Recently a grizzled friend was sounding off about people who deconstruct their received religious beliefs. Though not overly rigid in his own belief system, he thinks it frivolous to engage in theological naval gazing while children starve in Yemen. The world needs more people to live their faith, not lose it.
There’s truth in that.
But is doubt something we choose or is it something that happens to us? In his book When Everything’s on Fire, Brian Zahnd writes that being angry at people who doubt is like “being angry at medieval people for dying of the plague” (pg. 14). Most people do not find it very frivolous, after all, to embark on a path that leads to ostracization from their faith community and even financial precarity.
Zahnd believes that instead of sweeping our doubts under the carpet we should seek to understand them. Our individual and collective spiritual crises arise from a convergence of factors, many of them far greater than our personal beliefs and choices.
In the 19th century the philosophies of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud challenged many basic assumptions about human existence. While these three atheistic “Masters of Doubt” are all different, what they had in common was their suspicion of the church’s claim that in Christ “people can be truly motivated by the love of God and love of neighbour” (pg 21). Subtly, they supplanted the Christian story with powerful new meta-explanations for human behaviour, namely power (Nietzsche), money (Marx), and sex (Freud). We are still trying to come to terms with the reverberations.
Zahnd’s point throughout is not to demonize secular philosophers and atheists but to understand why people are deconstructing. Some atheists, he says, are in fact Protest Atheists, honest seekers who object to the humanly-constructed deities that are morally capricious or anti-intellectual.
Moreover, Zahnd does not shy away from critiquing the church. His list of catalysts for deconstruction from within the church is fearlessly non-partisan and brutally honest. Here is a sampling:
- Sham apologetics. Maintaing and selling a faith that’s based on Fundamentalism and biblical literalism (pg 96).
- Disdain for historical Christianity. Explaining away the substance of the Jesus story by allegorizing the heck out of it (Chapter 2).
- Religious fanaticism. It often leads to power-mongering, intimidation and spiritual boasting (pg 121).
- Christian nationalism. He hints at having been complicit in this at one point.
- Textual deconstruction for its own sake. This one may be rare, but sometimes people really do deconstruct as an end in itself. Texts may need to be deconstructed, but they do mean something.
This is indeed a sordid litany of secular and religious pitfalls, again, many of them greater than our personal choices and beliefs. In all of them, Zahnd insists that the narrow path forward is to keep a mystical relationship with Jesus Christ. Stay immersed in the church’s liturgies and sacraments, especially during periods of doubt. Seek an experiential faith in which it is normative for God to speak to us. He recommends reading the Gospels on your knees for six months and asking Jesus to reveal himself, a practice my wife and I have since implemented. Zahnd has some respect for the Charismatic “mysticism for the masses” (pg. 127) but he seems to favour the more wholistic Contemplative mysticism of Hildegaard von Bingen and Thomas Merton.
Recently a spate of dreary alarmist books have attributed the loss of healthy religion to attacks from atheists and/or so-called liberal Christians. On the other side, authors react to a rigid church tradition. Building on the sure foundation of a provocative podcast, they put all the blame on those deluded Fundamentalists. Zahnd’s book probes deeply and manages (mostly) to steer clear of incendiary and simplistic language on both sides, with a certain generosity of spirit for everyone.
I take a perverse pleasure in subjecting books to my version of the Hippocratic Oath—does it avoid doing harm and does the good outweigh the bad? Unfortunately, not all the books I’ve read in the past few years have passed my somewhat arbitrary test. When Everything’s on Fire, however, passes resoundingly. In fact, I place it in the elite category of ‘Book We Had Been Missing.’
Why? Because it presents a vision for the Christian faith that stays true to its ancient mahogany feel—whose sacraments and creeds predate the catacombs—but is at the same time averse to stagnation and unimaginative living. Like Jacob in Genesis it invites wrestling and is dynamic and ever capable of transforming. Idols, as the book makes clear, are static, but God is on the move.
Or, in the words of Zahnd, “Complacency, not doubt, is the great enemy of spiritual development.” And in a time when everything is truly on fire, his book provides a path for developing spiritually despite, and even through, our greatest doubts.