salient responses and reflections.

He begins by talking about the time, after losing his faith, during which he ran into plenty of other post-Christians who had left behind the “friendly confines” of their former orthodoxy. Just a small point about this: when I was in graduate school at a state university, religious convictions hardly always conduced to a friendly environment. I rather felt like my faith was under fire every day from certain zealous secular professors who took every opportunity to impugn the intelligence of religious believers and from certain fellow graduate students who relished emulating those professors.

I was studying philosophy, a field in which quite a bit of intellectual jousting takes place all the time, and learning the tools to engage unfriendly audiences with discussions about faith and its alleged irrationality took place in a rather hostile environment. It could sometimes be profoundly uncomfortable. In fact, I know several folks who kept their religious convictions under their hat to avoid finding themselves in the cross hairs of outspoken secularists, and others who abandoned faith altogether in the hotbed of graduate philosophy programs.

I make mention of all this just as a small observation. It may well be that atheists in the larger culture do have to endure challenges to be seen as normal and healthy, but there are also plenty of enclaves in which secularism enables people to feel like they fit in far more comfortably than they would if they espoused sincere religious conviction, whatever “friendly confines” the latter may have felt on Sunday mornings.

What many of these post-Christians told Bart they missed the most were the social dimensions of their religious experience—the music, the hymn sings, the potluck dinners, and the like. They encouraged Bart, knowing his background, to organize a church for people like them, “who want to be good and don’t believe in God.”

Bart endeavors to distance himself from angry, confrontational secularists and atheists, claiming no animus toward faith or people of faith. Indeed he writes, “I think Christianity has been one of the greatest community-building forces in human history.” So he claims it’s not his goal to trash the church, but rather to learn from it and offer a new and improved version of it, without the theological baggage, for people who genuinely want to be, again, good without God.

Not coincidentally, Greg Epstein’s Good without God was one of the most encouraging books Bart read through this time. Some months ago there was a bit of a dustup around Epstein when he, a secular humanist, was chosen to be the President of the Harvard chaplains. Christian chaplain Pete Williamson wrote a piece for Christianity Today defending his vote for Epstein and why it may not be as scandalous as many seemed to think when they heard it.

At any rate, Bart gives Greg’s book credit for introducing him to the logic and language of secular humanism, as well as opening his eyes to the possibility of engaging in the same vocation as a secular chaplain. After reading his book, Bart visited Greg to see his work firsthand and found students discussing cognitive science, vegetarianism, TED talks, racial politics, an upcoming LGBTQ solidarity march, and coming out to family. And in Greg Bart found a kindred spirit.

So Bart then reached out to USC to see what they thought of his idea of building missional communities for people who don’t believe in God, and they were open to the idea. Part of the reason for their openness was their definition of religion not in terms of specific belief systems, but rather as the quest to answer life’s ultimate questions. “What is the nature of the universe? Where do we come from and what happens when we die? What defines good and evil? How can we make the most of our lives?”

Allow me to say a word about this, and draw this entry to a close, saving the rest of this chapter for later. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga writes this concerning naturalism (which entails atheism):

Naturalism is what we could call a worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world. It isn’t clearly a religion: the term “religion” is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion.

I’m inclined to agree with Plantinga here, which is why something like a “secular chaplain” makes more than a little sense to me. At the least I don’t think we can have it both ways and insist both that atheism is a religion and that secular chaplains make no sense.

So Bart came aboard at USC as a secular chaplain, though he would have to raise his own funds, and started his new career, addressing the communal needs of USC’s rapidly growing secular population. Practically speaking, he does much of what he used to do when he was a Christian minister, and much of what other university chaplains do—showing up at campus events, speaking in classes and dorms, hosting community gatherings, and encouraging and supporting students’ and professors’ “spiritual growth.” If that seems a bit odd, tune in next time for more.

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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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 12

Now we arrive at a chapter by Tony named “You Reap What You Sow: How I See Bart’s Deconversion.” In this chapter Tony talks about the way a series of decisions by Bart contributed to his deconversion. This is of some comfort to Tony, who periodically feels guilty for Bart’s decision, but then Tony remembers that Bart’s decisions are his own. Tony’s reflections also serve as a partial response to Bart’s own depiction of his deconversion we just got done discussing.

Bart chalks up his deconversion to God’s failure to show up and make himself known. Tony disagrees, invoking the notion of Peter Berger’s “plausibility structures” to remind us that what we do and don’t believe are often highly dependent on what is affirmed to be reasonable by those most important to us. When the dominant culture goes contrary to a set of beliefs, maintaining a countercultural support group is vitally important to sustain those convictions.

Tony gives church camp as an example of how plausibility structures work, which is a good example for me. I grew up attending camp meetings, and to this day I testify to their power in shaping my convictions in deep ways. My wife and I, partially to pay homage to my deep debt to church camps, wrote a book about the history of a camp meeting in Michigan.

As a sociologist, Tony is not averse to adducing such examples as an example of “social construction.” As a philosopher rather critical of, say, a constructivist meta-ethic, I’d be less inclined than he to use such language. But he’s surely right about certain sociological dimensions that are relevant to sustaining beliefs. Even Tony admits that plausibility structures provide only the conditions wherein a particular belief system becomes and remains viable. And as Charles Taylor explains, ours is now a secular age in which particular traditional religious convictions can no longer be assumed the default.

Tony points to an array of Christian convictions and how exotic, foolish, and unintuitive they may seem to the modern mind. Here I think he may overreach a bit by talking about how Christians from the start have “celebrated” the fact that their views don’t align with modern science. Having been rereading Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies, I find Tony’s language here more than a little unfortunate. Plantinga argues quite convincingly that the conflict between Christianity and science is superficial, but the concord deep (and just the opposite for naturalism). The conflict comes up between faith and the naturalistically inspired theological or metaphysical add-ons to science that are not a proper part of science.

Admittedly Christian revelation goes beyond reason, but it never goes contrary to it. These distinctions matter quite a bit.

Regarding Bart’s decisions that served to undermine his faith, Tony adduces several examples. When Bart stopped participating in a local congregation on a regular basis, Tony grew concerned. When Bart eventually began asserting that some people are unable to be saved or transformed in any meaningful way, Tony became even more alarmed. Here Tony poignantly quotes a Russian existentialist philosopher who said that when someone stops believing in the capacity to grow and change and engage in noble and worthwhile pursuits, that individual eventually loses faith in God as well. To lose sight of the divine presence in even the lowliest person is the beginning of atheism. And the reverse is true as well: to lose faith in God is to lose faith in people. This is why, Tony notes, the Great Commandment is so closely tied to loving our neighbor.

Bart’s inner city ministry had to mightily wear on him, but I think Tony’s all the righter that without a strong inner spiritual bulwark fortressed by community Bart’s loss of faith eventually was no big surprise. And the point is just as spiritual as sociological. Christian fellowship and community are a means of grace, and without them spiritual starvation is inevitable.

When Bart’s preaching changed to no longer include the power of God to forgive and change, that was another huge warning sign. Tony knows firsthand how his own preaching can help sustain his own convictions. This dialectic relationship between our words and actions is “praxis,” and a powerful force in our life of faith.

Near the end, Tony’s chapter becomes especially interesting. He sums up his analysis by saying that who and what we become is ultimately the result of a long series of decisions that we make for ourselves. “I think I am a Christian not only because God has chosen to love and save me but also because I have freely chosen to trust His Word and do His will…. I affirm our dignity as those who freely make the most important decisions that determine our nature and destiny.”

I wholly agree, though I’ve noted some hyper-Reformed proclivities in Tony’s words before. So what does he mean by “freely” here? Compatibilist freedom? Such that we make the “choice” but we couldn’t have done otherwise, but, owing to God’s grace, we are doing what we want to do? If so, I think the latter may well be something of a necessary condition for freedom, but not a sufficient one. Or maybe Tony means libertarian freedom—still requiring God’s grace, but with the ability to turn down God’s gift?

Tony seems convinced that whatever his operative conception of freedom is, it’s enough to hold Bart responsible for taking the steps he did that led to his move away from God. He says to do otherwise is to disrespect Bart’s independence as an adult or deny his dignity as a human being.

