Doing Theology,  No. 23 February 2008 
A bi-monthly theological reflection from the
School of Ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina



The counter-intuitiveness of faith

Human beings – at least most of us – have common sense. To hear Andrew Brown explain it (writing recently in the Church Times and drawing upon Scott Atran’s book, In Gods We Trust), we learn very early on that there are predictable behaviors and results, and whether we call them common sense, or use fancier words, many things become intuitive for us. Those things that are intuitive throughout our lives take on an ordinariness that, for many of us, becomes rather uninteresting. And those that don’t make sense at all are so counter-intuitive that they just end up seeming ridiculous, and as a result they may not seem very interesting either.

Religion has not normally placed the common-sense ordinary, the intuitive of our lives, anywhere near the center of our faith understandings. Why, we ask, put life-long energies into that? Similarly, religion has not held up the extremes of counter-intuitiveness as central to our faith either. That doesn’t mean we set aside the miraculous, or the virgin birth, or the resurrection; rather we seek to communicate the essentials of our faith in terms that do not demand the acceptance of that which puts folks off from beginning the journey. Perhaps surprisingly, the impulse to lessen the counter-intuitive does not lie in any particular theological camp. John A. T. Robinson’s decidedly 1960s-genre books Honest to God and Now That I Can’t Believe as well N.T. Wright’s recent and seemingly traditional evangelical Simply Christian, all focus on faith essentials as being other than the unbelievable.

What they have done, and what Christianity and religion generally have done, is to hold up a minimal counter-intuitiveness. This minimalism takes us beyond the ordinary, but stops before we reach surreal belief demands that many of us are inclined to dismiss. Christianity instead turns us toward an affirmation of God’s power and love that ordinarily would seem implausible, toward something sufficiently plausible for us to be drawn toward God and God’s message.

Evangelists have understood this for some time. Years ago when I was living in London, I attended lectures by the foremost Anglican evangelical of our time, John Stott, on sharing the gospel story. At a time when a core educational principle was that any question seriously raised deserved a serious answer, John Stott took a different tack. If someone asked, what about this miracle or that, we were to set that question aside, unanswered. Rather we were to return to the “essentials,” of God’s love for us, of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Christian hope, and of fellowship among the faithful. Elements of those essentials surely engage the counter-intuitive, but minimally so, and with them at hand, we enter into, and sustain, the journey. 


Yours faithfully,
Leon Spencer