Functional Atheism
ChurchContinuing on the subject of The Plateau. There will be a subset of people on the plateau who are functionally atheist. I don't mean that they aren't believers (although they may be), but that the gospel is currently making no discernable impact over their day to day lives. They don't think about it, don't pray and don't seek to bring God glory in the warp and weft of life. They compartmentalise "the Christian bit" into an hour on Sunday. Therefore their approach to life is functionally no different to a non-believer.
Of course this may have a massive impact on a church if functional non-believers are present in any number. Any church leader will be understandably reluctant to conclude that people in his congregation who market themselves as believers in reality don't live like it. Especially if those folk have a degree of influence in the church. It will be all too easy to brush it aside with "of course they are – they are in church every week" rather than to confront the unpleasant truth.
On a related note, the same can be true in Christian Unions. I had a very interesting meeting with some university students at a good-ranking institution little while ago. We talked about whether they approach their study with Christian assumptions. I wanted to know whether they often considered what God thinks about what they were studying. What came out (student workers take note) was that most of them clearly believed core Christian truths and approached life with a Christian worldview but couldn't explain why they believed what they believed. In fact they didn't come close to being able to do so. And hence they had no sense that what they believed was true for all. It was in the realm of personal private opinion or preference. Most couldn't see that believing in salvation in Jesus alone implicitly means that the worldview of their non-Christian friends is incorrect.
They too were functional atheists. In this case they enjoyed worship meetings and all the paraphernalia that goes with having a close Christian community. But they were resting very lightly upon the world around them because they simply couldn't see that what they believed was any more pertinent to life or their study than what anyone else believed. They were Christian relativists. Their Christianity amounted to having a comfortable club that insulated them from the world.
I have commented recently in a couple of situations that believers ought to be able to say why we believe what we believe. Or else we are simply living blindly with someone else doing the thinking for us. Only to have the idea dismissed as "you are just being too intellectual. You are making unreasonable assumption about how much the average person can grasp." Too intellectual I may be, but I contend that this sort of compartmentalisation and lack of desire to have belief that is on a firm footing is a feature of people who have remained on a comfortable plateau, unchallenged. In countries where persecution is rife and being a real believer is dangerous I have no doubt that the percentage of people who are happy to remain as functional atheists is much, much smaller (or nil) and that everyone will be able to say why they believe it. Their answers might be existential – "I met God" – rather than intellectual, but they will be able to answer.
Reader Comments (5)
HI Marcus,
My experience of talking with students and now being one again definitely agrees with what you're saying. So many of us have never even begun to grapple with the question, "How does being a student of X help me to be a disciple of Jesus?". That is a public/private sacred/secular sphere shattering question (though I'm sure there is probably a better way to put it).
Do you think that this is why Dawkins and co. do get some traction with their "dyed-in-the-wool-faith-heads" comments?
Matt
I think I run into two types of unthinking Christian students (as well as the thinking ones, of course!) One type simply doesn't have a clue that they should be connecting all of life to belief in Jesus. They don't ask the "how the gospel impacts every area" question.
The second type is much better, but still difficient. They know how important the gospel is over every area but assume that the way to engage the academy with the gospel is by simply counter proposition. ie, making contributions in class that go along the lines of "you think this but Christianity says the opposite, so there!" Which is likely to make people more antagonistic to the gospel than the first position.
This latter approach is a genuine attempt to be faithful, but it is misguided because it thinks that it has engaged when it hasn't. Or in fact when it has done the opposite becasue it makes it look like Christian students are unwilling or unable to engage in debate at a serious level with those with whom they disagree. This is one reason why you find so few serious Christians doing post grad level work in the liberal humanities. Many simply don't know how to discuss and debate at that kind of level without knee-jerking into a simplictic "you are just wrong cos' the Bible says" approach.
Dawkins always likes to take the worst possible case of unthinking believers and generalise from it. I want to make sure that there are many clear-thinking Christians around. So that most non-believers will know someone for whom Dawkins' case so obviously doesn't hold water that they will realise what a false caricature he bases everything on.
Marcus,
What a clear and useful post. Let's add a few more programmes to the church/CU calendar to sort it out? I don't think that has worked so far has it? My growing convinction is that this is a problem at the foundational level. While the return to Scripture that Neo-orthorodoxy, and the new reformed school has encouraged was a clear reason to many to embrace it, evangelicals were not discerning enough about the fideistic epistemology that it necessarily entailed and rested upon. An absent minded attempt to stress the importance of worldview was the strategy employed to address the blank eyed stares of thousands of Christians, when faced with the most basic of all questions: Why do you believe what you believe? But this was just a bolting of the empty stable door. We must return to the apostles, to the epistemology of Acts, of Peter, Paul and Jesus. It still fascinates me to read how much Jesus relied upon human beings natural ability to think, as he gave them choices hidden in stories and questions.
Marcus,
That's such a good point about the two approaches. I think that engagement must be more than assertion if it's is to properly function as an apologetic. It must (in part) mean getting inside someone's worldview and demonstrating the inadequacies/inconsistencies of whatever approach to achieve their aim as well as the excellencies (including the reasonableness) of the good news.
I find that asking questions is much more helpful than making blank counter-assertions. It allows you to get in underneath what is being said and open up discussion and at the right time to speak. Still there are some theories coming into vogue in the social sciences that are relatively new and I can't find Christians who've thought much at all about them.
It then really require a lot of thought and effort to work out what is being said, see how it compares to the biblical witness and then to critique it on its own terms or by being able to justify another starting point for a critique. It's pretty difficult stuff and does require much more from the Christian student than someone who is happy to go along with anything. I need to keep sight of the grace of God!
Matt
Nice to hear from you Tom.
I completely agree that there is much more to belief than mere intellectual assent. Not least it is belief in a person rather than a set of facts to be adhered to. I also agree that biblical methodology seems to suggest far more than a programme to get students identifying their worldview! How narrow and overly academised (and boring) would that be? There is every possibility of getting people excited about entirely the wrong thing - ie that they understand why they know what they know, rather than about the Lord. The problem with too many evangelical approaches to scripture is that we think that Christian joy is what happens when we grasp an intellectual concept. It isn't.
However for people who are pressing hard after God and wanting to love him with all their heart, figuring out the worldview question is a really helpful thing to do. It doesn't replace love for God and knowledge of the good news, let alone constitute it, but it does help answer pressing questions. Just let our worldview be based on knowing God, not merely responding to arguments. We are quite capable of mentally assenting to arguments without knowing God.
I contend that worldview thinking - indeed all apologetic approaches - is secondary when it comes to knowing God. But that does't mean it isn't helpful.
I also want to contend that although we are taught in narratives, histories, parables and the like, very often what those non-propositional methods are doing is leading to propositions, known facts, about God. I think I sense between the lines of your comment the idea that because the method may not be propositional, that therefore the intended goal of the method can't be either. Let's tell the stories, teach biblical narrative, narratively. But let's not assume that the epistemology of the method and the epistemology of the goal are necessarily the same thing.