Tony keeps praying for Bart, of course, but then adds something simply fascinating in the last paragraph.

Secular as he is these days, his exegesis of Ephesians 2 is still right on the money. However we take care of it, our ability to believe—and therefore our ability to believe again—is always a gift from God. Therefore, rather than praying for Bart to soften his heart or change his mind or reopen his Bible or go back to church, I pray instead that the Holy Spirit will somehow dramatically overwhelm him the way Saul was overwhelmed on the road to Damascus, restoring his ability to look beyond the wisdom of the wise and see that the foolishness of God is ever so much wiser.

Although I agree we should certainly pray that God would do such things with unbelieving loved ones, Tony’s claim that Bart has a right understanding of Ephesians 2 is stunning to me. We discussed at length in our last installment why Bart was quite wrong on Ephesians 2. Does Bart have the ability to say no to God’s overtures of love or not? Tony just got done affirming he did, and then, like Bart, laid it at God’s feet! What was the point of the chapter, then?

Tony’s lack of nuance and careful distinctions here is deeply disappointing. Either he should have said more to avoid patent inconsistency, or he really did just make clear that his theology is problematically Reformed and the only conception of freedom he believes in after all is compatibilist. To say there is a tension, though, between that last paragraph and what came before is an understatement. There appears to be simply plain contradiction.

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

The next installment in the Campolo father/son book is Bart’s chapter called “Can’t, Not Won’t: Losing Faith is Not a Choice.” Bart begins by saying that he encourages the newly de-converted, when sharing their story with friends and family, to begin by listing all the cherished values they learned in church, all the teachings of Jesus they love most dearly, and all the commitments to social justice and community building they still share. Only then talk about why they can no longer believe.

Rhetorically this is perhaps most helpful, but I do find myself wondering about a potential equivocation. In Bart’s case, anyway, he has abandoned moral realism. He no longer thinks there’s adequate foundation for believing in objective moral truths. So it remains unclear what’s meant by his “cherished values” unless he’s just presupposing a deep fact/value divide, but in which case, how stable is his professed love for such “values”? It largely seems as if he’s admitting that his worldview lacks foundations for such values, but because he remains personally committed to them, he takes them seriously still.

However, he could have easily gone in another direction, it would seem, as some atheists do. I’m not suggesting that all or most atheists do so, but the question of ontological foundations for our cherished convictions seems eliminable only at great peril. Why remain committed to such values when, say, doing so becomes costly—if one genuinely thinks they are not objectively true, prescriptively binding, or anything of the kind? It makes one’s value commitments a purely subjective and personal preference that, in principle, could vary from one day to the next.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

Bart admits that early on, when he shared his de-conversion with others, he would get into the various reasons why he had grown skeptical of Christianity, which had the effect of putting believers on the defensive. He says he didn’t actually want to spoil anyone else’s faith, but it seemed that way when he took that approach. So eventually he says he learned to cut to the chase and claim something like this: “For reasons beyond my control, I simply stopped believing in God. The rest are just details.” In his case, “all that really matters is that over many years my ability to believe in any kind of supernatural reality gradually faded away, until I finally became convinced that the natural universe—matter, energy, and time—is all that exists.”

Bart claims he couldn’t retain his faith, and means to be taken seriously. “I didn’t choose not to believe in God; I just stopped believing.” He says it wasn’t willful. He had plenty of motivations to retain his faith. He says it didn’t happen on purpose; it happened to him, slowly but surely. God “disappeared before my eyes.”

The issue to which Bart is pointing here is quite an important one, pertaining to the matter of belief. It’s quite true that, for the most part, we don’t have direct volitional control over our beliefs. As I type this, my cat Mitty is lounging on my desk, partially behind the computer I’m writing on. Even if I were offered a hundred buck not to believe she’s there, I couldn’t do it. Beliefs don’t tend to work that way. We tend to be more doxastically passive than that; beliefs have a way of insisting on themselves, on the one hand, or exceeding our reach, on the other.

Then again, I resist Bart’s depiction of his de-conversion in wholly passive terms. I don’t think that’s true to life, either. Although we may not have direct volitional control over our beliefs, we surely, for at least a range of our beliefs, have indirect volitional control over them, it would seem. Pascal recognized this near the end of his Pensées, after offering several reasons to take faith seriously. Recognizing the challenge, he then pointed out that there are indirect ways of building faith. Our practices, our friends, our habits, our choices—all of these have an impact over time.

There are also indirect ways of undermining faith—bad theology, bad exegesis, bad hermeneutics, refraining from engaging in fellowship with fellow believers, living sinfully, etc. In a later essay Tony will suggest that Bart’s neglect of local Christian fellowship likely detracted from his faith.

But Bart seems to think that his volition and choices had little to nothing to do with his loss of faith. This seems monumentally unlikely. Having seen already some of the ways in which he processed the faith of his upbringing, for example, makes it, to my thinking, not unlikely that he would lose his faith. At least not a big surprise. Yet he persists in the claim: “For better or worse … none of us really chooses what we believe. No matter how motivated we might be, our sense of what is real is beyond our control.” Again, direct volitional control? Granted. Not even indirect volitional control? I doubt it.

So committed is Bart to this narrative that he expresses confusion that old Christian friends call and express their concerns and “hold me responsible for my obviously sincere lack of faith. After all, if Christianity is true, and there really is a God in heaven, he’s the one to blame.” Here he cites Paul in Ephesians 2:8-9 for evidence: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Again, I find Bart’s appeal to a biblical teaching the way he does quite misleading. That Ephesians passage, rightly understood, does not suggest that we play no volitional role in the acceptance of faith. Faith indeed is a gift, but gifts can be accepted or rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, in big ways and an aggregate of small ways. But Bart reads it this way (without much of any recognition that he could be wrong): “That faith is the gift of God, plain and simple. Which means, of course, that if there’s anyone my dear Christian friends, those concerned folks who keep reaching out to me, and especially my still-believing parents ought to be imploring, it is God, not me.”

Although I believe we can and should pray for our unbelieving friends and family, my theology is simply not this sort of monergistic picture of God according to which Bart’s decisions played no role in where he’s currently at. I think such a picture is defensible on neither biblical nor philosophical grounds; and in fact, I think there are hermeneutical, exegetical, and rational reasons to resist such a depiction. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Bart played a far bigger role in his de-conversion than he thinks.

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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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

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. 

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 9

I have now done several replies to just one chapter, Bart’s chapter explaining how he left the faith, so I had better do one more post about that chapter and call it done. We have seen how Bart gradually moved away from various of his religious convictions—some orthodox, some he merely thought orthodox, for reasons that were sometimes a matter of capitulation to other influences, and for other reasons which were arguably not a matter of capitulation or compromise at all, but quite principled. What conduced to a slippery slope, however, was his unwillingness to make those very distinctions.

On top of his struggles with issues like the moral propriety of gay sexual practices, the doctrine of damnation, and divine sovereignty, he had a life-transforming experience when he endured a terrible, life-threatening cycling accident in Cincinnati. Later on, in retrospect, he took three big lessons from the crash. First, “I learned that my core identity—my essential self, if you will—is all in my head…that my individual personality, mind, heart, and soul are all contained in my brain.” [Here he points to the work of Malcolm Gladwell and David Linden to the effect that our judgments and desires are largely controlled by the release and absorption of certain chemical in our brains in ways our conscious selves only vaguely understand; for a solid response, see here.] Second, he suddenly knew he would die one day. And third, when he dies, including his brain, he will vanish forever. “Like it or not, this life is the only one I’ve got.”

What he calls lessons are probably better thought of as inferences that he makes on the basis of what he considers good evidence. Of course, though, plenty of believers think there are intimate, organic connections between body and soul without inferring that the latter is finite, and their convictions are not without evidence, too—such as a range of highly evidenced out-of-body experiences that defy naturalistic analysis (see here). That we are going to die is a sober fact that all of us, believers and unbelievers, have to come to terms with. But Bart’s elaborate assertion without much of an argument that we just are our bodies and that, at death, we cease to exist is a quite ambitious metaphysical claim, radically underdetermined by the evidence he adduces.

