Faith Seeking Understanding

"...."For God's foolishness is wiser that human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength"

This congregation has lost a great teacher. For those who were fortunate enough, wise enough to avail themselves of Keith Beebe's mind, their minds will never again be made-up in the same way, nor will the Bible be read without echoes of his passionate cadence, nor will their faith be satisfied with mere sentiment, but will seek an understanding ever undergirded by mystery.

We were the last of Keith's students, of course, preceded by generations of undergraduates and graduates now digging throughout the world for the truth which sets people free. Their mentor was a man whose life embodied the Reformed belief that learning joined to piety--the life of the mind as the service of God--was among the highest of vocations. Thus it is to the coincidence faith and learning we turn this morning for the gospel's proclamation, in thanksgiving to God for the gift this teacher who addressed our doubt and deepened our faith. Our text is from Paul's letter to the Corinthians:

"For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God's weakness is stronger than human strength

"Dear Mr. Corn," a letter once began from professor to first year student, "I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith...." The words are Flannery O'Connor's, written to a young poet who had heard her lecture to an English class at Emory University in 1962. Too shy to speak to her after class, he wrote her and received this reply: "I don't know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all, if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief....you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames of reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe." So said we all at one time or another in our struggle with knowing and believing. You think you cannot believe: education and unbelief. How does one so predictably follows from the other?

Some might explain it by way of the psychology of late adolescence. Others would cite the development of critical reasoning which removes from one's mind mere childhood superstitions. Social scientists might contend that such is the necessary rebellion of one generation against another. The more nervous among our ranks might say it is simply the sin of arrogance. But Flannery O'Connor contends that critical thinking plays right into God's hand when it plunges us into great uncertainty as to God's existence or Jesus as the Christ or the Spirit's power to make old things new. "I don't know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all," she writes, "if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief."

To be sure, Mr. Corn had not simply let go of the God he had come to know through his parents and his church and his Bible. Rather, it must have been that other things had begun to seem more reasonable, more believable to his young mind: truth that could be had by way of calculation, problems that his mind had the power to solve, mysteries that, with perseverance, could be eliminated, a wealth of material at his fingertips which was there to be mastered. Could it be that life was made intelligible most deeply and truly by way of the tools of a social scientist or the scientific methods of a biologist or the probing questions of a literary critic or the deft calculations of an engineer...more than by the words of a carpenter who probably existed in the first twenty-nine or thirty years of the politically correct Common Era?

The question before us in every moment of our lives, and yet posed perhaps most acutely in our formative years, is simply this: what is the event, the paradigm, the model, the method by which all other events are made intelligible, the event in light of which all other events are understood and so worth our very lives? Is it the scientific method or a social theory or a literary paradigm or an aesthetic principle-all of which offer a kind of truth and a sort of understanding-or is it Jesus Christ?

Such was the question Paul put to Corinth's population fifty or sixty years after a few so-called wise men more than slouched toward Bethlehem on the advice of a star. Jesus had been born, lived and died on a cross. That was common knowledge. But for some, more had to be said if the truth were to be known. His life, death and resurrection became for them and, they believed, for the whole world, the event that made all other events intelligible. "For since," wrote Paul, "in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation, (Christ crucified), to save those who believe." Still, the world persisted in knowing its gods through human wisdom. To the intelligencia of Paul's age, Christian faith was foolish in light of what they knew to be the case. Their gods were more reasonable to the human mind, their basis for belief more respectable than mere reports of a carpenter traipsing through the Judean hills or hanging on a cross.

For the Greeks, God was most accurately characterized by the word apatheia. The word means apathy, but it means more. It means a total inability to feel. "The Greeks argued," according to William Barclay, "that if God can feel joy or sorrow or anger or grief, it means that some [one] has for that moment influenced God and is therefore greater than [God]." Plutarch said that it was an insult to involve God in human affairs: "God of necessity was utterly detached," he said. The incarnation was revolting to the Greek mind and hence the cross could be nothing more than nonsense.

