Some statistics seem to come out of nowhere, but then when you think about them they just make sense. For example, people who have lived in many different places were much more likely to vote to remain in the EU than people who had lived in one area their whole lives. Theresa May's famous Conservative Party Conference speech in which she attacked 'citizens of nowhere' may have been a bit of dogwhistle politics, but it encapsulated a real difference in how life is lived.
Similarly, it might initially surprise you to know that a strong predictor of violence is black and white thinking. There are obvious examples: a couple of weeks ago a church leader who had been sacked for bullying made a bold claim that everything in the Bible is black and white. This example might lead us to see violence associated with particular belief systems and hope to convert people to our more liberal worldview. However, every worldview is susceptible to black and white thinking. The scientist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins once described a British Airways employee sacked for wearing a cross as having 'The stupidest face', a patently false statement that betrays the demonising of the other which is a hallmark of black and white thinking.
The opposite of black and white thinking isn't a particular 'enlightened' philosophy, it's a different way of thinking. Academics have coined the phrase 'integrative complexity' to describe the ability to understand that one's views exist in a vast panoply of believing. Not just understanding though, but the ability to still hold one's views and not be overwhelmed by the vastness of the pluralism we inhabit.
As a youth minister I was very keen to make what we did in church as 'worldly' as possible, because I feared that a cosseted young person would get to university and have a faith crisis caused by the shock of reality. Either they would drop their faith as irrelevant or hide in the ghetto of the Christian Union. At 18, it's very difficult to live in the tension of having personal convictions while accepting their contingency, but it's possible. Integrative complexity can apparently be learned. A few years ago Cafe Theologique ran a joint event with Cafe Psychologique in which we invited Dr Sara Savage to present on these ideas. You can find out more about her work at https://icthinking.org/about.
Why would I take up the lion's share of my post telling you about integrative complexity? My answer is this: I think it goes a long way towards describing what I think mature believing looks like, which is the second of my five markers of maturity. In Ephesians 4:14, Paul doesn't list the correct doctrines that a mature believer should have, but he does say that they should be resistant to changing their mind on a whim, or according to fashion. I don't want to push my argument too far, but the image of a person holding firm to what they believe while the storm is raging around them is one that makes sense to me. Eugene Petersen called it A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, in the book of that name. Not that we refuse to change our minds (I've changed mine plenty), but that we find a way to commit to what we believe, while at the same time acknowledging that 'we know in part and prophesy in part' (1Cor 13:9). According to Sara Savage, this kind of humble yet serious faith makes the best kind of peacemakers.
In my PhD I'm going to work really hard to avoid a kind of schema in which Stage A is inevitably followed by Stage B and so on, because life is clearly not that simple. HOWEVER, it is clear that young faith often has a black and white quality about it. The moment of decision feels like crossing a line, and that leads to a person defining everyone by which side of the line they are on.
To be blunt, this is why most suicide bombers are young and/or new converts. Sometimes I see older Christians getting quite wistfully nostalgic for the passion and certainty of their younger believing selves. I understand the allure of that time, but know that God calls you to maturity, in which certainty and uncertainty live together. One thing that the life and ministry of Jesus teaches us is that we are always wrong about where the lines are, if there are any at all.
Even as I write that last sentence, I realise that it sounds like a recipe for apathy: 'We can't really know anything, so why bother? Why get het up about anything?' I hope that those reading this that know me, know that I do indeed get het up about a bunch of stuff. Again, while resisting the temptation to turn life into a simple progression towards enlightenment, I want to assure you that there are cool new winds on the other side of the doldrums of disillusionment. Who said growing up would be easy?
Image by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay
1 comment:
Reading C's Lewis recently he talks about current thinking is not necessarily right but needs to stand the test of time.
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