When Bart shared his newfound conviction that nobody survives past physical death with his wife, he discovered this was something she had come to believe herself for some while. He realized that, if they’re right, it wouldn’t entail God’s nonexistence, but steeped as he was in evangelical theology, he took such a fact about the finality of death as reason to disbelieve in God. “As far as I was concerned, if there was no afterlife, there was no good and just God, which reduced the teachings of Jesus to an odd mix of delusional metaphysics and commonsense wisdom about the benefits of virtue.”

This was both sobering for Bart as well as animating, motivating him to figure out a new way to live. Despite his change in worldview, some things remained the same. For example, he retained his commitment to build warm and loving communities, to social justice, to education and the arts, and to believing that sacrificial love is the best way to live. Their worldviews had changed, but not their values. He gravitated to what he thought were scientific explanations and logical arguments, but also yearned for something of a “new gospel.”

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

This he found in secular humanism and his new hero, Robert Ingersoll, a 19-century politician and orator. “What struck me most when I started reading Ingersoll…was his deep and obvious commitment to love as the ultimate hope of humanity, and his great eloquence in communicating it…. [T]he surest path to true happiness is to concern yourself with the happiness of others. He instantly became my role model as a secular humanist evangelist.”

For now I will reply just to this last point about the correspondence between love and happiness. I have written quite a bit on this topic, as have many other moral apologists through the centuries. Not only is Bart right, in one sense, he’s more right than he knows; and in fact he’s implicitly furnished us with the resources for a variant of the moral argument for God. This is the argument from providence, as John Hare calls it, and it goes something like this: Full rational commitment to morality [or a life of love] requires that morality is a rationally stable enterprise; in order for morality to be a rationally stable enterprise, it must feature ultimate correspondence between happiness and virtue; there is no reason to think that such correspondence obtains unless God exists; so rationality dictates the postulation of God’s existence.

Without theism and a providential God at work ensuring ultimate and airtight correspondence between a life of love, on the one hand, and happiness, on the other, there will invariably be points of disconnect when the virtuous life of love, far from conducing to happiness, will result in far more misery than happiness. Theism, though, salvages the rationality of morality. This was an insight that Sidgwick, Kant, Reid, Locke, and others have spilled a great deal of ink on through the centuries. If Bart is looking for an argument, I might point him in this direction.

As much as I am loath to do this, because I don’t want this to seem a diatribe against Bart, it’s worth noting that such an argument would be unlikely to speak to Bart, because he actually isn’t committed to anything like the rationality of morality. Indeed, he has given up that there is anything objectively binding about morality at all. He has abandoned moral realism, by his own admission.

So his ongoing commitment to, say, the value of a life of love, is predicated on a divorce of fact and value. Whatever sense in which such a life, at least in general, is a better choice is purely practical or pragmatic. He seems to replace the “delusional metaphysics” of Jesus with no relevant metaphysics at all—just a choice on his part to live in a way that he thinks will conduce to happiness. As a philosopher I find this wholly inadequate and, frankly, profoundly unphilosophical. In some ways he remains, I think, his father’s son—content with sociological analysis, which is often fine as far as it goes. But it’s no substitute for robust philosophical reflection. It’s no surprise that plenty of other atheists would find there to be little compelling reason to be committed to living such a life; if Bart wants a worldview that actually puts love front and center, not just contingently but essentially, perhaps he should reconsider the faith he left behind.

To read more about the argument from providence and the television show The Good Place, see here.

To read more about the natural human desire for immortality, see here.

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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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 8

As promised, this blog will now explore the doctrine of damnation, the logic of perdition, the terrifying and much-maligned notion of hell. Bart seems to have interpreted scripture along the lines of meticulous providence, which understandably and invariably encountered insuperable difficulties in the context of brutal human experience. He admits that his theology before losing his faith was not much different from that of Shonda’s Sunday School teacher, which is a sad commentary about the quality of his theological sophistication at that stage. For someone with his strong ethical sensibilities and soft heart, he was, in retrospect, eminently ripe for walking away from his faith.

He had believed that “anyone who didn’t accept Jesus in this life was going to hell afterward,” and this would include one like Shonda unless she changed her mind about Jesus. He writes, “To me it was absurd to think that an all-powerful, all-loving God would willingly fail to protect an innocent little girl in this life, and then, when she couldn’t trust Jesus as a result, doom her to eternal damnation in the life to come. So absurd, in fact, that I decided to think otherwise.”

After rejecting meticulous providence (mistakenly taking this to involve eschewing divine sovereignty), Bart then “decided there must be some kind of back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died.” Once more Bart effected this maneuver with at least a tacit sense that doing so constituted a departure from orthodoxy—simply a decision he was undertaking on his own, a deviation from biblical teaching.

Again, there are two issues at play here. Prior to asking whether the Bible’s teaching on this matter is accurate, the question is whether or not Bart’s interpretation was right. If it wasn’t, the question of whether such an interpretation is accurate does not arise. Bart’s confidence in his biblical interpretation is strong—far too strong—and in light of his moral sensibilities and personal experience, he simply thought he needed to reject biblical inspiration and adopt views at variance with biblical teaching.

A far preferable methodology, to my thinking, would have been to subject to much greater critical scrutiny some of his narrow biblical interpretations. But as we have seen, he equated such an effort with theological accommodation. Surely this is a danger; indeed, I have suggested that Tony’s change of mind on the issue of homosexuality is a paradigmatic example, which seems to be Bart’s view as well. But there is a distinction between principled theological adjustment and unprincipled accommodation, a distinction often seemed lost on Bart because of his failure to subject to adequate scrutiny his biblical exegesis.

So there seemed to form in Bart’s worldview a perfect storm: the conjunction of treating his biblical interpretations as sacrosanct, interpretations often predicated on ultra-Calvinism and meticulous providence, a failure to distinguish between principled and unprincipled theological adjustments, and his largely laudable moral sensibilities. Frankly what would have been surprising is if he didn’t end up losing his faith given this cacophonous cocktail.

As time went on, Bart says that, by a certain point, belief in hell was “long gone.” But what was his doctrine of hell, exactly? It was not simply based on the notion that salvation is ultimately only available because of Christ, but something like that conviction conjoined with a host of add-ons. Not only must one accept Christ to avoid hell, for example, one must accept Christ in this life, without exception. Bart could have rejected, or at least questioned, the latter without rejecting the former. For example, what happens to the unevangelized subsequent to their death? Even Billy Graham admitted he wasn’t sure, and not because he harbored doubts that salvation was only through Christ.

Moreover, by Bart’s admission, he began looking for a back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died. I’m not entirely sure what Bart means by “good people,” especially if all of us as human beings are sinful and in need of salvation. If he means people who haven’t definitively rejected Christ in this lifetime, but who for one reason or another didn’t explicitly accept him, I’m eminently open to such a possibility. I think many Christians are. It seems to be an arguable entailment of God’s love. This is no “back door,” or unprincipled theological accommodation. It is, though, a rejection of an ultra-fundamentalist epistemology, a Calvinist paradigm of soteriology, a meticulous providence view of divine sovereignty, and presumptuous theological add-ons.

Not every view with which we have been raised needs to be treated as a sacred cow, a nonnegotiable, sacrosanct tenet. There is a huge distinction between a hermeneutical commitment to the reliability of scripture, on the one hand, and a treatment of each of one’s own biblical interpretations as inerrant, on the other. The latter bespeaks a profound lack of epistemic humility.

Belief in biblical inspiration means that its truly nonnegotiable and crystal clear teachings are to be accepted as altogether reliable. But it assuredly does not entail that we assume as beyond criticism our biblical interpretations on every ancillary, peripheral, or secondary question that might arise. The Bible makes clear that salvation is ultimately only through Christ; this is properly treated as a nonnegotiable piece of orthodoxy. Various presumptuous and fine-grained conjectural add-ons are not.

C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce offers a way to understand hell that doesn’t depict it as simply the ultimate torture chamber for those who unluckily failed to accept Christ in this life or who happen to rejected a garbled, twisted, or degraded picture of Christianity. It is rather a morally robust picture of damnation as the tragic consequence of a clear-eyed rejection of every last overture of God’s love, where, as in Dante, one’s sufferings are intrinsically connected to those sins one refuses to let go of until the bitter end. I mention thinkers like these not to treat their fictional pictures as gospel truth, but to showcase intriguing possibilities for how to think maturely about substantive matters of theology.

