Oily politicians are always harping on about “kitchen table” issues and the alleged conversations that take place around them, mostly as a sop to those they have little to do with and even less knowledge of, but whose vote they covet.
Then again, I have my own kitchen table story to tell. And it has the added advantage of actually being real. It happened years ago while having lunch in the kitchen of a college friend’s parents in suburban Chicago.
As it was, his parents were dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists who insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The problem, at the time, was that I was a student at Yale Divinity School, a known liberal bastion. I might as well have had the mark of the beast imprinted on my forehead.
On the other hand, they genuinely liked me. It was just that I was misguided. At numerous points in our wide-ranging discussion, any comment I made that didn’t fit exactly with their well-defined belief system would be met with a slight, disapproving shake of their heads, as if in pity and disbelief. One could almost visualize a thought-bubble over their heads that read: “Oh, he’s ‘of the world.’”
Later on, a friend from divinity school offered wise counsel. His father, the son of a fundamentalist preacher, once advised him, tongue-in-cheek, that in dealing with a fundamentalist, “smile and lie a lot.” His point? That you’re never going to convince a fundamentalist that he or she is wrong. It’s you who is always playing for the wrong team. It’s that black or white.
Now, as it happens, this table talk occurred at a significant moment in my religious development. And at the time, I found it both amusing and disturbing, in equal measure. After all, my commitment to God was real. To then be told I was, in effect, “of the world,” seemed wrong to me. As well as a bit overly judgmental.
Perhaps a quick review of my background is in order. As a child I attended church regularly. However, the church I attended, part of the United Church of Christ, hadn’t touched my soul in the slightest, or so I thought at the time. The God they worshipped seemed merely a “big idea,” of intellectual interest mostly – a God who just wanted us to be good.
Then there was the fact that my father, a deeply religious man, was the product of five generations of pastors, including uncles and great uncles. Not only was his father a pastor, but so was his mother’s. Christian ministry was the family business.
But when I left for college, I was determined to avoid anything having to do with church, a project I pursued with extreme prejudice. As a suburbanite and child of the 60s, I decided the whole Christianity thing was bourgeois nonsense. (I was a lot smarter back then.)
Until I had a religious experience in my mid-to-late 20s. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I discovered that God was not just an idea but existentially real. And that this had implications. I started reading a lot, mostly philosophy, psychology, and religion.
In those days, I’d say I was closer to a radical unitarian, or a Jungian even, and considered all religions as limited expressions of divine truth. (Like I said, I was really smart back then.)
By the time I arrived at divinity school, I was a full-blown skeptic of traditional Christianity though, perhaps incongruously, a newborn believer. I found my fellow students limited in understanding and mostly uninteresting.
It was around this time that the aforementioned kitchen table talk took place. Yet, after a year or so in divinity school, my views had started to change. I had a few professors whose teachings mattered to me.
One in particular was Professor Paul Holmer, a world-renowned authority on the 19th century Danish philosopher (and theologian), Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s main theme had to do with how one comes to faith as well as the development of Christian character in varied individuals.
He loosely identified three stages of development: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. He famously argued that the movement from the aesthetic to the moral and religious stages requires what he called a “leap of faith.”
His position, at least for me, helped put meat on the bones of the Christian dictum that “Christ meets us where we are.”
A child, for instance, doesn’t learn math by first being introduced to trigonometry. He starts with rudimentary addition and subtraction; he first learns that 2+2=4 (with apologies to Orwell).
Similarly, we don’t learn to read and write by studying Shakespearian sonnets. We begin with “See Jane run.” At least I did.
Though not an exact analogy, we learn Christianity in similar fashion. Recall the Apostle Paul’s remarks to the church in Corinth where he talks about having fed them at first with milk, not solid food, for the simple reason that they were not yet ready for anything stronger.
Along these lines, I remember with clarity a friendly debate one afternoon at school between Professor Holmer and the highly respected evangelical author and teacher, Carl Henry.
Professor Henry started things off by presenting a very thoughtful and erudite defense of evangelicalism. After he was done, it was Professor Holmer’s turn. And I will never forget his words.
“The problem I have with your theology,” he began, respectfully, “is that it puts the truth too easily on the lips of too many.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. It was a brilliant response, suggesting that one must grow into a mature faith. We don’t, in other words, instantly or automatically become fully formed Christians. It takes time, struggle, and commitment. Just parroting Christian truths, even if true, doesn’t mean we have incorporated them into our being or that we have any deep understanding of what they actually mean for us and for our world.
Consider a child’s perception of love. It’s unquestionably real, but it’s also by its very nature innocent and naïve. But applying this simple love amidst the complexities of our broken world is a different matter altogether. Only a mature adult, having experienced the vagaries of everyday life, knows how challenging it is to effect a child-like love.
Today, as I consider the path my spiritual life has taken me, I now accept much, if not most, of what my friend’s parents had to say those many years ago.
The problem I have with their approach, however, is that they didn’t seem to appreciate how God works in and through us admittedly imperfect creatures.
At the time, I had only just begun a new relationship with God in Christ. And it was this relationship, and not any perfected understanding of that relationship, that mattered most.
Which is to say that if we remain constant in our relationship with God, we inevitably gain a deeper understanding of the Other. Our views change. We change. We grow in spiritual maturity (sanctification). And it is likely we will come to accept many aspects of the faith we previously may have rejected.
Put only slightly differently, our faith lives don’t stop at baptism, or at the “altar.” Rather, baptism marks but the beginning of a lifetime of upward growth in the person of Jesus Christ.
If I had listened to my friend’s parents and concluded that I was indeed “of the world,” I might have rejected Christianity altogether. I might have rebelled against it. I might have decided I could never fit in with its beliefs. I might have given up.
Fortunately, I stuck with it, stuck with my newfound relationship with God. As I now look back on my former beliefs, I’ll admit to being a bit embarrassed by them. But thankfully God didn’t abandon me to my ignorance. He led me, often in fits and starts, to the point where today I embrace most of the historic Christian witness.
It’s true, I did challenge them, test them, but also grew into them. I came to believe in them not because I had taken them at face value or accepted them uncritically, but because over time I came to see that, of all of the ways of understanding life, they speak most clearly to me, to what I consider the truth of life. They have become, in essence, my very identity.
Despite my checkered spiritual life, and the back alleys it may have taken me, I’m the first to argue that God’s truth, unlike my personal understanding of that truth, is not malleable or subject to human interpretation. Rather, it is our relationship to that truth that changes and reorients. God’s truth, in short, is no less true whether we choose to accept it or not.
Thus, the church must never bend to contemporary beliefs or fads, perhaps especially my own. For Christian faith is not founded on our passing, temporal perceptions, but on God’s unchangeable and eternal truths.
So that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it – as slow a learner as I admittedly, and unquestionably, remain.