Ordway, Not God's Type

A book review of Holly Ordway, Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010)

Ordway's Not God's Type is a work in Christian apologetics, that is a book designed to make a compelling argument for the Christian faith to those who are not Christians.   Her audience is doubting or unbelieving academics and others who reject the Christian faith on intellectual grounds.  Her argument is that Christian faith is based on sound reason and that careful, logical, and critical analysis can lead one to faith.    Not God's Type is an autobiographical sketch of Ordway's own journey from what she sees as an almost unthinking, knee-jerk atheism to a saving faith in Christ that encompasses her reason, her passions, and ultimately the whole of her life.

Ordway is currently an Assistant Professor of Letters at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California, who began her academic career as an atheist.  By her own telling, life was not good, and she lived in a world of self-delusion.  She was focused on herself and much more broken as a person than she realized.  She describes the emptiness, despair, and loneliness of her atheism and writes, "My atheism was eating into my heart like acid." (p.  27)  Her journey away from atheism and into faith started with her fencing coach, Josh, who is a deeply convicted Christian and a wise soul, at least where Ordway was concerned.  Josh never tried to witness to her or argue her into anything, but over a course of weeks Ordway was led (by the Holy Spirit, she believes) into a dialogue with Josh about religion.  Having become intrigued with the possibility that religion may not be entirely unwarranted superstitions, she set out on a self-conscious quest to discern the truth about God.

Ordway considers herself to be a tough minded rationalist, and she thus intended to follow the logic of her search wherever it might take her.  For nearly all of the book, she traces the steps of her conversion.  Josh convinced her that there are reasons to take faith seriously.  Soon his arguments for the existence of God made sense to her.  She began to realize that her atheism was based on false assumptions and that it had not been nearly as intellectually rigorous as she had thought.  It was based largely on untested, superficial assumptions.  Ordway began to see that God is personal and that Christ is more than a mere human.  Step by step she was led to a consideration of Christ's resurrection, and after a period of intense study she accepted that the resurrection was an objective historical event, one that changed everything for her personally.  Having accepted the resurrection, she had to accept the Christian faith.

With Josh's guidance, Ordway's conversion led her to St. Michael's-by-the Sea, an "orthodox" Episcopal Church committed to an "Anglo-Catholic" worship tradition.  She was baptized and became a member of the church.  At the end of her recounting of her conversion, she expresses a deep sense of how rewarding for her it has been to give herself up to Christ.  She has gained far more than she ever guessed she would.

Dr. Holly Ordway

In historical perspective, Ordway's apologetical approach is one that goes back to the 18th century and colonial times.  It is a tradition that paints life without God in the starkest of terms as being empty, lonely, meaningless, and without a moral anchor.  It is a life lived in a horrible darkness.  The life in Christ, in contrast, is a life of freedom, peace, joy, and service lived in wonderful light.  There is no middle ground between the two ways of living, as Ordway says herself when she began to  seriously consider becoming a Christian.  Having accepted the historical veracity of the resurrection, she could no longer live between the darkness of atheism and the light of faith.  She had to choose.  This apologetical style believes that having a dateable conversion experience is a fundamental spiritual necessity.

Ordway's apologetics presupposes an orthodox faith.  She does not self-describe herself as an evangelical or even, actually, name her brand of faith.  Yet it is clear in ways large and small that her conversion was to a conservative, orthodox faith.  She was attracted to St. Michael's Church because of its orthodox theology as well as its high church liturgical style.  Toward the end of Not God's Type, she writes,

"St. Michael's was a place where I was challenged.  The Bible, it turns out, contains some really hard things.  The preaching and teaching at St. Michael's made me realize that much of what I had held dear as a politically liberal feminist was rooted in false premises and had to be rethought.  That was difficult for me, especially since I liked the image of being a rebel and dissident.  Obedience did not come easily.  But I had accepted Christ as my Lord, my King.  As I had recognized His death and resurrection as real, historical events, so too I now reconized the Holy Scripture as authoritative: God's Word, not man's." (p. 148)

That is to say, her conversion was not only away from atheism to Christian faith but also away from unbelieving liberalism to believing orthodoxy.

