Sing Us a Song of Joy: Saying what We Believe in an Age of Unbelief

Sing Us a Song of Joy

Saying What We Believe in an Age of Unbelief

Philip W. Eaton

SING US A SONG OF JOY

Saying What We Believe in an Age of Unbelief

Copyright © 2018 Philip W. Eaton. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1449-1

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-1451-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-1450-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Eaton, Philip W.

Title: Sing us a song of joy : saying what we believe in an age of unbelief. / Philip W. Eaton.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-1449-1 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-1451-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-1450-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian life—United States. | Christianity and politics—United States. | Apologetics. | Title.

Classification: BX1406.3 .E92 2018 (print) | BX1406 (ebook)

Manufactured in the USA February 20, 2018

Scripture quotations taken from the Revised English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1989. All rights reserved. 

Primary Wonder, by Denise Levertov, from SANDS OF THE WELL, copyright © 1994, 1995, 1996 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Shape of the Fire, 1947 by Theodore Roethke; from COLLECTED POEMS by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: We’ve Got It Covered . . . Well, Almost

Chapter 2: The Starting Point

Chapter 3: Shaped By Stories

Chapter 4: Holy Ground

Chapter 5: Struck By Grace

Chapter 6: Waking Up Amazed

Chapter 7: What About Mystery?

Chapter 8: The Ancient Paths That Lead To What Is Good

Chapter 9: Called To Interpretive Attention

Chapter 10: What Is Water?

Chapter 11: Troubled Conversation

Chapter 12: Getting To Good

Chapter 13: Strutting And Fretting: Our Hour Upon The Stage

Chapter 14: Living Water

Chapter 15: No Longer Thirsty

Chapter 16: A New King Has Arrived

Chapter 17: Building Our House On Rock

Chapter 18: Renewing Our Minds: The Transformation Of Character

Chapter 19: The Dawn Of A New Day

Conclusion

Bibliography

For Sharon

my ever-faithful encourager

who brings me back to earth with a gentle smile

who gives me the gift of enduring love

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept

as we remembered Zion.

On the willow trees there we hung up our lyres,

for there those who had carried us captive

asked us to sing them a song,

our captors called on us to be joyful:

Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

—Psalm 137:4

Preface

This book began out of a deep yearning to say what I believe—even up against our age of unbelief. To say something about the things that matter most has always seemed critically important to me. I need to talk, or write, or carry on a conversation around a dinner table. I believe putting words to experience clarifies our view on the world. And here’s perhaps a driving principle for me: Finding words can actually open us to faith, deepen our faith, expand both our experience and understanding. And of course saying something is the key to sharing with others what seems to us profoundly good. I believe everyone feels this urge—to find the words, adequate words, perhaps vibrant words—to communicate what we believe most deeply.

On the other hand, when words go flat and lifeless, as they inevitably do, faith has probably gone lifeless too. The two go hand in hand. That happens a lot in our age of unbelief. The prevalent pressures of skepticism seem to suck the life out of our spiritual lives. We’re thrown on the defensive. We grow limp, timid, shy about our faith, confused, perhaps a bit wistful for what once was, embarrassed. Surely it’s not easy to believe these days. We know it’s not easy to say something about what we believe.

But here’s the deal: I write this book on the hunch that we all, Christian believers and ardent skeptics alike, somewhere along the journey, catch a glimpse of the living God in our midst. I know that may sound naïve, not up with the times, but it’s true. There are lots of ways this encounter happens, as we shall see, but it does happen. It has happened all through human history. That leads me to say, confidently, that God just magnificently exists, whether or not we are confused by skepticism. The extreme doubt of our age does not determine God’s existence—or God’s choice to enter our human space. That’s a basic premise in what follows. This conviction actually flips things upside down. Maybe this was among the deepest of my discoveries as I sought to find my own words to say what I believe. Yes, God magnificently exists—whether I’m in the mood or not.

