Reflections on a Draft Theology (i)

The Fellowship of Presbyterians is a conservative/evangelical Presbyterian Church (USA) reform movement that is seeking new directions for its wing of the denomination.  It was formed in the aftermath of the controversial decision to no longer automatically forbid the ordination of gays and homosexuals to the ministries of the denomination.  In preparation for its "covenanting conference" to be held in Orlando on January 18-20, the Fellowship has prepared a document entitled, "Draft of the Theology of the Fellowship of Presbyterians and the New Reformed Body," which sets down in preliminary form a proposed theological orientation for the Fellowship—and for the new Reformed denomination that will evidently result from the Orlando conference.  It deserves careful attention by the whole denomination, and what I would like to do here is to reflect on its contents using them as a springboard to explore some contemporary theological issues.  I can't do this all at once and will add to this series of reflections as time allows and the spirit moves.

The immediate goal of the Draft is to initiate theological discussions within the Fellowship of Presbyterians looking to reclaim its Reformed heritage as an essential step to forming a new Reformed body from the evangelical wing of the PC(USA).  Its larger purpose is to foster discussions that will lead to a theological consensus and a spirit of theological friendship among those engaged in giving birth to this new Reformed body.  Its perspective is thus evangelical and Reformed.

The Draft begins with a confession of failure on the part of the PC(USA).  We have "severely weakened our worship and witness" by our "casual affirmation of our theological heritage."  We are "squandering the gifts our confessional heritage could give us."  The confession is an inclusive one, which is to say that the Draft recognizes that the evangelical wing of the denomination bears its own responsibility the sad state of the denomination's theological condition.  The Draft proposes to address this situation by promoting discussion leading to a theological consensus among Pc(USA) evangelicals concerning the essentials of the Reformed faith.  One of the main tasks of the new Reformed body that will emerge from the Fellowship is to foster this consensus.  "Identifying essentials," according to the Draft, "necessarily and rightly focuses our theological conversation and our life together."

Wordle for the Theological Draft document

It is clear that the authors of the Draft believe that our failure to ground ourselves in our confessional heritage and our loss of theological consensus is a key reason for the decline of PC(USA) churches.  It is for this reason that the Fellowship has issued the Draft.  It intends to build the future of its proposed new Reformed body on a firm  consensus rooted in the classical confessions of the Presbyterian church.

The Draft's analysis of what is needful for reclaiming the future does not appear to be based on any empirical data.  The decline of our churches is evident, but the causes are multiple and not clear.  They are often at least partly local as demographic changes leave some churches high and dry while others benefit from being located in areas of growing population.  It is not evident on the face of it that reclaiming a particular theological heritage will address actual causes of decline.

The Draft's analysis, furthermore, is built on the unstated assumption that liberalism is the primary cause of mainline church decline.  Liberal churches decline whereas conservative ones don't.  Evangelicals have long argued that in order to move forward, we must reclaim the classical doctrines and faith of the church.  The authors of the Draft look to PC(USA)'s Book of Confessions as our treasury of classical Reformed faith and write, "The documents that compose The Book of Confessions are not seen in our rear view mirrors as road markers of where the church has been; they are seen through our windshield as faithful and sure guides for our perilous road ahead."  The problem is that in our age of advancing secularity even the most conservative and faithfully evangelical churches are beginning to decline.  The Southern Baptist Convention has in the last decade passed a tipping point and the pace of statistical decline is slowly accelerating.  By the same token, evangelical megachurches are losing their momentum of growth and beginning to show indications that the boom times are coming to an end. Evangelical fervor, seriousness of purpose, and deep commitment to their churches has heretofore shielded many of their congregations as well as their denominations from the creeping secularity of our times.  Creeping secularity is slowly rendering these traits ineffective.  And, in any event, it is not at all clear that the theological orientation of evangelical churches in and of itself had much to do with their staying power down to the present.  Their deep sense of conviction seems to have been much more important.

It seems, then, that the Fellowship of Presbyterians is charting its future course and putting its hope on an assumption that does not bear out in the real world of church decline.  We are in a new age.  It is secular in nature.  Reclaiming our theological heritage will not ultimately address the challenge of secularity.  This is not to say that theological literacy is unimportant.  It is important, but it is not the key factor in decline.  Large segments of the church have always been "theologically challenged" even in ages when the church grew almost automatically.

Reflections on Hecht, "Doubt: A History"

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History.  New York: HarperOne, 2003.

Doubt: A History runs to 494 pages of text, although "lumbers" might be a better term than "runs" for a tome that covers some 2,600 years of what the author calls the history of doubt.  She covers doubt in every age since and in Asia as well as Europe and the West.  Her catalogue of doubters includes many who might obviously be included but just as many, including Jesus, that one would not normally expect to find in such a history.  Hecht generally tells her story clearly and logically, maintaining a clear chronology of doubting.  Still, it is a "dense" read made more difficult by the fact that she seldom recalls for the reader the purport of doubters and schools of doubt previously introduced.  For those of us who read the book over a period of weeks, this means either a lot of going back to refresh our memories or just skipping over references to the various Greek philosophies and the myriad of figures discussed many pages back.

Doubt: A History is one of those books that you have to want to read, but given that motivation it is well worth the effort.  In a sentence, Hecht successfully opens the reader's eyes to the breadth and depth of doubt in its many different forms and, in fact, a great deal more than just doubt itself.  If you are interested in doubt, this is a book for you.

