A confession: I’m fascinated by Tom Holland. Not Spider-Man. The historian, author of the magisterial “Dominion.”
The intrigue is borne of a strange tension in Holland. Holland self-describes as a “secular, liberal agnostic.” Yet his work, perhaps more than any recent author’s, is reinvigorating appreciation for the profound ways Christianity has shaped Western culture. Holland maintains the West is rooted in Christian ideas and ideals, from universal human rights and concern for the poor and oppressed, to modern science, the modern secular state, and even contemporary atheism. Indeed, according to Holland, everyone in the Western world thinks in Christian terms. Not only that: he believes much of this Christian influence is profoundly good.
One wonders why Holland doesn’t just convert.
At a recent event hosted by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, he tells us. Says Holland:
To convert, I essentially have to cut myself off from reason. If I’m inhabiting the dimension of reason, then I don’t believe. If I surrender myself to a dimension of myth and poetry and transcendence, then I can believe.
I have lots to say about this. (Some of it I’ve already said.) Here, I want to focus on something particular:
Holland’s reflection on his inability to convert reveals a presupposition: faith is irrational.
If commitment to the Christian faith is “cut off from” reason, then instruction in the truths of Christianity is, at best, an arational affair. At worst, Christian “education” is positively irrational. This does seem to be Holland’s view. He takes reason to insist that religious commitment “is a chemical reaction, that everything is material”, that religious belief is all a matter of happenstance, a “culturally contingent” result of evolutionary programming, a bit of sheer luck if one lands on the truth. Reason says religious commitment is unreasonable.
Jesus demurs. Jesus seems to think that reasons mattered, that responsiveness to evidence and arguments is a core part of our humanity. He respected humans as rational agents, even in their profound brokenness. Jesus educates, he does not indoctrinate.
Consider Mark 9. Having just been Transfigured, Jesus descends the mountain into a heated, raucous “great crowd”, and from the fray a grief-stricken father calls to him:
“Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.”
The father’s experience is unfathomable. Caring for a child who suffers in this way—and the description only gets worse—is horrifying. This is evil that undoes the sufferer, that makes life seem hardly worth living. Jesus, surprisingly, seems not moved to compassion but to frustration:
“O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening?” And the father answered him, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
Palpable desperation seeps from the father’s voice. Surely now Jesus’s compassion will emerge.
It doesn’t. Jesus retorts, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.”
The desperate father has walked into a buzzsaw. Jesus’s frustration toward the “faithless generation” is now directed at him, a father who wants nothing more than the restoration of a son he’s never truly known because of a situation that can only be described as tragic. Jesus’s sharp rebuke, delivered through repetition of the father’s very own words, would have cut to the core.
What comes next reveals that Jesus’s prickly response was a stroke of striking interpersonal insight. The father “immediately…cried out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’”
The father has been provoked by Jesus’s provocation. Rather than hiding behind niceties and social expectations and self-preservation, the father now opens the messiness of his heart to Jesus. The father believes Jesus can heal. But he is also unbelieving, a contradiction that often coexists to some degree in the human heart.
Jesus is getting somewhere. The father has confronted his own inner life, and part of the problem is one of belief. He is desperate for something that is more than belief, but not less. He needs to believe in Jesus, but believing in Jesus requires believing that Jesus is who he claims to be.
And it’s this latter thing—belief that—which can be educated.
Jesus does not, in this moment of clarity, manipulate or cajole this man into more belief and less unbelief. Jesus does not exploit the father’s need in order to gain a follower. Nor does Jesus demand that the father see a duck where he had seen a rabbit. Instead, Jesus gives this conflicted, confused, hurting man a reason to believe the vital truth that Jesus is who he claims to be.
How does Jesus do this? By healing his son:
Jesus…rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out…
Jesus respected the humanity of this father. And in dealing with his stricken son, he also deals with the father himself. Jesus treats the father as a rational being ought to be treated: he gives him reason to believe that Jesus is who he claimed to be.
Of course, through this healing Jesus also gives the father reason to trust. In this case, the reason was the same as that needed for right belief. Jesus respects the father’s humanity enough to persuade him of a vital truth rationally, but also deals with him in love by caring for both him and his beloved son.
This is not indoctrination. This is true education.
Jesus, here and elsewhere, interacts with humans in the same way a good poem does. Poetry is rational, but not merely rational. Done well, poetry does more than educate, but not less. In touching our hearts, the poetic touches our minds. The mind, after all, is part of the heart.
Jesus loves us and so respects our rationality. He gives us reasons to believe. But he does far more than just that. Jesus’s poem educates our whole heart. It compels without manipulation.
Holland has not yet understood Jesus. Christian faith needn’t be arational, much less irrational. Jesus loves our minds.
Tim Pickavance, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University and Scholar in Residence at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA, where he also serves as a Ruling Elder. His latest book is Knowledge for the Love of God: Why Your Heart Needs Your Mind (Eerdmans, 2022). Follow his writing by subscribing to Pancake Victim Speaks.