And further, when we catch those glimpses of God’s presence, we are struck with wonder. We know we have been brushed by grace. We want to bow down, perhaps only for a moment, but we know we have walked on holy ground. With Moses, we want to take off our sandals. When we hear that special voice, summoning us into mystery, we bend forward, stand on tiptoe. We are eager to hear more. Everything begins with this encounter with the living God. It takes a lot of denial, even in our time, to dismiss this extraordinary intrusion of grace into our ordinary daily lives. This uncommon presence is amazingly common. And so our question becomes: How do we open ourselves more fully to this intrusion of God’s presence? That’s the question we want to tackle, philosophically, theologically, and practically.

"Signals of transcendence"—that’s what sociologist Peter Berger calls this surprising, sometimes startling appearance.¹ The great nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claims the world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like the shining from shook foil.² The philosopher Charles Taylor labels these signals an invitation into a place of fullness. ³ There is mystery here, to be sure. In the twenty-first century, of course, we do everything possible to whisk away what we consider the fog of mystery. And yet, this cropping out of God’s presence continues to surprise us. We are invited into mystery. This mystery promises something beyond our limited rational grasp. When we experience the surprise of joy, to use C. S. Lewis’s words,⁴ from childhood on, we are left with a deep yearning to return to this seminal experience. Yes, this encounter with the living God is the story human beings have told throughout history. It is my own story. It is the story I want to map out in the pages ahead.

This book has been a journey for me, an intellectual journey, to be sure, but also a spiritual journey. I am trained as a culture-watcher. I have learned something about the task of examining the texts that define culture. And so I set out on this journey to scrutinize the secularization of Western culture. This secularization project, begun somewhere around the fifteenth century, has swept across our landscape with breathtaking speed, over the last decade, even over the last five years. It is now complete. I am among those who claim our culture is pervasively secular. We live with both the benefits and the damages of that secularization.

As I plunged once again into the literature of suspicion of our age—a literature that seeks to challenge all the old presuppositions about how to live—I discovered once again the familiar story of disintegration of culture. At this point in the history of the Western world, things seemed to come apart at the seams. That’s what our writers tell us. Such coming apart doesn’t feel good. People get hurt. Confusion is set loose. We lose a common center. In the process, our culture decided that each individual has the power to define what is true and good and beautiful. The forces then became fiercely centrifugal, scattering us in far-flung places, dividing us, splintering our common life. We each become convinced we are the king of our own little kingdoms, and of course the king of the universe is sidelined, marginalized, wiped off the map. These are the consequences of this massive historical shift toward the secular. The results have not been happy.

I must admit I’ve grown weary of this story of disintegration. I am tired of pushing the rock of faith up a mountain of resistance. I’m tired of being defensive. I long to put some things back together. I yearn for renewal, a new beginning for our world, a rebuilding, for me personally, but as well for my society, our world. And so I ask of this culture: doesn’t God just magnificently exist through it all? And doesn’t this same God want to bring goodness into his world so that all his children might flourish, me included? Am I not invited to participate in this plan of human flourishing? Should I not enter even more fully into this very encounter with the living God—where it all begins? And then, finally, should I not then try to find authentic language to say what this is all about?

One more thought before we begin. Our language in this moment of secularization is fraught with anger, rage at times, hatred often, sometimes despair, certainly confusion. Our language is hot. Our language divides, fractures, wounds, even among Christians. We talk a good story of reconciliation but only to reconcile with those who speak the same ideological or theological language. Otherwise we pull back into the silos of our own meaning. We talk among ourselves, if we talk at all. The broader conversation breaks down. We withdraw into silence and lick our wounds. It is in this condition, with the great Psalmist, we sit down on the banks of our own Babylon and weep. In the willow trees there we hang up our harps. We have lost our song, a song that both defines our identity, but as well a song that can bring healing to a broken world.