In his Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf reflects on the apparent tension between a God who loves us enough to die for us and a God who would relegate us to hell. Among his many insights is this one: “God will judge not because God gives people what they deserve, but because some people refuse to receive what no one deserves; if evildoers experience God’s terror, it will not be because they have done evil, but because they have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah.”           

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 7

When I first started this series about Tony and Bart Campolo’s book, I figured I’d do a blog per chapter, but I’ve been going at a slower pace than that. The richness of the material requires it. I now need to do a third blog on Bart’s first contribution to the chapter, “How I Left.” What we have seen is that Bart, owing to various experiences, began to see his confidence in his Christian convictions erode. His friendships with some gay friends made him lose confidence in biblical authority, for example, which we’ve already discussed a bit. And similarly he rejected his belief in the doctrine of hell.

I suppose belief in hell isn’t exactly an essential Christian belief, in the sense that, presumably, Christians can be universalists. At least when it comes to human beings, then, they might think hell remains empty. What their view is of fallen angels, Satan, etc. would be another matter. But the point is that one doesn’t have to believe that anyone goes to hell in order to be a Christian. That said, though, traditionally most Christians have endorsed some doctrine of damnation, and there seem to be solid biblical reasons for doing so. So in this blog and the next I’d like to reflect a bit specifically on Bart’s reasons for rejecting the doctrine and why I do not find his reasons compelling, but rather confused.

Bart writes that while his commitment to Jesus’ teachings about loving relationships and social justice grew stronger, the content of his faith kept shrinking. The intensity of his commitment to effect good in the world was increasing, but his confidence in traditional Christian beliefs was lessening. This included the doctrine of hell, which was “long gone by then,” thanks, he says, “to Shonda and a host other Shondas we got to know.”

Shonda, recall, was the mother of one of the kids in the day camp he helped run in Camden, New Jersey. She had been raised a believer, but at the age of nine, tragically, she was gang raped by a group of young men. When she asked why God hadn’t rescued her, her Sunday school teacher explained that because God was all-knowing and all-powerful, he could have stopped the attack, which meant that he must have allowed it for a good reason. “The real question, the teacher when on, was what Shonda could learn from the experience that would enable her to better love and glorify God.” At which point Shonda said she rejected God forever.

What Bart admits was that his theology at this time wasn’t much different from that of Shonda’s Sunday school teacher. “Indeed, I believed that God was sovereign, and that anyone who didn’t accept Jesus in this life was going to hell afterward, which made God seem like the cruelest of tyrants, at least as far as Shonda was concerned.” It struck Bart as absurd that an all-powerful, all-loving God would willingly fail to protect an innocent little girl in this life, and then, when she couldn’t trust Jesus as a result, “doom her to eternal damnation in the life to come.” So absurd, in fact, that Bart decided to think otherwise.

Note that it wasn’t at this point Bart rejected faith altogether. Rather, he “instinctively and quietly adjusted” his theology to accommodate his reality. He decided that God wasn’t actually in control of everything that happened in this world after all, and then he decided that there must be “some kind of back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died.”

There are (at least) two important issues to discuss here: divine sovereignty and the doctrine of damnation. For the rest of this blog I intend to discuss the matter of divine sovereignty, and in the next blog the matter of hell.

I find it supremely telling that Bart’s adjustment to his theology regarding sovereignty was to choose to believe that “God wasn’t actually in control of everything that happened in this world after all.” This is a very important point, because it reveals that Bart’s operative conception of sovereignty was a conception that would arguably make God the author of sin. To believe that God is in utter control of everything that happens is the view of meticulous providence, but to my thinking there is little reason to believe any such thing, and a number of reasons to disbelieve it. All that happens is within God’s permissive will, surely, but to put God’s agency at the center of all that happens yields unpalatable results and goes beyond biblical teaching.

Once more, there are two questions regarding such a doctrine. Does the Bible teach it? And is the Bible reliable? I don’t think the Bible teaches it, and most Christians do not. When a group of men gang rapes a child, did God somehow cause that to happen? Surely not. Now, it’s true that some would affirm that God does cause such things to happen. John Piper has said as much, as has a certain stripe of other Calvinists. But I find such theology fundamentally mistaken, if not pernicious. And if it is mistaken, the question of whether the Bible is accurate in teaching such doctrine doesn’t even arise.

Here’s an interesting insight. Some have suggested that it was the liberal and progressive aspects of Bart’s upbringing that made him so susceptible to losing his faith. I doubt it. I’m rather inclined to think it was the ultra Calvinist-sounding nature of some of his convictions. And notice this by way of confirmation: Bart himself, when he adjusted his theology on sovereignty, admits in retrospect that this “was the beginning of the end for me.” He identified Christian theology with something like extreme Calvinism and meticulous providence, and when he rejected the latter, it put him on a road to reject the former and lose his faith altogether. What makes this as needless as it’s tragic, to my thinking, is if the original conflation of Christianity with meticulous providence was mistaken in the first place. It was.

Among the many problems with such theology, in my view, is that it renders the problem of evil intractable. Making God the ultimate author of sin and of the most heinous acts of cruelty and injustice and abuse is hardly consistent with God’s essential nature of love. Rather than conducing to finding a practicable solution to the problem of evil, it exacerbates the problem to the point of rendering it intractable. Rather than saying the possibility of such things tragically happening is introduced in a world in which God confers meaningful freedom that can be horribly abused, it makes us say silly things like God must have wanted the rape itself to happen for some reason. It’s both bad theology and bad philosophy.

So Bart’s mistake was not, I would submit, the rejection of meticulous providence, but his identification of such hideous theology with Christianity. If there are other accounts of divine sovereignty that don’t yield such unpalatable implications—accounts entirely consistent with sound principles of biblical interpretation—then it’s altogether rational and principled to reject something like meticulous providence. Indeed I think it’s rationally, ethically, and exegetically incumbent on us to do so. It’s no unprincipled theological accommodation; it’s doing good theology, refusing to treat as sacrosanct a rather obviously wrong interpretation that represents a minority view in the history of the church to begin with.

Bart admits to dialing down God’s sovereignty and dialing up His mercy. I don’t think he was wrong to do so, starting as he did with his warped and inhumane understanding of sovereignty. Sadly he is hardly the first to abandon faith because of a clear-eyed recognition of the morally distasteful implications of such hyper Calvinism.

In the next installment, we will take up the matter of damnation.

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 6

Last time we distinguished between the interpretive and inspiration (or inerrancy) questions when it comes to biblical teachings on homosexuality. We saw that Bart and Tony disagree on both. Tony thinks the Bible is authoritative but that it does not teach that homosexual behavior is wrong; Bart thinks the Bible does teach that it’s wrong, but that the Bible isn’t authoritative. In this blog we will pause long enough to consider some more the interpretive or hermeneutical matter of whether the Christian scriptures teach that gay and lesbian behavior is in fact sinful. I tend to agree with Bart that the Bible does in fact teach that the Bible morally proscribes homosexual behavior.

As this is a large question of biblical interpretation on which no small amount of ink has been spilt over a long period of time, I will endeavor to delimit what I have to say to matters that have specific connections with the sorts of considerations that convinced Tony to adopt a progressive and permissive interpretation of scripture on this vexed matter. Recall he characterizes the position at which he’s arrived, after what he characterizes as a long period of ambiguity and deep uncertainty, as full acceptance of gay couples into the Church who have made a lifetime commitment to one another.

The deepest underlying and prior question, to Tony’s thinking, is this: What is the point of marriage in the first place? Here he bifurcates the options into these two categories: An Augustinian depiction of marriage as having for its sole purpose procreation, on the one hand, and a view that recognizes a “more spiritual dimension” to marriage, on the other. According to the latter view, God intends married persons to help actualize in each other the fruit of the Spirit; marriage is primarily about spiritual growth.

He admits that a large factor that convinced him to change his mind was his experience of spending time with gay couples, and he thinks it’s high time for the exclusion and disapproval of their unions by the Christian community to end. He invites others to join the battle against making them feel like they are mistakes or not good enough for God “simply because they are not straight.” As a social scientist, he is convinced that sexual orientation is hardly ever a choice, and he takes as a cautionary tale common stances in the past justified at the time by an interpretation of scripture we later came to reject.

