I'm having a difficult time synthesizing spiritual freedom and intellectual freedom. In the early years of my life one had to choose and faced with such a choice jettisoning intellectual freedom was, well, a no-brainer. However, my mind seems particularly ill-suited to prison life so it staged a mid-life breakout. Now I've got to find a way to live with the consequences.
Turn about being fair play, the simple answer is to jettison my spiritual freedom in favor of agnosticism or a fuzzy faith without any particular allegiances, but I have a feeling my soul is even less suited to prison than my mind. So the question has become how to stand fast in the freedom Christ has given me and read Virginia Wolfe and Thomas Hardy. The old answer was to find out what respected Christian teachers had to say about such dastardly duos and carefully see nothing more or less than what you were instructed to see. My mind won't have that anymore.
My previous life assumed that Christianity was fragile, or perhaps that my hold on it or it's hold on me was fragile. I think that's false. Times of extreme doubt and struggle have always ended by uncovering unshakable bedrock, such as my complete adoration of/addiction to holiness. If I am going to accommodate the new freedoms my mind has appropriated for itself I will have to trust that that trend will continue and that I have nothing to fear but fear itself as I learn to think without walls and safeguards.
2 comments:
My response to challenging thoughts (not Wolfe or Hardy, but in my case Russell and Hume) was to build my own critique of their ideas based on what I knew. Any reference to what other Christian scholars said was sort of cheating, like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook. With freedom comes the responsibility to work as hard as those scholars you are wont to cite in coming to your own conclusions.
It's really wrong to wall yourself off from those who criticize what you believe, be it Christianity or anything. If truth is true, and if Christianity is untrue, then I'm a liar if I deny counterfactuals that challenge Christianity.
If Christianity is what it claims to be, it provides an interpretive grid through which one can interpret Wolfe and Hardy (and Hume and Russell). Does Virginia Wolfe say something about human nature, about what it is to be a woman in a fallen world, surrounded by fallen people and the society of their consensus? Idunno, I haven't read the lady; I'm a geek. But if this is the case, we should appreciate her insights into human nature where ever we find them.
Speaking as a Christian, those insights are descriptive of God's image bearer and my love of the archetype of those images should motivate appreciation.
It all bears upon what is truth. You can't rely upon some "Christian teacher" to tell you what to see and not-see in Wolfe's prose. As you know, a "Christian teacher" may get in trouble if he says something impolitic and thus what he says may be couched in a bit of vagueness at certain points. (I smile when I think of how my Contemporary Lit prof chose the least-racy works of the authors we studied.)
Even when working with scholars whose boots I'm unworthy to clean, I must arrogate to myself the right to question their assertions. It's only fair. If Wolfe dogmatically says A and if Jerry Falwell criticizes her, saying not-A, then Falwell should be equally subject to critique.
Therefore, I believe in the need to acquaint oneself with not only Wolfe and Hardy, but also with the Christian scholars who have studied them. Just as you critically assess what Wolfe and Hardy teach, you must critically assess what those Christian scholars teach, too.
Ultimately, you are responsible for what you believe and if you ditch that responsibility by merely parroting the words of some Bible teacher, that dishonesty will result in the spiritual bondage you describe. I have to be honest within myself. And if I am dishonest within myself, I may project that dishonesty onto Bible teachers that I uncritically glommed onto.
errrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm......
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