Given such a God, it follows that the wise man, the wise woman would seek to emulate such detachment. For the Greek, wisdom involved the entertainment of ideas, the dispassionate study of some subject, the detached observation of this or that phenomena. You remember Paul's address to the Stoic philosophers in Athens? They had heard his talk about Jesus and the resurrection and were curious. So, the Book of Acts reports, "They took him and brought him to the Areopagus (where the wise men of the day gathered to debate) and asked him, 'May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.'" Paul looked out at all the statues of idols, especially the one dedicated "To An Unknown God" and proclaimed the God made known in Jesus Christ. When he had finished they said, "We will hear you again about this," as they bowed to the God of Apatheia, the God of Interesting Ideas.

In our day and age, we might speak of the God of Objectivity: "Without bias or prejudice," Webster says, "detached, impersonal." For us, a true scholar is one who steps back from passionate encounter with a subject such that the truth can be discerned. Martin Buber tells the story of the Hasidic Rabbi Levi of Berdychev and how "he broke down the resistance of a follower of the enlightenment who visited him by saying to him time and again, 'But perhaps it is true after all.' Finally he said, 'My son, the great Torah scholars with whom you debated wasted their words on you. When you left them you only laughed at what they had said. They could not set God and God's kingdom on the table before you, and I cannot do either. But, my son, only think. Perhaps it is true! Perhaps it is true after all!'" The God of Interesting Ideas.

I think Flannery O'Connor was saying to Mr. Corn that if one is to be a Christian in this day and age, one must do business with the God of Objectivity, with the unbelief born of intellectual detachment, with a God who has led many an unsuspecting student to lead an interesting life, but a life, nevertheless, without purpose or real passion.

Though O'Connor was saying even more to Mr. Corn about the impetus for his unbelief. For unbelief also follows when the aim of learning is the elimination of mystery. "One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college," she warned, "is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life." She goes on to tell of a teacher whose "best students feel it is no longer necessary to write anything. She said they think that everything can be done with figures now, and that what can't be done with figures isn't worth doing. I think," says O'Connor, "this is a natural belief for a generation that has been made to feel that the aim of learning is to eliminate mystery....Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind."

It was also a great embarrassment to some in the ancient world. In the same breath that Paul called into question the Greeks' desire for wisdom, he condemned the Jews demand for a sign ...a very human inclination to know for sure and, by knowing, to eliminate mystery for the sake of our mastery. If the God of the Greeks was a God detached, the God of those who demand signs is a God so out of hiding as to be in human control: in a word, a God who is no God at all. Besides, what use is such a god if our minds can grasp the way in which the universe was made or the laws which govern nature or the truth within the smallest cell, or the significant factors which make us behave this way rather than that...if we know, then we need no God to keep us from falling for we will hold in our heads the means of our salvation.

But "mystery," writes John Leith, "is by definition, that which is never within our grasp....[It] defies objectification (as to the Greeks) and every effort to grasp it or to get hold of it (as to those who demand a sign)...[for] it is a presence that encounters us in the depths and at the boundaries of existence."

So, wrote Paul, "We preach Christ crucified...the power of God and the wisdom of God." A mystery which defies human wisdom and leaves us ever on the boundary of unbelief. Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians not a God removed and disinterested, nor a God within human control, but the paradox of a God who chooses to be absolutely vulnerable and yet remains totally Other. The wisdom of this God whom we know in Jesus Christ is inextricably bound up in all that is vulnerable to the world's rejection and so, I think, is part and parcel of Mr. Corn's necessary unbelief and even our own. For faith that steels itself against all new ideas, every significant challenge, any slight question, is no faith at all, but "human commandment learned by rote." True faith is given, says Gerhard Ebeling, "at the point where every casual motive...which accompanies faith breaks down and falls away, where faith is exposed to the test of confirmation, where it is deprived of all other power and abandoned by them and exposed, naked and defenseless, to their hostiliies.

For the Christian, the connection of faith to learning has to do with a vulnerability of mind and heart which need not fear any idea because of what Paul calls the "message of the cross," wherein God took the consequences of human wisdom as the cause for our salvation. And, in the same breath, faith and learning has to do with a skepticism which always suspects truth to be Other than what the human mind can grasp.

"Even in the life of a Christian," writes Flannery O'Connor at the end of her letter, "faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when we can't see it of feel it, if we want it to be there, You realize, I think, that it is more valuabe, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but (even in your unbelief) cultivate Christian skepticism (which always says: wait, don't bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read). It will keep you free--not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you."

"For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." Thanks be to God for one named Keith who taught us thus. Amen.

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