Let’s consider the fundamental question as far as Tony is concerned: What is the point of marriage in the first place? It seems fairly obvious that Tony’s treatment of the issue of procreation in marriage casts this dimension in extremist fashion, namely, that procreation is the only value or purpose of marriage. That is arguably something of a straw man. It simply doesn’t follow from procreation not being the only purpose of marriage that it isn’t essentially tied to its nature.

Three main sources have proven themselves helpful to my own analysis of this issue. First, the book What Is Marriage? by Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis, who argue for an understanding of marriage according to which its essential nature is “a comprehensive union: a union of will (by consent) and body (by sexual union); inherently ordered to procreation and thus the broad sharing of family life; and calling for permanent and exclusive commitment ... a moral reality: a human good with an objective structure, which is inherently good for us to live out.” This conjugal view of marriage (one rife with spiritual import), in contrast to a revisionist view that eliminates the procreative component from the picture altogether, seems to me to make considerably better sense of the purpose and point of marriage. It includes reference to procreation but not in the one-dimensional way that Tony willfully paints it. 

Second, I would point readers to this article by longtime Asbury College President and Old Testament scholar Dennis Kinlaw: “Homosexuality Calmly Considered: A Theological Look at a Controversial Topic.” It’s well worth a careful read.

Third and last, but certainly not least, I urge those interested in the issue of what the Bible teaches on this matter to look at probably the best single volume on this issue—written by my friend, Bible scholar Robert Gagnon—entitled The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. The most important issue about this whole matter, from a Christian perspective, is what the Bible actually teaches—this is the heart of the interpretive matter under discussion. That the Bible has been misinterpreted before, as Tony points out, is undoubtedly true, but relevant to the present discussion only if the traditional interpretation of scripture on homosexuality is mistaken. Pointing out such a possibility is no argument that it’s the case. That this debate involves an important exegetical question makes clear that the question isn’t merely one of take-it-or-leave-it. There is such a thing as rightly dividing the word of truth—and wrongly dividing it. It strains credulity to think that Tony has done his due diligence in this matter when a book like Gagnon’s goes unaddressed by him.

Rather than discussing a mere handful of biblical texts, Gagnon’s treatment is comprehensive, careful, and exhaustive. It ranges from the witness of the Old Testament, the notion of going “contrary to nature” in early Judaism, to the witness of Jesus and of Paul and Deutero-Paul. With the mind of a top-rate scholar and heart of a pastor, Gagnon also considers the hermeneutical relevance of the biblical witness and anticipates and answers a wide range of objections. I urge those who wish to understand biblical teaching on this question to read this book.

Notice Gagnon’s reference in his title to homosexual practice. The concern is not one of orientation. Fallen human beings are filled with all manner of inclinations for wrongdoing without that fact implying anything about what’s morally normative. The issue is behavior, not predilections or proclivities, trials or temptations. For Tony still to conflate these matters, after orientation versus practice have been carefully distinguished time and again, makes one wonder how ingenuous he’s being.

Not coincidentally, the same question haunted him during the years he half-heartedly feigned his official resistance to gay practice in various debates. With his pro-gay wife he would appear, offer weak, fideistic-seeming arguments against homosexual practice, and allow her to give her best arguments in favor of it. Another time he actually joined with Gagnon and argued against homosexual practice against two opponents who took an affirmative position, and conducted himself in such a way that Gagnon personally challenged him afterwards by pointing out the obvious: Tony didn’t believe what he was claiming to believe, even then.

On this issue, then, Tony’s ostensible “change of mind” does indeed seem to fall prey to Bart’s depiction of it elsewhere in their book: Tony has chosen the interpretation of the Bible on this matter that he wants to hold rather than adopt an interpretation based on solid principles of exegesis and hermeneutics. It’s difficult to see how this qualifies as showing to show himself approved as a workman who need not be ashamed. 

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 5

Our previous installment ended with mention of the example of homosexuality as a theological topic about which Bart Campolo changed his mind. After defending for a while what Bart thought was (and thinks is) the biblical proscription of homosexual behavior, his relationship with some gay friends led to a change of mind.

In order to understand the trajectory of his thought, we need to examine with some care exactly what transpired here. He admits that for a while he struggled “to reconcile the Bible’s clear injunctions against homosexual behavior with my dawning realization that my gay friends’ sexual orientations were no more chosen than my own.” But eventually none of his interpretive solutions were satisfactory both to his friends and his own evangelical sensibilities, and, he writes, “I knew I had to choose between them.”

Bart’s story is similar to and different from Tony’s change of mind on this issue. Although Bart refers later in the book to his dad’s famous decision to support gay marriage, Tony himself doesn’t refer to it in the book. But on June 8, 2015, Tony released this statement, which I will cite in its entirety:

As a young man I surrendered my life to Jesus and trusted in Him for my salvation, and I have been a staunch evangelical ever since. I rely on the doctrines of the Apostles Creed. I believe the Bible to have been written by men inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. I place my highest priority on the words of Jesus, emphasizing the 25th chapter of Matthew, where Jesus makes clear that on Judgment Day the defining question will be how each of us responded to those he calls “the least of these.”

From this foundation I have done my best to preach the Gospel, care for the poor and oppressed, and earnestly motivate others to do the same. Because of my open concern for social justice, in recent years I have been asked the same question over and over again: Are you ready to fully accept into the Church those gay Christian couples who have made a lifetime commitment to one another?

While I have always tried to communicate grace and understanding to people on both sides of the issue, my answer to that question has always been somewhat ambiguous. One reason for that ambiguity was that I felt I could do more good for my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters by serving as a bridge person, encouraging the rest of the Church to reach out in love and truly get to know them. The other reason was that, like so many other Christians, I was deeply uncertain about what was right.

It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.

For me, the most important part of that process was answering a more fundamental question: What is the point of marriage in the first place? For some Christians, in a tradition that traces back to St. Augustine, the sole purpose of marriage is procreation, which obviously negates the legitimacy of same-sex unions. Others of us, however, recognize a more spiritual dimension of marriage, which is of supreme importance. We believe that God intends married partners to help actualize in each other the “fruits of the spirit,” which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, often citing the Apostle Paul’s comparison of marriage to Christ’s sanctifying relationship with the Church. This doesn’t mean that unmarried people cannot achieve the highest levels of spiritual actualization – our Savior himself was single, after all – but only that the institution of marriage should always be primarily about spiritual growth.

In my own life, my wife Peggy has been easily the greatest encourager of my relationship with Jesus. She has been my prayer partner and, more than anyone else, she has discerned my shortcomings and helped me try to overcome them. Her loving example, constant support, and wise counsel have enabled me to accomplish Kingdom work that I would have not even attempted without her, and I trust she would say the same about my role in her life. Each of us has been God’s gift to the other and our marriage has been a mutually edifying relationship.

One reason I am changing my position on this issue is that, through Peggy, I have come to know so many gay Christian couples whose relationships work in much the same way as our own. Our friendships with these couples have helped me understand how important it is for the exclusion and disapproval of their unions by the Christian community to end. We in the Church should actively support such families. Furthermore, we should be doing all we can to reach, comfort and include all those precious children of God who have been wrongly led to believe that they are mistakes or just not good enough for God, simply because they are not straight.

As a social scientist, I have concluded that sexual orientation is almost never a choice and I have seen how damaging it can be to try to “cure” someone from being gay. As a Christian, my responsibility is not to condemn or reject gay people, but rather to love and embrace them, and to endeavor to draw them into the fellowship of the Church. When we sing the old invitation hymn, “Just As I Am”, I want us to mean it, and I want my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to know it is true for them too.

Rest assured that I have already heard – and in some cases made – every kind of biblical argument against gay marriage, including those of Dr. Ronald Sider, my esteemed friend and colleague at Eastern University. Obviously, people of good will can and do read the scriptures very differently when it comes to controversial issues, and I am painfully aware that there are ways I could be wrong about this one.

However, I am old enough to remember when we in the Church made strong biblical cases for keeping women out of teaching roles in the Church, and when divorced and remarried people often were excluded from fellowship altogether on the basis of scripture. Not long before that, some Christians even made biblical cases supporting slavery. Many of those people were sincere believers, but most of us now agree that they were wrong. I am afraid we are making the same kind of mistake again, which is why I am speaking out.