There are points at which her conversion process seems to have been just a little too pat and one feels that she "protests too much" about her rational hard nosed conversion.  For example, when challenged to think about how the universe came to exist, she claims that as an atheist she simply wrote off the question as being something we can't know.  Maybe, she thought, causality regresses eternally.  Josh then challenged her thinking with the Kalam cosmological argument, a philosophical argument against a universe that has no beginning.  This was a key moment in her journey because it meant that she had to take the possibility of a First Cause, a God, seriously; and by her own telling, Ordway accepted the argument right away without much if any critical push back (see p. 66).  The Kalam argument is hardly airtight, but she heard it and pretty much immediately "caved in" to it.  Much later in the process, she wrestled with the meaning of the resurrection and asked Josh for some "scholarly" works on the subject.  He gave her two books, one by a leading evangelical scholar, Gary Habermas and the other by the "open evangelical" British scholar N. T. Wright.  These two scholarly works convinced her that the resurrection was a real, objective historical event, and once she accepted the historicity of the resurrection everything "fell into place" for her (pp. 114-119).  Had Ordway sampled the works of other scholars she would have found very different interpretations of the resurrection.  As much as she makes of her hard-nosed, rational quest for truth, Ordway pursued it along a very narrow course and without the intellectual vigor she claims for herself.

All of this does not take away from the importance of the Christian faith for Ordway.  She is clearly a better, happier person for her spiritual journey.  And if the path she has taken represents but one set of faith choices among many, her experience shows that faith remains a valid, important option for people today.  Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography represents another option, more progressive, and very different from Ordway's but nonetheless meaningful and faithful for the difference.

In conclusion, it should also be said that Not God's Type is a relatively easy, quick read.  Ordway's writing style is simple and direct.  It is largely an honest book although, as suggested above, she seems to overstate her former misery somewhat in pursuit of her apologetical agenda.  One suspects, however, that relatively few "hard-nosed" non-believer academic types will find this book particularly persuasive.  Many will find in her conversion to a conservative orthodoxy only confirmation that the choice they face is between unfaith and narrow faith.  Fortunately, there are more choices than that.

Links for Holly Ordway

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Ordway's website, Hieropraxis.
Ordway's blog, Now What?
An interview about her life and experience.
A media packet for Dr. Holly Ordway.

Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

A book review of Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993)

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography is about a person and a place.  It is a spiritual autobiography, written by the poet Kathleen Norris about her spiritual journey.  It is also, as the subtitle says, "a spiritual geography" of the Great Plains of the western Dakotas.  Dakota is well-written and easy to read, marked by its clean prose, lack of pretension, and winsome honesty.  It is filled with aphorisms and quotable one liners.  It is a thoughtful read rather than a hard one.

Dakota is about Norris' life in a small town located on the prairie, Lemon, South Dakota.   Although her family was from Lemon, Norris was not born there and spent only part of her life there.  After her parents died, however, she and her husband moved from New York to Lemon and the High Plains.  Dakota is about that move and her life as both an outsider who didn't grow up in Lemon who is also an insider—everybody knew her parents and her family.

Life on the prairie is different and in our time it is in decline.  The country is vast and empty.  The towns are few, far between, and slowly dying.  The people can be closed, fearful, and defensive.  They often resist even good changes and want to dwell in an era long since past.   Norris describes the inertia that takes hold of their lives.  The world seems to be passing by the rural western Dakota plains.  Early in the book Norris writes, "The western Dakotas feel like America's shadow side, where the economy is not booming but in free fall and rural people have been rendered invisible in a media-driven celebrity culture." (p. xv)  The book, acknowledges the realities of the empty plains and the isolated lives people live there, and then finds numerous ways to celebrate that life.  Norris likens it to learning how to live a monastic life.  The emptiness, the constant winds, the vast distances take on a spiritual quality.

