Christianity & Culture

Moving Forward and Stepping Through

By Theodore J. Wardlaw

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times. Born in 1979—the same year in which I received my last diploma—he is the youngest regular op-ed writer at the Times, and went there from The Atlantic where, in his mere thirties, he had been a senior editor. Douthat is a devout Catholic of generally the conservative variety, and is certainly, as well, a political conservative.

Sometimes his editorials irritate me with their prickliness, but thankfully not all of them, so I continue to read his columns and am frequently quite grateful for them. What I am particularly grateful for is his unapologetic and thoughtful Christian piety—something you don’t get every day from a New Haven-raised Magna Cum Laude-holding Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. Douthat is a faithful believer, a faithful Christian, and unabashedly so.

Recently he wrote the lead editorial in the Sunday New York Times—an essay titled “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief.” It is deeply philosophical, so I had to read it several times in order to grasp its central points. His intended audience was the many highly educated people “who hover on the doorway of a church or synagogue … [wanting] to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-haunted writers interesting and inspiring, and the biblical cadences of the civil rights era more moving than secular defenses of equality or liberty.”1

“Yet,” he goes on, “they struggle to … reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.” He acknowledges that this struggle encourages some of these seekers to simply “treat piety as an act of the will undertaken in defiance of the reasoning faculties, and see what happens next.”

However successful such a project may be for some, Douthat encourages another way to approach religious belief—as a leap of faith. “Instead of starting by praying or practicing in defiance of the intellect, you could start by questioning the assumption that it’s really so difficult, so impossible, to credit ideas of God and accounts of supernatural happenings.” In this disenchanted world in which we live—a world shaped by Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein—Douthat encourages us to consider nonetheless that the world was created with intent, that we are fashioned in the image of the world’s creator, and that this connection to a supernatural plane enables us to experience higher-order things ranging, says Douthat, “from baseline feelings of oneness and universal love, to strange happenings at the threshold of death, to encounters with beings that human beings might label (gods and demons, ghosts and faeries) but never fully understand.” Then, he says, consider the possibility that all of this is still true! After all, he suggests, our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe, “and a better reason to think of ourselves as made in a divine image than the medievals ever knew.”

There is much more to absorb in this essay, but I am most intrigued with a profound invitation—a sort of “altar call”—that Douthat issues in his last paragraph. “If you are standing uncertainly on the threshold of whatever faith tradition you feel closest to, you don’t have to heed the inner voice insisting that it’s necessarily more reasonable and sensible and modern to take a step backward. You can recognize instead that reality is probably not as materialism describes it, and take up the obligation of a serious human being preparing for life and death alike—to move forward, to step through.”

I think on these words in this extraordinary COVID time in which we are still living. We don’t know what the shape of our church’s faith will look like on the other side of all of this. Many are predicting that, after the ravages of this disease and its attendant terrors that have swept across the whole planet undermining nations and systems, it will become quickly apparent that scores of former practitioners of that faith will in fact do the “reasonable and sensible and modern” thing and just take a step backward—out of any engagement with the walk of faith. Maybe these prognosticators are right. But I am betting my life that they aren’t. Just this past summer, my wife, Kay, and I vacationed in two special places for us—first, the North Carolina mountains, and then, for a week, our favorite coastal beach near Charleston. Then, on our trip back to Austin, we stopped for a couple of days in Natchez, Mississippi, where Kay spent most of her growing-up years. Natchez is, in many ways, a charming little city. It once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around cotton and on the backs of enslaved peoples. Today, it is a tourist town, and people come from all over the world to tour its antebellum mansions. We enjoyed walking around and seeing so many of the sights that mattered to us—particularly the beautiful old Georgian-style historic Presbyterian church where, one July afternoon in 1978, we were married. That church sat near another old sacred space—the oldest Jewish synagogue in the South—and just next to it sat the oldest surviving Episcopal church building in Mississippi. From one angle of vision, the place dripped with elegance.

But the larger story of Natchez, just like the larger stories of Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Memphis, and so many other cities (Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, Tulsa)—maybe every city in the world, ultimately—is more complicated. There was one downtown street on which we walked where there was a building in ruins. Perhaps there had been a fire, or perhaps the building had sheltered in some way the strategies and narratives of hatred. We didn’t know. But we noticed, on a large piece of plywood stretching across much of the width of where that building had sat, a multi-colored likeness of Martin Luther King Jr. His face was alive with shades of black, brown, orange, blue, green, pink, and red. And next to his face were printed these words, King’s words: “I have decided to stick to love … Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Is it finally true that the “reasonable, sensible, and modern thing” is to retreat from commitment to faith, to “take a step back” into a cultured and comfortable agnosticism that seeks respite from the burdens of believing? Perhaps, in the minds of many, yes. But I know students at the Seminary, and challenging faculty and dedicated staff and committed congregations who would answer, no. They are believers, perhaps by choice but perhaps also because the Spirit leaves them no other choice. They are willing to make—indeed they make every day—that leap of faith of which Douthat speaks. They know the reasonable arguments to the contrary, arguments arrayed each evening in whatever news source you watch: the lingering curse of COVID, the overheated hatred of racists and white supremacists, the rough and tumble of the economy, the precarious nature of national and global politics. They know how those arguments amount to a case for backing up on believing and backing down from commitment. And still they leap, trusting that all of this is not mere random chance, a roller-coaster ride to absurdity. They are betting their lives on the faith that God is in this somewhere, holding open the door to a future as unimaginable as it is incongruous with reason, a future that holds both life and death alike in its sway. They keep that door in view with the eyes of faith, and they Christianity & Culture are moving forward and stepping through.

NOTE

1. Ross Douthat, “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief” (New York Times, Sunday, August 15, 2021, p.4-5 Sunday Review; all subsequent unattributed quotes in this essay appeared in the same editorial.

Theodore J. Wardlaw has been president and professor of homiletics at Austin Seminary since 2002. Educated at Presbyterian College, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and Yale University, he previously served as senior pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta as well as parishes in New York, Texas, and Tennessee. He is a regular contributor to the Presbyterian Outlook and The Christian Century.

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