I hope what I have written here will help my fellow Christians to lovingly welcome all of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters into the Church.

Obviously, there is a great deal to unpack here, but for now I will point out one significant similarity between Tony and Bart, and one significant dissimilarity. The similarity is that, for both of them, their decision was importantly spurred by personal friendships they had formed with practicing gay people. The difference I wish to highlight, however, is important. Bart came to think of the effort to square such acceptance with biblical teaching as futile, ad hoc, and unprincipled. Tony instead argues that a solid biblical interpretation can be rendered according to which gay practice is morally permissible. This is no small difference. Although they both end up condoning gay practice, their respective rationales for doing so, despite a surface resemblance, remain starkly different.

Bart remained dissatisfied with an interpretation of scripture that allowed for gay behavior; he thought scriptural teachings were pretty clear that gay sex was unholy and immoral. With this pronouncement he disagreed, so for him the decision to accept gay practice as normative required a rejection of biblical authority—“inerrancy,” as he puts it. Tony’s decision is different. He claims he came to think that the Bible is not rightly interpreted as proscribing gay practice. So in principle Tony can continue to affirm biblical inspiration, but simply deny that the Bible teaches that homosexual behavior is wrong.

Recall Tony’s words: “Rest assured that I have already heard – and in some cases made – every kind of biblical argument against gay marriage….” Tony thinks the Bible, “rightly divided,” simply does not teach that gay practice is wrong. Bart thinks it does. They both wish to accept gay behavior as normative—though they often couch it in terms of people being born with gay proclivities, with the apparently hidden premise smuggled in that proclivities to do X make X morally permissible, which is obviously rather problematic. But, importantly, they differ on what the Bible teaches here. Since Bart thinks the Bible teaches against gay practice, he rejects biblical authority; since Tony thinks the Bible is consistent with gay practice, he can be gay-affirming while continuing to embrace biblical authority.

So two distinct questions need to be identified here. One is what the Bible actually teaches about homosexuality. This interpretive matter is the “hermeneutical question.” The other is whether that teaching is reliable. This is the “inspiration question.” Bart and Tony disagree on both questions. The vast majority of Christians in the history of the church would have agreed with Bart on the hermeneutical question, and with Tony on the inspiration question. Of course this means they would also have disagreed with Tony on the hermeneutical question, and disagreed with Bart on the inspiration question. Truth isn’t simply settled by a vote, of course, so the next installment will continue this discussion by elaborating on the hermeneutical question.   

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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.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 4

“Those who have deconstructed their faith or significantly revised their sexual ethic seem to have one thing in common: They’re angry.” This was sent to me by a friend who knew I am reading the book by Tony and Bart Campolo, but I have to admit that Bart does not seem to match this description. He does not appear to be angry at all, but rather cheerful and downright chipper, despite that he has pretty much deconstructed his faith and significantly revised his views on sexual ethics. Perhaps he is concealing his anger, perhaps my friend is wrong, or perhaps Bart is, if not unique, at least anomalous. I am unsure, but he at least does not obviously fit into the category my friend describes.

I thought about this as I reread Bart’s opening salvo in the book, a chapter entitled “How I Left: A Son’s Journey through Christianity.” The chapter is characterized by none of the animus and stridency so often associated with those who vocally reject their faith. It is rather an eloquent, lucid, and engaging exposition of his trajectory first into faith, and then out of it. Growing up as Tony’s son, Bart makes clear, posed no obstacle to becoming a Christian. He always admired his dad, and thought that Tony made the Christian life seem like a huge adventure. The problem, though, at least until high school, Bart just didn’t believe in God. Since his mother and sister, during that time, had no faith to speak of, either, “In our family, the real religion was kindness. As long as I was nice—and especially nice to people on the margins—I was fine.”

Things changed in high school, though, as Bart became part of a dynamic Christian youth group. He enjoyed the fun and relished the fellowship, and before long, though he still didn’t believe in God, he really wanted to “because I wanted to become a full member of the most heavenly community I’d ever seen.” So when he was asked to receive Christ as Savior, he didn’t hesitate, and soon became active in evangelism and social outreach himself. From the start he saw following Jesus mainly about systematically transforming the world for the better. The new community helped forge his sense of identity and focused his energies. From the beginning, though, he struggled with the Christian narrative—from the creation story in Genesis to the resurrection of Jesus to the apocalyptic prophesies of Revelation. The supernatural aspects of the faith seemed to him the price of admission, not the attraction.

Tony Flew once said Christianity dies the death of a thousand qualifications. Bart describes his gradual loss of faith over the next three decades as dying a death of a thousand cuts—and ten thousand unanswered prayers. Seeing the hardships and sufferings of kids in a day camp in Camden, New Jersey was one of the first of those cuts. One encounter in particular stands out. Shonda, the mother of one of those kids, had grown up in church but was raped when she was nine years old. When she later asked why God had not protected her, her Sunday school teacher explained that God was all-knowing and all-powerful, so since he did not stop the attack he must have allowed it for a good reason. The real question, the teacher went on, was what Shonda could learn from the experience that would enable her to better love and glorify God, and it was at that point Shonda lost her faith.

Bart admits that, when he heard this, his own theology was much like that of the teacher’s. His view of divine sovereignty made God seem like a cruel tyrant, at least where Shonda was concerned. For his theology included both that God didn’t intervene to save Shonda from the rape and would relegate her to hell for her resulting unbelief. This led him to alter his theology, and this is, to my thinking, one of the most interesting and informative features of his story. For Bart’s alteration of his theology was perhaps justified; there are indeed, say, construals of divine sovereignty that stand in great tension with an essentially loving God. Tweaking one’s theology along the way can be an altogether appropriate and necessary thing to do, but Bart seems to interpret it as choosing to believe what we want to believe, rendering theology altogether malleable. In this case, he saw what he was doing as “dialing down God’s sovereignty” and “dialing up His mercy.” “For the first time in my Christian life, without consulting either my youth leaders or my Bible, I instinctively and quietly adjusted my theology to accommodate my reality.” I might suggest, though, that Bart’s interpretation of what he did is a bit misleading. What he did instinctively may well have been justified, and deeply consonant with the biblical depiction of God as wholly good and loving.

Instead Bart describes that event as the “beginning of the end” for his faith, which I cannot help but think unfortunate and needless. Because he thought that what he had been willing to do involved a compromise of biblical commitment, and unprincipled theological accommodation, it led to a slippery slope culminating three decades later, as he puts it, with “literally nothing left of my evangelical orthodoxy.” What I suspect happened is that some of the later accommodations he was willing to make were, indeed, from the vantage point of orthodox Christianity, unprincipled capitulations. But because Bart saw himself doing that from the get go made the subsequent steps easier to take, without realizing that along the way he crossed a line. His initial concession when it came to jettisoning a particular view of sovereignty did not qualify, as far as I’m concerned. As Christians we’re committed to the teachings of scripture as sacrosanct, not every last particular interpretation of such teachings with which we were raised or happened to acquire along the way.

Indeed, right after telling Shonda’s story, he talked about his friendship with two homosexual roommates at Haverford College, and how for a while he struggled to reconcile the Bible’s clear injunctions against homosexual behavior with his dawning realization that his gay friends’ “sexual orientation were no more chosen than my own.” In the end, he found that none of his interpretative solutions satisfied both his friends and his own evangelical sensibilities, and he concluded that he had to choose between them. The next entry will take up this issue in more detail.

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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.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 3

The previous blog ended on the note of discussing what can be realistically expected of arguments for the Christian faith. Recall that Campolo, at the end of the first chapter of the book he co-wrote with his son Bart, had written, “The world doesn’t need any more theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, and this book certainly isn’t trying to be either of those,” despite that he immediately added that he always does try to make his best case for following Christ.

On the surface there seems to be a potential tension between Campolo’s claims: that we have no need for theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, on the one hand, and that he nevertheless feels compelled to make the best case he can for following Christ, on the other. Perhaps what explains the apparent tension between these claims is that Campolo is intentionally casting polemics and debates with a negative connotation, but this is worth pointing out because not everyone construes polemics or debates in a negative way, nor should they.