But then, and this is one of the main points of this book, our captors, the Psalmist suggests, are actually asking us to sing our song. Imagine that? They want us to sing a new song. That’s another of those discoveries I want to offer. I have come to believe our culture is asking us to sing our song of joy. Do we know our song anymore? Do we know how to sing with joy? Are we ready to sing in a mighty choir? I believe we are ready. Or, I believe we can be ready. That’s our task for our discouraged moment in time. We enter into a place of fullness with the living God—and then we want to break into song. Wouldn’t that be lovely. Wouldn’t that be marvelous. It is possible. Spiritual renewal for our time is possible. At least that’s the possibility I want to press.

So that’s the story I hope to unfold. But before we tackle this story, let me strike a note of gratitude. My life been shaped by the writers and teachers in my life. Reading is critical to my formation. So many of the great literary artists, from the beginning of my education, have shaped my understanding of things. So many of the great apologists of the faith, both current and throughout history, have also shaped my thinking over a lifetime of reading, people like Augustine, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Nicolai Berdyaev, Evelyn Underhill, Flannery O’Connor, Lesslie Newbigin, N. T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Jürgen Moltmann, George Weigel, Rich Mouw, Denise Levertov, Ann Voscamp, and many others. These writers continue to nourish my soul.

But teachers too, those who taught me in the classroom, and those among so many colleagues and friends, who have sharpened the lens through which I see the world. Teachers introduced me to whole new worlds of words and new perspective. My teachers changed my life into something that surprised a lot of people, myself included. I think here of Clem Simpson, Fenton Duval, Dean Ebner, Leonard Oakland, John Perkins, Rob Wall, Rick Steele, Frank Spina, Steven Newby, Earl Palmer, Dale Bruner, master teachers all. I believe in teachers. Teaching is one of the honored professions. And so to all of these—the writers and my teachers—I hope the enduring gifts they have given to me over a lifetime are now somehow returned to them with deep gratitude.

Also, I come from an amazing family, for whom I am immensely grateful. The moment this family sits down—my wife, my brothers and sister, their spouses and children, our sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren—yes, when we sit down at the dinner table, we go deep. We can’t help ourselves. I love that. I learn as much from this family as from all the books I am constantly reading. My family nurtures me, keeps me honest, sharpens me, just flat-out blesses me.

And finally it is my wife Sharon, to whom I dedicate this book, who deserves as much gratitude as I can give. She is my long companion in this journey, my patient listener, my gentle critic, my get-real-get-down-to-earth conversation partner, the one from whom I receive more love and forgiveness than I deserve. Without her, this book, and the joyful life with which I am somehow blessed, would not be possible.

And so, with that, let’s think together how we might sing a new song, a joyful song, for the sake of our own lives lived more fully, to be sure, but as well for the spiritual renewal of the world. We turn our song toward a world that yearns, I believe, to discover the grandeur of God who visits us regularly, the very God who brings goodness into our brokenness. So let us see if we can learn once again to sing a song of joy, the Lord’s song, for the foreign land in which we find ourselves.

1. Berger, A Rumor Of Angels, 59.

2. Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, 887.

3. Taylor, A Secular Age, 5–6.

4. Lewis, Surprised By Joy.

Introduction

What I crave at this point in my life

is to speak more clearly

what it is that I believe.

—Christian Wiman

Sunday Morning In The Elevator

Hope you are going to a party or something, a woman remarks in the elevator of our condo. Apparently we look a little too dressed up for a Sunday morning in Seattle. Actually, we’re going to church, my wife responds cheerfully. Oh . . . well . . . have fun, our neighbor replies. As we step out of the elevator, we know we’ve been hit with that all too common sort of speechless incredulity when anything religious creeps into a conversation these days.

Why would you go to church on a beautiful day like this?—that may be the real question that lurks beneath the surface. "What could church possibly offer that you can’t get from reading The New York Times at Starbucks? You don’t have to get dressed up for that. Actually, you could even read the paper in bed, with a good cup of coffee, the windows open to a fresh breeze, the long-awaited sun streaming into the room. Sundays are the best part of the week—rest up, recharge, get with friends, do something with the kids, indulge in lovely pan au raisins, fresh berries from the market, take a long walk—enjoy life, for goodness sakes! Why would you waste such a day in church?"

