5 minute read
Have you ever come across an online description of a community that truly inspired you? As you read it, something deep within yourself came alive and you thought, ‘I’ve finally found my people! Even if it’s a mere fraction as good as it sounds, I need this in my life.’ I had that experience a couple years ago with a community of secular humanists. Sorry for being unable to find the description to quote verbatim, but from memory it read something like, “Do you believe in the great human capacity for love and creativity? Do you believe humans have tremendous potential for critical thinking and the pursuit of truth? Do you enjoy wine, dancing, and nature? Then this group is for you!” I remember thinking, ‘For crying out out. These days it apparently it takes secular humanists to value human flourishing. Why don’t Christians talk like this?’
The truth is, I agree with secular humanists about their belief in the immense human potential to love deeply, think critically, and enjoy the beauty of the natural world. I, too, strive to be an integrated man of character who has deep feelings, nuanced thoughts, a receptive soul, and close relationships. I, too, value the rational exploration of science and the emotional expression of the arts. I, too, treasure the sheer biological delight of sensual pleasures ranging anywhere from a sunset to whiskey, music to sex. I, too, believe in gender equality, racial reconciliation, and social justice. Yet I see no need to choose between God and humanism.
To my mind, the whole God vs. humanism framework is a silly false dichotomy premised upon a lack of historical understanding. Standing in the spiritual legacy of the late-Medieval philosopher, theologian, priest, and all-around intellectual badass Desiderius Erasmus, known to history as the “Prince of the Humanists,” I come to humanism from a decidedly sacred angle. It’s my conviction that God wants us, as His beloved people, to flourish by living fully into our humanity. These wondrous experiences aren’t meant to be repressed but relished. God created our amazing bodies and this tremendous world for us to enjoy because, done in a healthy and mindful manner, that delight actually worshipfully points back to the loving intentions of our Creator.
Still the question remains: why is it so bloody difficult to find church communities full of professing followers of Jesus who are sacred humanists? No, the point is not about that specific language. I could care less whether others want to call themselves “sacred humanists.” What I’m driving at is this theocentric way of thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving. It’s about leaning into our deep human potential to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness as a holistic way of life. Again, why is that so hard to find? Eclectic though my experiences have been, obviously they are not representative of the full depth and breadth of the Christian community. I get that. Still I have to say that it seems remarkably difficult to find Jesus followers of this ilk.
This list might make some readers uncomfortable, but from my experience it seems quite easy to find the following types of Christians:
- Culture warriors who see personal evangelism and social justice as antithetical practices,
- Indignant fundamentalists who condemn anything but the King James Version of the Bible,
- The Piety Police who relish every opportunity to spread the good news of guilt and shame,
- Hipster small groups at the local pub who love promoting Unconditional Election,
- Hardlining traditionalists who detest every word spoken by Pope Francis,
- Passionate enthusiasts who get together to shout emotive, feel-good gibberish,
- Cloistered ascetics who habitually criticize the impure “way of the world” though they have startlingly little interaction with the rest of the world,
- “Love wins!” progressives who are convinced all conservative spirituality is innately toxic yet obviously haven’t bothered cracking open a Bible in the past decade,
- Conspiracy theorists on Facebook who denounce Black Lives Matters and the “Plandemic” as Trojan Horses of Marxism,
- Science skeptics who are campaigning for the local school board so they can require a 10,000 year old earth to be included in the high school biology curriculum,
- Stoic white people of northern European descent who don’t believe any of this cultural religion but it’s part of their familial tradition so they just keep going through the motions,
- Bearded former Bible college students who have a knee-jerk defense of all things Russian and say no one else can understand the (capital-M) Mystery of their faith because they’re too Western despite themselves being from South Carolina, and
- Armchair theologians whose Sunday school class seems to be a never-ending polemic on behalf of the Book of Concord, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy, or the Nashville Statement on human sexuality.
I don’t understand. Why do these seem to be our only readily available options? Why is it nearly impossible for so many of us to find communities of thoughtful Christians who selflessly serve others and inspirationally articulate the human potential to live, learn, and love? My apologies if this adds to the existential fatigue we’re all feeling in 2020, but I don’t know why this is so difficult or so rare. Don’t get me wrong. I get that we’re all fallen from grace, so there won’t be any Utopian experiences this side of eternity. Still I don’t understand why it’s this difficult to find communities full of sacred humanists with a robust vision of human flourishing. Brokenness and all, shouldn’t this be the prevailing essence of the Christian faith clearly manifest in worshiping communities throughout every town and city? Shouldn’t that be the norm rather than the outlier?
No doubt there are going to be naysayers who wish to offer a theological objection at this point. They’ll say I have an insufficient understanding of sin or that my theological schema fails to adequately take into account the consequences of the Fall. Those who’ve done their homework might even bust out the big guns and level accusations of Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism. To any such readers I would preemptively say, “You’re wrong.” Philip Yancey once wrote, “A church uncomfortable with paradox tends to tilt in one direction or the other, usually to disastrous consequences.” I affirm neither the Pelagian rejection of Original Sin (or Ancestral Sin) nor the Reformed affirmation of Total Depravity. To my mind, both evidence discomfort with paradox.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood. He shrewdly observed, “One of the best contributions which Christian thought can make to the thought of the world is the repetition that life is complex. It is part of the Christian understanding of reality that all simplistic answers to basic questions are bound to be false. Over and over, the answer is both-and rather than either-or.” That dude is in my head. I uphold the tension that humanity is simultaneously beautifully made in God’s image yet in all ways tragically marred by the Fall, which is why the world is so broken yet beautiful. We all share an ever-present capacity for great love and beauty as well as great evil and ugliness. That’s the paradoxical human condition.
As someone who is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I’m struggling with the reality of my lived experience. Apologies for putting it so bluntly, but my question boils down to this: Why is it that secular humanists, who explicitly reject the existence of a deity, seem to consistently embrace human flourishing with living, learning, and loving while the Christians, who passionately believe in a creative and loving God, kinda seem to suck at life? Something in there doesn’t add up for me, but I’m not quite sure what it is. Shouldn’t we be the ones who are most inspired to pursue richly fulfilling lives of beauty, compassion, curiosity, hope, justice, and love? I just don’t understand why Christian faith routinely seems to have the opposite impact.