Debates held with mutual respect and a commitment to rigor can be a highly effective way to foster substantive dialogue; in some ways, Campolo’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there is an undeniable element of debate contained within this book. Each Campolo is making his case, after all, explaining his convictions, pointing to evidential considerations to make them plausible, underscoring perceived weaknesses of opposing views, and the like. This is essentially what a debate involves. That it can be done civilly and, in this case, even lovingly, with as much commitment to listen as to talk, only shows that debates need not be an unfriendly and inherently negative activity, nor need be construed in that way. If speaking the truth is love has primacy, each participant in a debate of this nature, in a real sense, should be rooting for his opponent. We wrestle not against flesh and blood.

For many readers of the Campolo book, after all, while deeply appreciating the irenic tone of the volume and the model the discussion provides of how to disagree agreeably, may well also be genuinely interested in weighing the relative merits of both sides in their own efforts to discover the truth and achieve greater clarity. Debates may be more pointed and adversarial than plenty of other dialogical exchanges, but they can surely serve useful purposes. Some might suggest we don’t need less of them (much less no more of them!), but a great many more, at least done well and right. I suspect the resistance to debates among many is because they often tend to be more about projecting appearances of victory and orchestrating mic drop moments than a genuine, mutual, and humble quest for the truth.

Likewise with polemics. In fairness it is likely Campolo was intentionally exploiting the common depiction of polemics as largely adversarial and predominantly confrontational. But colloquial employment of the locution doesn’t determine the essence of the referent. Lexical definitions themselves often don’t provide as penetrating insight into a word’s meaning as does careful conceptual analysis. Polemics in the realm of theology might pertain to arrogating or appropriating, say, a secular thought pattern, category, or story to a Christian application; or in the realm of dialectics, polemics often pertains to fine-grained discussions about which specific theology might be most in evidence—in an effort, for example, to adjudicate between Christian or Islamic theology. Since Bart by his own admission considers secular humanism his new religion, a polemical component to the discussion is practically unavoidable. This is a perfectly legitimate and valuable exercise with little to no hint of any intrinsically negative implications. The aversion plenty of kind-hearted persons to interpersonal conflict is laudable, but it shouldn’t mean we don’t see the value of iron sharpening iron. Not all ideas are equally good or defensible, penetrating or veridical. Of course in practice, as Tony and Bart admit, conversations of substance about significant differences calls for an abundance grace to keep the wheels turning.

Context can usually make clear whether one means by polemics its denotation or connotation, and it’s fairly obvious that Campolo was gesturing toward the latter. Fair enough. I’m not trying to strain for gnats here or be unduly nitpicky. Still, my point is this: contending for the truth ineliminably involves, by turns, both apologetics and polemics, rightly understood and properly practiced. To say we need more of neither in a book preoccupied with the propriety or lack thereof of believing the truth claims of Christianity strains credulity at least a little.

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

I considered perhaps trimming the present point a bit for fear of belaboring, but then thought the better of it, because I think there is an important point to emphasize here. Even etymologically “polemics” is connected to war, so this might be thought to confirm the fraught connotations of the term, but we can go to war with people or with ideas. Clearly Tony is not at war with his son, but there is a clash and conflict of worldviews here, and that’s okay. It shows we don’t have to make it a battle between persons; we can keep the conflict at the level of ideas, which is practically a lost art in our cultural moment. Seeking to root out bad ideas is a noble and needed venture, and thoroughly biblical. 2 Cor. 10:4-5 says this: “The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the world. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We tear down arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” And in fact Tony, to my thinking, marvelously models this approach throughout the volume.

Allow me now to back off from the specifics here in order to deal with the more pressing and general question all of this broaches: the relative importance of reasons and rationality in Christian conviction. Again, Campolo himself tries to make the best case for following Christ, as he does impeccably throughout this book. Still, perhaps what he’s getting at in distancing himself from any overly strident model of discourse here are what he recognizes to be some limitations to reason, limitations that reason itself might help us grasp. Perhaps these words by Campolo a few sentences later confirm this reading: “While I understand that Bart’s faith probably won’t be restored by my arguments, I hope they at least help him stay open to what ultimately must be the work of the Holy Spirit.” And of course he also hopes his arguments will model for other Christians a way to keep the communication lines open with nonbelieving loved ones, a way that is both wholly loving and respectful without compromising the gospel.

For help in understanding both the purpose and limits of reason and rationality when it comes to matters divine, let’s briefly consider a few points from John Wesley’s sermon entitled “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered.” Having taught Greek, logic, and philosophy at Lincoln College at Oxford, Wesley was clearly a man who took argument seriously, and he lamented when anyone under-appreciated reason. Here is what he wrote near the end of this sermon to such people:

Suffer me now to add a few plain words, first to you who under-value reason. Never more declaim in that wild, loose, ranting manner, against this precious gift of God. Acknowledge “the candle of the Lord,” which he hath fixed in our souls for excellent purposes. You see how many admirable ends it answers, were it only in the things of this life: Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments…. When therefore you despise or depreciate reason, you must not imagine you are doing God service: least of all, are you promoting the cause of God when you are endeavouring (sic) to exclude reason out of religion. 

Wesley says more in that vein, and it is most inspiring, but in fact at least half of the sermon is directed at those who over-value reason, assuming it is replete with powers of which in fact it’s quite bereft. Specifically, Wesley points out three central realities that reason alone cannot generate or guarantee, contra those in his day (and ours) who so lionized the power of reason as to form expectations that go beyond its capacities. First, reason cannot produce faith. “Although it is always consistent with reason, yet reason cannot produce faith, in the scriptural sense of the word. Faith, according to Scripture, is ‘an evidence,’ or conviction, ‘of things not seen.’ It is a divine evidence, bringing a full conviction of an invisible eternal world.”

Interestingly, while discussing this first point, Wesley spoke of a personal confirmation of this limitation of reason. He tells of having heaped up the strongest arguments that he could find, in ancient or modern authors, for the existence of God, and then finding there was still room for doubts that reason is powerless to quench. He challenges readers to do the same, setting all our arguments for God in an array, silencing all objections, and putting all their doubts to rest. The result is that they may repress their doubts for a season, but “how quickly will they rally again, and attack you with redoubled violence.” This does not show that faith is irrational or unprincipled, but rather that reason alone is not its ultimate source or locus. Can reason alone, for example, illumine what happens after the grave, satisfying our curiosities and banishing our fears? Hardly. The best unaided reason can do is suggest that death is, as Hobbes put it on the precipice of shuffling his mortal coil, “a leap in the dark,” whatever bravado we might wish to project to conceal our intractable existential angst.

Second, reason alone cannot produce hope in any child of man—scriptural holiness, that is, by which we “rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” Where there is not faith, there is not such hope; and since reason is impotent to produce the former, likewise the latter. At most but a lively imagination or pleasing dream resides within rationality’s lonely grasp.

Third, reason, however cultivated and improved, cannot produce the love of God, for it can produce neither faith nor hope, from which alone such love can flow. It is only when we “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” that “we love Him because He first loved us.” Cold reason can produce merely fair ideas, drawing a fine picture of love, but “only a painted fire.” Beyond that reason alone cannot go.

Some other resultant limitations of reason include virtue and happiness. Those without the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love can experience pleasures of various kinds, but not the sort of happiness for which we were made—merely shadowy dreams of ephemeral pleasures fleeting as the wind, unsubstantial as the rainbow, lacking satisfaction.

“Let reason do all that reason can,” concludes Wesley. “Employ it as far as it will go. But, at the same time, acknowledge it is utterly incapable of giving either faith, or hope, or love: and consequently, of producing either real virtue, or substantial happiness. Expect these from a higher source, even from the Father of the spirits of all flesh. Seek and receive them, not as your own acquisition, but as the gift of God…. So shall you be living witnesses, that wisdom, holiness, and happiness are one; are inseparably united; and are, indeed, the beginning of that eternal life which God hath given us in his Son.”

Campolo and Wesley, both of them, recognized the importance of reason and its limitations, and depicted faith as a gift of God. In subsequent posts we will have occasion to speak in more detail about what each of them means by this, and whether or not their views converge. But for our next post, we will move on to Chapter 2: Bart’s story of his deconversion, how he left.