Although the evidence remains muddy and open to interpretation, there is much talk these days about the decline of practicing Christians in America. No wonder our nice neighbor on the elevator seems puzzled we are going to church. More and more people, we are told, are deciding not to go to church. Actually more people are saying they don’t believe in much of anything. There seems to be a shift going on here. The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, the respected Pew Research Center reports, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. To be sure, the report clarifies, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world, and yet, over the last seven years, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated—describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’—has jumped more than six points. These are the nones we hear about so often.¹ The trends don’t seem to tip in favor of going-to-church Christians.

So a key question in this book is how to talk about church, or things associated with church—things like faith, mystery, grace, goodness—when the surrounding culture seems to have lost a vocabulary, or even an interest, for this kind of conversation. The conclusion I have reached is that Christians need to say something, first, in order to know ourselves what we believe, but then, so that our neighbors, families, friends, and colleagues will know what animates our lives. Words matter, I will conclude. Words, though slippery at times, may actually precede action. Finding precise, compelling language has always been critically important throughout the history of Christian experience.

But then I will go on to test two audacious suspicions. First, our world will drift in directions even more dangerous—if Christians have nothing to say. The world needs the good news of the gospel. And, second, people seem actually to be listening for what Christians have to say. I know this second point will sound naïve, but I believe most everyone yearns for renewal, yes, even spiritual renewal.

Christian Wiman frames the purpose for what lies ahead: What I crave at this point in my life, he says in his marvelous book My Bright Abyss, is to speak more clearly what it is that I believe.² I share this craving. I suspect I’ve always had this desire, but I find this urge growing more forceful at this point in my life. Part of this is personal, of course, but much of it is surely the felt need to push against the severe pressures of skepticism Christians face in our daily lives. In all of this I have discovered the biggest question comes down to this: What do I have to say? What actually do Christians believe up against these pressures of unbelief in our age? That’s the question that drives the task out ahead.

Who Needs God Anymore?

Our age persists, in small ways and large, to confront Christians with all kinds of profound questions: "Going to church, really? Surely you know Christians are on the wrong side of history. The world moved on some time ago. Haven’t we finally eliminated the need for God? Hey, we’re doing just fine on our own, thank you very much. Besides, is there any shred of evidence that God actually exists? Can you prove there is a God?"

What do I say? Thrown on the defensive, we are sometimes tempted to give it up, the conversation, for sure, but maybe even our faith. Up against the skepticism of our day, lots of us have grown mushy about matters of faith. We’ve sort of backed out of the conversation. The questions are pervasive. They’re often hard to face. We become inarticulate, timid, quiet.

And then a card intended to trump everything is played: "Belief is just a personal matter, isn’t it? Each of us must decide what is true and what is not, for ourselves, in private, we are told. It’s just my opinion against yours, after all. Who’s to say who gets it right? Aren’t the religions of the world all the same anyway? The notion that we live in a pluralistic world slips often into debilitating relativism. I can’t believe how often I am confronted with the notion that it’s up to each of us. Live and let live. You surely don’t propose to lay your religion on others, do you?"

Since at least the fifteenth century in the Western world, our modern age has valiantly sought to blur the lines on any common notion of truth. In the place of agreed-upon truth, we have appointed the individual as the final arbiter of meaning. I fear that many of us, perhaps especially young people, adopt this kind of sheer relativism without even thinking about it. It’s in the air we breathe, the coffee we drink. What’s the truth? It all depends on your angle. That’s the postmodern message we are left with to guide our lives, our families, our world.

