belief

The first time I read Blue Like Jazz I was completely blown away. I felt like it articulated so clearly all the internal struggles I had within the Christian experience. I still like it a lot, though when I read it lately, I find that Donald Miller is actually quite a bit more orthodox than I am skewing these days. Regardless, I still find him funny and real and insightful. Reading it the other day, this passage struck me:

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out that there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove that he does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter and I don't care. I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? "(Page 103, Blue Like Jazz)

I love the spirit of what he's saying. And before I began this trajectory of dissecting my beliefs, I would have agreed with the whole shebang. Now it makes me think about a couple things ...

First, for someone who sincerely believed that there were indeed solid intellectual and factual arguments for the truth of Christianity, I was very disappointed when I went looking for those arguments. The apologists I read just did not seem to make very persuasive points. In fact, I truly think the arguments for Christianity made a bigger dent in my faith than the arguments against it. (Note: I'm not arrogant or deluded enough to believe I somehow have a better grasp on theology than the scores of Christian apologists out there. It's just that few of the ones I've read so far have resonated.)

I've found that the arguments that do seem to resonate aren't really defending Christianity at all. They often begin there. But then the inclination seems to be to back way up ... to revert to defending the very notion of faith itself. And not defending it as something provable. But as something almost higher. Something personal, intangible, experiential and wholly unprovable. Personal experience, I've found, is always the trump card. Who can challenge that? Who even wants to? Certainly not me.

As I've said often (so I'll try not to go on and on about this yet again), for me, it is not quite as simple as a choice between belief and disbelief .... between the existence or absence of God. That's only the first (and okay, actually not-all-that-simple) step. It's the next step that confounds me. The specificity of one belief system or another. The exclusivity of truth. I feel a bit like a broken record sometimes. But these are the things I think about.

All that being said, I still think Donald Miller totally rocks. Orthodox or not.