That being said, there is one aspect of the book that requires special review and reflection.  The author never defines doubt, not in a sharp, crisp, and precise way that would set limits to her investigation of doubt—which is why the book is so long and dense.  Hecht throws in whatever might even vaguely have something just possibly to do with doubt, and there are many times when she confuses doubt with other things, which sometimes have little to do with actual doubt.  The book thus is not just or even primarily a history of doubt.  It is, rather, a history of contrarian thinking, especially thinking that cuts against the grain of religious orthodoxies.  Depending on one's point of view, the lack of a clear definition of doubt is either the greatest defect or one of the most important contributions of Doubt: A History, which is a point that I would like to explore further here.

Let me start by doing what Hecht doesn't do, define "doubt". According to dictionary.com's definition, doubt has to do with uncertainty.  A doubter is one who is unsure, questioning, hesitant, perhaps even suspicious and mistrusting. It's Latin root, dubitāre, means exactly that: "to waver, hesitate, be uncertain."  This is a reasonable definition, one that accords with our general popular usage of "doubt."  The thing is doubt doesn't decide.  Once we decide we no longer doubt.  Hecht does not make this distinction, hence Doubt: A History is not about religious or philosophical uncertainty so much as the emergence of anti-orthodox thinking.  Her hidden assumption is that unorthodox thinking arises from doubt, which is certainly true—sometimes.  But, unorthodox thinking also comes from conversion experiences (Paul on the Damascus Road) that replaces one belief with another in a way that has nothing to do with doubt.  And some contrarians are born contrary.  They never did "buy in" to the orthodox line.

It is a serious weakness of Doubt: A History that it does not describe historically the process of belief turning into doubt then moving on to a new belief.  That would be a fascinating story, although it would admittedly be a difficult one to write.  It is very difficult to study the mental processes of historical figures because historians are dependent on documents and sources, and usually all that is left historically is the finished product of one's thinking—not the process by which the figure arrives at his or her position.  Still, it would have been helpful for Hecht to examine more rigorously the ways in which doubt contributes to unseating orthodoxy.

Instead of focusing on doubt, the author actually writes about a much larger complex of historical phenomena associated with unorthodox thinking.  These phenomena include disbelief and unbelief, secularity, naturalism, "evidentiary rationalism," irreverence, heresy, sensuality, "cosmopolitan relativism," unconventional ways of thinking about God e.g. (p. 231), and almost any other thinking that stands over against orthodox religion.  At the very end of the book (p. 486-487), she lists "seven key doubting projects," which include (1) science, materialism, and rationalism; (2) nontheistic transcendence programs; (3) cosmopolitan relativism; (4) graceful-philosophies; (5) the moral rejection of injustice; (6) philosophical skepticism; and (7) the doubt of the believer.  These seven "projects" provide a rough guide to the contents of the book and of them only the last one clearly is about doubt.  One could argue that the scientific method is based on doubt, but I'm not sure that it is correct to do so.  The scientific method requires the scientist to suspend judgment until there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment. Maybe that is a form of doubt, but if so it has nothing inherently to do with unorthodox thinking, which is Hecht's focus and, in fact, is entirely orthodox according to the scientific method.  That doesn't seem like doubt so much as simply waiting to decide.  The problem is that Hecht gives us no guidance on how decide whether the scientific method utilizes doubt or not.

Granting that the author's approach has provided us with a useful description of unorthodox thinking through the centuries, does her failure to define doubt matter?  If the reader is interested in the larger complex described in the book, then the answer is, "No."  If, on the other hand, one really does want to look at doubt historically, then it does matter.  One reason, at least, that it matters is because Hecht tends to conflate doubt with unbelief, and they are very different things.  In the Christian tradition, doubt is always an element of faith.  The "true believers" are not people of faith.  They know.  They're sure.  They have it in the can or in the bag.  They don't live by faith but rather by a set of rigid doctrines, which all too easily become idols of their own cognitive creation.  We are, instead, called to faith, which means we don't have all the answers but we trust God.  We understand the human limitations of the Bible, but we trust that God is present in it speaking to us.  There is an element of uncertainty, a healthy dose of continuing doubt, which we accept with quiet equanimity trusting in the faith we hold.  Doubt and unbelief are hugely different things.

Indeed, "unbelief" isn't even a useful category unless a person truly doesn't believe anything—and the rejection of all beliefs is itself a belief leading us back to the basic fact of the human condition: we all believe in something.  It's the way we're built.  By "unbelievers," what Hecht really means is people who don't believe the things taught by orthodox religions.  They are contrarians, as already mentioned above.  Sometimes, however, contrarians can be as much "true believers" as orthodox folks can be, just not in orthodoxy.  By confusing unbelief with doubt, Hecht implies that doubt falls into the province of contrarian thinking, and even though she does make the point that doubt is related to religious faith the impression left is the opposite.  She leaves the impression that doubt leads away from religion when in fact it frequently takes one in the opposite direction, toward faith.

Because Doubt: A History is a tome in search of a unifying theme, in the end it is more of a history of philosophy sprinkled heavily with dashes of the history of theology, which emphasizes discontinuities and departures from the accepted norms of philosophical and theological thinking in each age.  It is hardly surprising, then, that Hecht discovers continuities in doubt because they are actually the continuities of philosophical reflection that keep reappearing in each generation.  And that is one of the things Hecht contributes to the study of philosophical and theological reflection, the fact that contrarian thinking plays an important role in both types of reflection.  Contrarian thinking generates a great deal of creativity, some of which is born out of doubt and some of which is driven by contrarian thinkers being as sure of their views as their opponents are of theirs.

I must confess that I expected a book that told the history of uncertainty rather than one that described the story of conflicting certainties.  So, I was disappointed.  It's not a bad book.  In fact, it's a decent one.  It's just not really about what it advertises itself to be about.  That's all.