Kathleen Norris

Life on the prairie for Norris is a study in contrasts and contradictions.  The people of Lemon, for example, cherish the past but at the same time fear the truths it holds.  Where others see emptiness, she has found beauty.  What seems to be bleak and boring has taught her how to find more in less.  She learned that there are clear parallels between living a monastic life and living on the prairie.  They both seem to be confining and constraining, and yet they each give birth to unexpected freedom and unlooked for happiness.  When Norris returned to Lemon, she was a religious doubter and skeptic, but the years there have brought her back to the Presbyterian church, her family church.  In spite of the wordiness and sometimes shallow feel of mainline Protestant worship as they practice it in Lemon, she found herself attracted again to the deeper faith also found in worship.  She worked through negative elements of that Protestantism and learned to think of herself as a Presbyterian again.  The fact that the Presbyterian church in Lemon is small was a plus.  She had to take leadership.  She was asked to preach, and  in the course of things, she learned to translate old-fashioned off-putting religious ideas like "sin" into terms that make sense for her.

In sum, Norris discovered that her place of self-imposed exile on the plains became her home, a comfortable place.  The prairie is not what it seems to be.  It seems to be vast and empty.  But when you know where to look, it is actually teeming with life.

Dakota prairie

The chapter "Where I Am" (pp. 107ff), which lies at the center of the book, summarizes many of these themes.  Norris writes, for example,  "Where I am is a marginal place that is at the very center of North America..." (p. 107) It is a place where whites and Indians "live alone together."  While it seems a place of little hope where the human fabric is "worn thin," she embraces its emptiness and writes that, "The willing embraced desert fosters realism, not despair." (p. 110).  In response to this place she calls herself "a fledgling ascetic." The high plains seem to sand down Norris' soul with its vastness, its contrasts, its demands for courage and the almost stifling pettiness it encourages at times.  In her small church, she has had to learn how to preach, and she has heard other lay leaders who do a good job.  Norris thus lives in a place that calls for wisdom from her.  It is a place where she has discovered how to live on the edge of a dying world and find life in the dying.  It is a place that can't be controlled, can't be solved with quick fixes; and in this world she has found liberation and rediscovered her own past.  Her experience in the Presbyterian church is part of that process.  At the end of the chapter, Norris writes, "My own life has opened up more than I thought possible in the Dakota desert, the desert of the monastery and the small town, the desert of a small and fairly conservative Presbyterian church." (p. 122)

The prairie reminds Norris of the ocean.  Living there is like living at the edge of a vast empty and powerful sea.  It can't be controlled.  It can't be tamed.  You must learn to live with it on its terms.  In doing so, Norris has discovered that this oceanic-sized monastery with its rules, regulations, and restrictions—its dangers—is her spiritual home.  Living on the plains for her is a spiritual experience.  One hastens to add that there is no false, wordy piety in this book.  Norris is a doubter, a skeptic, and one who questions everything.  She is impatient with pretense in herself as well as others.

Dakota is written from the edges of modern American society, spiritually as well as geographically.  It is, if anything, the discovery of a counter-culture by someone who was not finding meaning in the fast-paced, fill-life-with-things world of places like New York City.  In Norris' counter-culture, empty is full, slow is good, and small is preferable.  Dakota reminds us that even in our age of conformity and uniformity there is still much that is different in our world.  Hidden here and there are whole communities that the world passes by, but which have something meaningful to teach the rest of us.  Faith in our world today is often hard won and all the more precious for that fact.

Dakota is an honest book that looks life's hard places squarely in the eye and discovers happiness, love, and meaning.  Norris is wise in a self-deprecating way that reflects the true style of wisdom.  She has been able to learn from things that others just endure.  She uses small words well.  There is something of the modern mystic in her.  This is a book well worth reading and reading slowly and thoughtfully.


Kathleen Norris Links

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There is surprisingly little about Norris on line. These two links will take you to some of what is available:
A Bibliography of her works.
The Wikipedia article about her.