The Day I Lost Faith in Good Arguments

No one would fault you for assuming that private Evangelical universities score fairly low on diversity of ideas, particularly in their theology departments. Case in point, Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, should be, on all counts, the most ridiculous case of academic groupthink on the planet. If you knew nothing about the school, just its name and location should be enough to condemn it without further ado.

But you’d be wrong.

This odd little bubble of old-school faith healing and conservative Evangelicalism has a theology department with perhaps the most diverse faculty in the known universe. Its professors hail from everywhere—Methodist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed, Messianic, Eastern Orthodox, and Catholic traditions—and though they generally get along, they have some serious disagreements on critical points of doctrine.

I was unaware of this dynamic when I entered their graduate program in theology, but damn was I excited to find it this way.

I was raised in a Mormon family whose roots reach back to the founding members of the LDS Church, so leaving Mormonism as a teenager meant having good arguments ready for my friends and relatives when they pressed me on my newfound faith, and arguing the faith became second nature. I spent most of high school competing in formal LD debate, and by the time I hit college, I was ready to spar with the best and brightest of the Evangelical noosphere.

Amid the fun, about halfway through, I realised something disturbing. I was surrounded by professors who had devoted their lives to pursuing the strongest arguments for their respective traditions; masters of their fields, brilliant philologists and historians, most of whom were ordained pastors (these were practitioners, not mere library nerds), all claiming to read the same Bible, yet they all disagreed.

Yeah, no kidding. This is Evangelical Protestantism; of course, everyone disagreed. But the fact that these, the most educated of the bunch, still held opposing conclusions on some critical points of doctrine made the fun turn sour.

Why? Because I doubted that I would ever reach their level of expertise, and even if I did, I would be no better off. If all the experts with the best arguments in the room disagree, then it follows that something more than good arguments is needed.

What I couldn’t kick was the thought that, regardless of my best efforts, my search would be in vain; in the end, my chances of arriving at the truth based on my own genius would be a roll of the dice—a sheer coincidence at best.

There is a key phenomenon about argumentation that seems to elude many. In short, it is not enough to gather as many facts about a particular subject and then argue to a correct conclusion. It would be nice if this were how it worked, but it rarely does. Put succinctly: the facts don’t settle the argument; the argument settles the facts.

Sad but true.

Unacknowledged biases behind arguments predetermine how facts are interpreted. Even acknowledged biases (one cannot help but have a bias) rarely alter outcomes. As anyone who has competed in formal debate knows, it’s very easy to take the same set of facts and argue convincingly in opposing directions. And when it comes to a subject as mammoth as Christianity, there are no limits to the diversity of conclusions.

Along these lines, it’s also important to consider what it means to ‘be in the truth’ as opposed to ‘being right’. Can a good argument ever take one further than just being right? One can be technically right about something but nowhere near the truth of it.

Soren Kierkegaard described this with his idea of the truth as subjectivity. In dealing with spiritual truths, the only way to know the truth is to be in it, not to hover outside of it, describing its attributes; one needs a thoroughgoing, passionate, inward relationship with it (essentially the difference between subjectivity versus mere objective knowledge). Kierkegaard used faith as one of his primary examples. Paraphrased, he asks: Who possesses the truth of the Christian faith more, the one who can recite correct information about God, or the one who lives in passionate subjectivity to God?

If one constructed the greatest possible explanation of faith in God—technically correct in every jot and tittle—it would be easy to remain a universe away from genuine faith in God. As the book of James notes, do not the demons also believe in God and tremble? They are fully aware of the facts about God, but nobody confuses this with having faith. Both demons and St. Peter confessed Christ as the Son of God, yet Christ told Peter that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him, but the Father (Matt 16:17). Both confessed Christ, but what a difference in confessions!

You get the point.

What saved my faith from jading, like many of my fellow students at the time, was realising that an accumulation of good arguments was not the sole means by which historic Christianity arrived at truth.

My brand of Evangelicalism depended essentially on sola scriptura. The journey from kerygma to dogma was as simple as reading the Bible and deciding for yourself what it meant; chances of getting it right improved slightly with ecstatic experiences or learning Greek, but ultimately, you were on your own, and that was okay because you were awesome.

But the Early Church had no such delusions. Case in point:

In Acts 15, we find the apostles gathered at Jerusalem to tackle the question concerning the Judaizers. Which, if any, of the 613 regulations contained in the Mosaic Law were necessary for gentile converts to obey? It was not up to Paul alone, or Peter alone, or anyone alone, to decide the truth of the matter—regardless of their individual authority or intelligence. It was a matter for the Holy Spirit to reveal. As it happened, He chose to reveal it through the process of prayer and debate among the Holy Fathers, as the Apostle James states when writing the formal decision of the council, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things…” (Acts 15:28).

Here, the precedent was set for church councils to be the method for discerning the Holy Spirit regarding weightier matters of the faith (dogmatic concerns). And church councils were just the beginning. As Eugen Pentiuc put it,

“The apostolic tradition has found expression not only in the apostles’ witness to the Christ-event [kerygma], but also in the ecclesiastical tradition of the dogmas; and not only these discursive modes of expression, but also in the polyphonic testimony of the liturgy.”

This shows up even in the otherwise “discursive mode” of debate in church councils. For example, during the first Council of Nicaea, a critical impasse in the Arian controversy had been reached. Both sides of the debate clung to their well-reasoned interpretations of Scripture, and both claimed to represent the original tradition. What ultimately helped to break the deadlock (among others) was attention to creedal elements in ancient baptismal rites and the support of revered ascetics such as Saint Anthony, whose later endorsement strengthened the Orthodox position.

Long before Kierkegaard introduced the idea of truth as subjectivity, Christians recognized the limits of good arguments and sought reassurance from those who were unquestionably close to God, such as Saint Anthony.

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Here’s the point. The truth of Christianity is not available at the lowest market price of scholasticism, philosophical system building, Greek mastery, or other best-argument approaches, but rather encompasses everything from Scripture to doctrinal definitions, creeds, canons, liturgy, iconography, hymnology, sacraments, ascetic practices, and the lives of the saints, etcetera. Having the truth of Christianity is not dependent on one factor or the other, but on the “polyphonic testimony” of Tradition, or as the Orthodox call it, “Holy Tradition”.

You will hear wonderful and exciting, well-reasoned arguments for this or that theological belief from the greatest thinkers of the age, but keep in mind, there is always another side to the story, always another well-reasoned interpretation of the facts. How will one decide which represents true Christianity?

Personally, I lost faith in my good arguments back in grad school; my biases were too seductive and clever to allow for true clarity of both my chosen dogmatism and scepticism. I still love a good theological, philosophical, historical, metaphysical debate over facts, but without reliance on Holy Tradition, winning or losing always amounts to an increase in pride and confirmation bias, not in humility and truth (which are kind of the point of the Christian faith, I think).

This might not seem like the sort of article to end with a quote from Freud, but this one hits:

“If one regards oneself as a sceptic, it is well from time to time to be sceptical about one’s scepticism.” (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, XXX)

Doubt your doubts.

Thanks for reading!