At age twenty-nine, I was living a golden life: married ten years to a gentle and kind woman who possesses an innate ability to make those around her feel joyous, a gift I desperately needed; a son who bore my and my father’s name; a sprightly pearl of a daughter; and work that was transforming from a job into a career. I had it all. Except faith.
Until then I had not known a moment in which I didn’t sense God or consider myself anything other than a Christian. In my mid-teens an alchemy of influencers spurred me to own my faith. There was Jon Braun of Campus Crusade for Christ and Francis Schaefer with his L’Abri promise of “honest answers to honest questions”. More intimately, there was our church youth pastor, an artist whose “chalk talks” gave a first inkling that the Gospel was beautiful, and a Sunday School teacher unintimidated by a class of teen boys.
Yet, at twenty-nine, I deliberately stepped outside the Christian faith. It was not a hesitant half-step. I stopped attending church, I defined myself as an atheist and, worst of all, I hurt my wife by ceasing to be the man she had expected when we married.
My total unmooring from faith came about in reaction to an overbearing certainty that seemed fundamental to the Christianity that surrounded me. Christians I knew and read were speaking with very precise certainty on everything about God – how he works, how the scriptures are the word of God, what specific passages mean, and insisting that a scriptural passage may be interpreted in only one way, which was their way.
I was appalled that these interpretations often made God unattractive and unappealing. I knew intuitively that God is more complex and beautiful than I was hearing, but I couldn’t find a space in which epistemological humility, uncertainty, curiosity, liberty were welcomed. Lacking space within the circle of faith, I stepped out.
Fortunately for me, my wife was steadfast in loving me despite the confusion and hurt I had caused, and I continued to reflect across a broad reading regimen that incorporated atheists and agnostics, religious perspectives and, for some inexplicable reason, the early Church Fathers. I had an inkling – or perhaps only a hope - that if authenticity were to be found in Christianity, it would be found in those who lived adjacent to the time of Jesus. I didn’t recognize that I was reversing the post-modern presupposition that modern is better than ancient, a prejudice C.S. Lewis derided as “chronological snobbery.“
And that’s how I, a modern prodigal son, came to bathe in the words of the ancients: Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Origen. All were distinctly foreign names as I began reading, yet they became friends, tutors, fellow pilgrims who had walked ahead of me on the path to God, and who had left notes along the way for those who labored behind them.
It was Augustine in particular, with his notion of Essentials and Non-Essentials relative to knowledge about God, who handed me the Golden Key, to borrow an image from George MacDonald.
Augustine defined Essentials as tenets about God that are so intrinsic to being a follower of Jesus that we Christians have been united for centuries in our acceptance of them. Such tenets are profound but few, such as those we find in the Apostles Creed and Nicene Creed.
Non-Essentials, Augustine taught, are other beliefs about God that we may derive from the scriptures or tradition, but which are not intrinsic or required. Non-Essentials often are explanations of how God operates. For example, believing God has created all things is an Essential, but how God effectuated the creation – six literal twenty-four hour days, a big bang, evolution, Old Earth/Young Earth, etc. – is a Non-Essential. That is, it’s difficult to think that an individual could be a Christian without holding to the belief that God is Creator; on the other hand, it’s not difficult to think that an individual could be a Christian without holding to a literal six-day creation view. With Non-Essentials, we are at liberty to mine the scriptures and reach a comfort level or even suspend our judgment.
With this insight, Augustine opened for me the window of epistemological modesty. Because we can’t know with certainty everything or even nearly everything about God, I don’t have to accept what others say no matter how certainly they express their position. As Frederick Buechner expressed it, “Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him … Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
It was then, after a half-decade of considering myself outside the Christian faith, I found myself remarkably attracted by the face of God that Jesus drew in the Gospel narratives. It seemed to me that the beauty of what Jesus said and did functioned as a type of spiritual gravity, God’s beautiful gravity inexorably tugging me toward him.
In addition to drawing his face in Jesus, God had surrounded me with expansive beauty:
Drawn by God’s silver chain of beauty, I stepped back into the faith. How could I not do so? For what can be imagined more beautiful than a kind and loving God.