And besides, we will also hear, with so much hypocrisy to spread around, do Christians really have anything helpful to add about living our lives in ways that are healthier, better? Christians are stuck in the Middle Ages. Their moral universe is no longer relevant. Christians are way too judgmental. Get over it. The culture wars are over, in case you haven’t noticed. All that moral stuff just bogs us down. Why not just go with the flow? Yes, indeed, enjoy life, for goodness sake. Mellow out when it comes to a moral universe. You’ve been wrong on so many questions before. We don’t want to hear your preachments anymore.

Such conversations may draw to a close with something like this: Listen, contrary to all those apocalyptic stories, Christians are the ones ‘left behind.’ You might as well move on yourself, especially on a beautiful Sunday morning.

Could This Be The Time For Spiritual Quickening?

Surely, you might resist, I have inflated my little encounter with our friendly neighbor in the elevator. Well, sure, nothing like all of this was actually said. And yet it was said. Something like this is always being said. We hear it in our small conversations. We see it in body language that often signals indifference, even disdain, about matters of belief. We hear it in the news, constantly, those subtle digs of ridicule aimed at those of us who still try to believe something.

We live in an age of severe skepticism, not just a pluralistic age, but an age of unbelief. We live in a post-Christian world, at least when it comes to the Western world. We have felt pervasive secularization sweep over our society with breathtaking speed, over the last decade, even over the last five years. We have even felt the pressures of skepticism seep into our own way of thinking. All of this causes enormous anxiety, not just for Christians, but for most everyone. Anxiety rises when we realize we have cut ourselves from our deepest spiritual roots, historical roots for our society and our civilization, personal roots for our individual lives. Those roots may have rotted. We droop like cut flowers in a vase. We watch as the water grows murky and the flowers begin to wilt.³

The early twentieth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev has become instructive for me. At the end of World War I, when such devastating carnage lay scattered across the landscape of Europe, and just as the Bolshevik Revolution began to exercise iron-fisted control over his beloved homeland, Berdyaev began to reflect on what kind of civilization the Western world was now choosing.

He knew the tectonic plates of history were shifting beneath his feet. He knew this dramatic shift was not just political or economic, as so many people tried to propose. It was profoundly cultural, Berdyaev argued. Culture is always determined by what is spiritual and religious. The Catholic intellectual George Weigel says rightly that history is driven, over the long haul, by culture—by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts.⁴ And so the collapse of Western culture is ultimately a cultural collapse, a spiritual collapse, Berdyaev argues. Clearly there are profound consequences when everything spiritual is airbrushed out of peoples’ lives.

In his remarkable 1923 book The End of Our Time, Berdyaev probes both the cause and a solution to the tumultuous troubles of the moment:

Faith in the ultimate political and social salvation of mankind is quenched. We have reached settlement-day after a series of centuries during which movement was from the centre, the spiritual core of life, to the periphery, its surface and social exterior. And the more empty of religious significance social life has become, the more it has tyrannized over the general life of man.⁵

This is the profound secularization in which we now live. Western culture made a decision—as far back as the fifteenth century, solidified in Berdyaev’s time in the twentieth, carrying forward into the twenty-first century with tremendous force—to airbrush God out of history, out of our lives, out of our notion of what is real, out of our language. All of this may sound a little sweeping, but surely these patterns are clear.

Our culture made a choice that what is real is measured only by what is material, what is merely physical. After that master stroke had been absorbed into culture, the individual was then moved to the center of the stage to become the source of meaning, the interpreter of empirical evidence, the final determiner of what is true and good and beautiful. To turn to political or social salvation from this plight is simply futile, far too simplistic, far too shallow. We’ve got to probe much deeper. We’ve got to put our nets out into the deep, as Jesus counseled his soon-to-be followers. That’s where the real catch lies. That’s where the real meaning will begin to become clear again.

And so Berdyaev proposes that

the world needs a strong reaction from this domination by exterior things, a change back in favour of interior spiritual life, not only for the sake of individuals but for the sake of real metaphysical life itself. To many who are caught up in the web of modern activities this must sound like