Friday, June 26, 2009

Heart and Mind

An idea - an idea about myself and my tendency to unbelief - became clear a moment ago. I find it almost impossible to believe a thing if I do not understand it fully. This is why I began to write about the Atonement. It was no dry, academic exercise. Rather I want to believe but find an inability to understand a barrier to it. I want to believe that, Christ died for my sins. But I don't know what this means; I don't know what precisely I am to believe. Thus I do not fully believe.

I suspect this is a fault. (Indeed it must be a fault if rank-and-file believers believe with good reason, as I suppose they do.) What others pass over with a quick and sure intuitive grasp makes me trip and fall. I immediately begin to analyze, and when analysis fails, belief wavers. Moreover, even if I my analysis of, say, the Atonement were to satisfy me at the moment, it isn't at all unlikely that at a future time it will not. But I don't think it wise to rest faith upon a foundation that might shift.

This is an existential problem, not a theoretical one. But if I know me, I'll continue to pursue the theoretical end, though it have no confidence that it will bear fruit.

2 comments:

David B. Ellis said...


I suspect this is a fault. (Indeed it must be a fault if rank-and-file believers believe with good reason, as I suppose they do.) What others pass over with a quick and sure intuitive grasp makes me trip and fall.


What I suspect is that you're giving other believers too much credit and yourself too little.

David B. Ellis said...

There is a very simple explanation of the atonement which, unfortunately, believers are not generally much inclined to consider:

That the man the early christians thought was the messiah was crucified and they, if they were to continue to consider him the messiah, must fit that into their theology in some way.

What they came up with was the very problematic, humanly invented idea of the atonement---which has troubled thinking christians ever since---for very good reason, it makes no sense.