Living In A Nerd-ish Paradise

I am beginning to feel the results of choosing a secular education over a theological one. Yesterday, I had coffee with a Christian friend in UPenn’s PhD Classics program. We both expressed the relational disjunct between ourselves and the church laity. His sentiments are summarized best in the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss,’ where mine were concerned more with the incongruity between my sentiments and those persons in my Sunday school class.

At CIU, the advantage lay in surrounding myself with thinkers with common intuitive affections. The classroom consisted in an overall effort for honoring and understanding God. At UPenn, my classroom method takes a more surreptitious form, and following a train of thought (as an inchoate intuition) requires manipulating the classroom milieu toward value claims, objectivity, and even the gospel. My friend and I sit in the same class, and our Christian attempts often find mutual support from each other coming at least in the form of head-nods and smiles. But we are dealing with men and women who are at least and usually more psychologically clairvoyant than ourselves, and desirous of situating the discussion around other value sets—the most popular being ideological provocation and novelty, regardless of counter-convention.

We concluded, while sipping our coffee, that our exposure to this atmosphere has placed us in both a precarious and burdensome situation. It is precarious because not one class or books goes by which does not place our Christianity on the slab and hand us the butchering knife. Presently, my friend is feeling the despair that results from this more than myself. Having had occupied this valley of death for some years, I have no intention of returning soon--not to mention that I have crossed the threshold of anti-Christian beliefs so many times now that I’m kind of used to the feeling.

As an example, the question of Jesus’ sacrifice as a historical fact, and not a contrived legend no longer seems as implausible, in the logical sense, as it once did. People have been constructing mythologies for millennia, and it does not take a genius to do it. To point to parallels in the Synoptics, and mark them as a reformulation of the Osiris myth—or the myth of Balder—thus creating a mythology that both explains and infuses meaning into the world to the satisfaction of the masses, is not a wild stretch of logic. Christianity on this model would not be an anomaly, it would be a recapitulation of mythological history. Myths are indeed remarkably identical, so identical, in fact, that hundreds of theories try to explain why.

This is not to say that I don’t believe there are answers to these difficulties. The point is that the number of Christians dealing with these difficulties is very limited. It might not be a wild statement to say that I sit in a category of under 100 Christian students in the world dealing with this sort of material—that is to say, dealing solely with secular mythological theory. (I still look daily for Christian mythological theorists, and have found only traces of them. If anyone knows of anything toss it my way)

As I said, there is also a burdensome factor to it. If my friend and I are Christians, and we are, it follows that we must come to its defense, either by fighting against its opponents or nurturing the Christian mythos. I have chosen the latter road, one which will require a vast knowledge of mythological theory, not to mention a decisive theory of education. Thank God my other class in moral psychology has helped me identify exactly the sort of Platonic/Aristotelian paideia I intend to employ for the rest of my life.

I am not, and never expect to be, a scholar. I have neither the background nor the talent. And for that matter, a hunched back and kidney problems from too much coffee seems comparatively barren to living a normal life with wife and child. But the true burdensome part lies in that discontinuity between my sentiments toward the scripture and most Protestant Christians. The burdensome part is the loneliness. The burdensome part comes, in other words, when I realize that I may never have a wife who can empathize with the psychological repercussions which results from constant exposure to atheistic and agnostic literature of this caliber. The burdensome part comes when it’s time to teach my children the stories of the O.T., and I don’t know what to tell them. I claim agnosticism where many Christians claim certainty. The effects are a difference in sentiment. And when my coffee friend and I walk into a Sunday service expected to feel exactly the same way about Elijah going up into the clouds as everyone else, that embarrassing outsider emotions piques. We only wish that we felt the same. Every day we look for that shooting star of Christian literature which will indefinitely resolve our problem. For all we know, it might be part of our burden to provide such a literature.

As a Christian student of myth, psychology, and philosophy, I am bound to take note of the truth, to notice the obvious and multifarious parallels between narratives, and insofar as my Christian duties are concerned, provide psychological evidence—not to mention assert metaphysical reasons—why Christianity says these repetitions occur. I plan very much to focus my study exactly to this end in regards to story, to call upon all my imaginative and rational powers to make sense of O.T. miracle and narrative. But unlike the normal Protestant Christian, I would not be that bothered over finding out that Elijah didn’t really ascend into heaven via a chariot of fire. I cannot cut off vestigial ( to use Lewis' term in Myth Became Fact) Christianity altogether i.e. i refuse to cut off the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, nor do i want to remove all the miracles of the O.T. I merely want to decipher if all of the miraculous claims in the O.T. are, in fact, miracles. Who but God knows what I will find? But it is this need to find, and not simply to believe what I was told, this difference in dogma, which can result in relational disparity; it can weigh on a man, much as it presently weighs on my coffee friend. Our brothers and sisters can seem far away, and were we to openly confess our troubles, the level of intimacy would deteriorate, resulting, or so we fear, in our demarcation as black sheep.

In short, I do not know what to tell you about facts, but I can certainly express the sentiment of not knowing the facts. I do not have the answers; I am a repository of questions. But during the coffee break, I mentioned in a rather spasmodic episode that maybe this is part of our calling. Maybe my friend and I are supposed to grapple with these questions so that others don’t have to. Maybe we’re not supposed to sleep as comfortably at night so that the souls of our intercessors may have rest enough to bend their knees without falling asleep, so our pastors can spend their hours awake, ready to ward off the wolves, our priests vigilant in administering the sacraments, the layman alert so he can perform whatever service God requires of him with a clear conscience and a ready faith. It was only an ebullient expression, and it appears more poignantly here than it did at the time, but I think there must be something about being part of the educated body of Christ. I cannot believe it makes me much more than a fingernail, or perhaps I may rise to the dignity of a pinky toe, but I consider the burden easy and the yoke light so long as it is in His service. After all, I get to learn for fun. It’s a nerd paradise if ever there was one.

I ask for your prayers, as I am weak, and insufficient for the task. And I ask, moreover, for my friend, who at present deals more readily with the emotions accompanying our temporary vocation.

the K.H.