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Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 2

Back when I saw Tony Campolo speak in person, he got the crowd laughing right off the bat. In his characteristically animated and rapid-fire diction, he practically yelled that physicists tell us that the faster to the speed of light an object travels, the more mass it obtains. Then, mischievously looking over at the corpulent pastor, pausing for comedic effect, he added, “Pastor, you’re not fat! You’ve just been moving too fast!”

All these years later, it is admittedly a little surreal reflecting on a book that Campolo has written with his son who’s lost his faith. Last time we made brief mention of the foreword that had been written by Peggy Campolo, Tony’s wife and Bart’s mom, which reminds me of a humorous anecdote about her too from a long time back. When she was staying at home raising the kids, she would grow weary of being asked what she did for a living, so rather than keep answering that she was a homemaker who had elected to stay home, she took to giving this for an answer: “I’m socializing two Homo-sapiens in Judeo-Christian values so they’ll appropriate the eschatological values of utopia. What do you do?” They would often blurt out, “I’m a doctor,” or “I’m a lawyer,” and then wander off with a dazed look in their eyes. 

Nobody was laughing, though, Thanksgiving evening in 2014 when Bart, in his old three-story house in an “at-risk” Cincinnati neighborhood, told his parents that he no longer believed in God. The first chapter of Why I Left, Why I Stayed is Tony’s poignant account of that evening. Bart had long served in ministry, doing outreach to the poor and proclaiming the Christian gospel alongside his famous father, and had exerted a significant impact in the lives of many. This made all the harder for his dad to reconcile what he was hearing. It was overwhelming and painful, leaving Tony reeling, feeling “bewildered and unsure.”

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

After the excruciating conversation, Tony and Peggy spent a lot of time praying, determined that they would love their son unconditionally just as he was. Of course, though, this didn’t mean Tony wouldn’t try to get to the bottom of some things. He had questions. What had led to his son’s decision? Could he get Bart to reconsider? Had Tony failed somehow as a father? Before long an editorial in Christianity Today suggested that if Tony hadn’t focused so much on social issues and concerns for the poor, Bart might not have departed from the faith. Tony admitted this was painful to read because it made him doubt he had been a good father. In subsequent posts we will take up this topic in some detail.

Soon after that fateful Thanksgiving, Tony booked a weeklong speaking tour in England, and Bart happily agreed to tag along so they could spend time in substantive conversation. And so, in a succession of English parks and cafes, they shared with one another their innermost feelings and most deeply felt convictions. In our cultural moment, such candid, caring conversations are often hard to come by, riddled as it is with so much divisiveness and animus, tendentiousness and acrimony, among those with conflicting worldviews. But this is a father and son determined to forge such conversations.

This very dynamic is one of the features of the book—that came out of those conversations—I find most compelling: the model it provides for such challenging but valuable discussions. In both its spirit and execution the book is an eminently attractive picture of familial commitment despite deep differences, the diametric opposite of and efficacious antidote for our reigning, pervasive, and far too unimaginative “cancel culture.”

At this juncture and on this note, I might anticipate an objection among some of my evangelical friends. Tony Campolo himself, though respected greatly by many, has been fairly written off by others, including by some close friends of mine. The reasons are various, and some of the concerns altogether legitimate—from Campolo’s rabid commitment to the Democratic party, to the change of his stance on gay marriage, to what was likely a fair bit of dissembling and disingenuousness on the matter of homosexuality for quite some time before officially “changing his mind.”

We will have occasion to discuss all of these matters in subsequent entries. Bird by bird. For now, though, we might ask readers to suspend some of those judgments, hold them in abeyance, and simply empathize a bit with an evangelical father who had to come to terms with a painful situation, and who then had to think hard about how best to show his son love despite a crushing turn of events. It is a situation the vicinity in which any of us is liable to find ourselves, and it would do all us all good to give it some thought.

The penultimate paragraph in Tony’s opening chapter struck me as especially interesting. He began it this way: “The world doesn’t need any more theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, and this book certainly isn’t trying to be either of those.” That said, though, he immediately admitted he’s always trying to make his best case for following Jesus. This introduces a fertile topic for an entry of its own, so the next blog will pick it up here, exploring this matter of what the role of arguments for the truth of Christianity realistically is and isn’t. By way of a tantalizing preview of coming attractions, for some assistance we will appeal to a few insights from none other than the inimitable John Wesley.

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Response #1 to Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo

The name Tony Campolo invokes quite a bit of nostalgia for me. Like many church kids, I grew up watching the animated Christian sociologist/evangelist, always struck by his humor and energy, his insight and erudition. While attending Asbury Theological Seminary in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a friend and I read several of his books together, each in turn, taking the time to discuss them together as we did. Occasionally we may have balked a bit at some of what we read, a rhetorical flourish, something a tad hyperbolic here, a hint of needless iconoclasm there; but for the most part we enjoyed his passion, personality, and prodigious gifts a great deal.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

This made it all the more fun when we were able to see him speak in person outside Lexington, Kentucky before I left that area for good. If memory serves, he spoke in the same church where my seminary graduation would be held pretty soon thereafter. I still remember how he effortlessly held the capacity crowd in his hand on the day he spoke. His charisma was contagious, and I distinctly remember thinking that if he misused his considerable gifts he could do real damage. I have often said that he’s one of the three most gifted communicators I have ever seen (along with James Robison and Tom Morris).

It has been some years now since I have read any of his work, but I recently purchased his latest book because the topic was irresistible. His son Bart has lost his faith, after having served in ministry for many years. And the evangelical father and humanist son have written a book together, called Why I Left, Why I Stayed, a friendly conversation on the topic of Christianity published by HarperOne. I had had an interest in the book for a while, and finally ordered it, then read it through pretty quickly.

As I read the engaging and irenic dialogue, it spurred a lot of interest within me and served as fodder for a good deal of reflection. So the thought occurred it might be worth the trouble to blog a bit about each of the chapters. Tony and Bart take turns writing chapters, so the first chapter is by Tony, the second by Bart, and so on. In subsequent posts I will take each chapter in turn and discuss its contents, sharing some of my own reflections the chapter inspired as we go.

The nature of their close relationship makes for compelling reading. So often it’s hard for people of diametrically opposed worldviews to remain civil while discussing their deep differences. Tony and Bart are determined to do so because of their long and close familial relationship, and because it’s important to find good models of such difficult conversations, it’s worth considering for that reason alone. As the culture wars have ramped up, suspicions of those with whom we disagree have elevated to often alarming levels, exacerbating and intensifying the chasms and divides between those with conflicting perspectives. The casualty of such tensions is often substantive dialogue, which is a real shame. This book can help serve as a partial corrective to this lamentable state of affairs and a better way forward.

As the Preface notes, the Campolos are not unusual; many Christian parents are struggling, both emotionally and spiritually, because their children have left the Christian faith. So often the result is one of tension, acrimony, and alienation, and they hope to show a better way. “Hopefully,” they jointly write, “this book models a graceful way to process what has become an increasingly common crisis, while also serving as a safe forum for those struggling with doubts and questions about the Christian faith.” They aim to heed the apostle Paul’s advice to be kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving to one another, and this is laudable indeed.

The poignant Foreword to the book was written by Peggy Campolo, husband to Tony and mother to Bart. Although she’s heartbroken that Bart has lost his faith, she’s also proud of him for being authentic and transparent about his convictions, especially in light of the painful price they have exacted. She retains the belief that God is still involved in Bart’s life, just as God was, by her own admission, at work within her for a long time before she realized it.

One last preliminary: I am intrigued by the more social scientific tenor of much of the conversation. Tony has a PhD in and a career teaching sociology, and he often brings to bear insights from a range of thinkers—from Durkheim to Heidegger, from Freud to Maslow—with whom I don’t interact very much. This adds a texture and richness to the conversation I find enjoyable and enlightening. Obviously, I cannot help but reflect on what they talk about from my own background and professional training in analytic philosophy, but I think the resulting interdisciplinary nature of the conversation should prove both interesting and illuminative.

If folks decide to read along, I might suggest you get a copy of their book and read each chapter with me as I go along. Doing so would probably enhance your enjoyment and ability to add to the conversation.