Today Maggi Dawn’s posted on her blog a reflection on the experience of Thomas the Apostle. The agonising experience of questioning in the face of a man who claims to be the resurrected Jesus.
When I read Tom Beaudoin’s book, Virtual Faith, in 1998, I was studying with a D.Min consortium at San Francisco Theological Seminary. At the end of the course we were invited to write down what we’d picked up over the six weeks. I thought back to our engagement with postmodern approaches to ritual, scriptural interpretation, particularity and universalist understandings of gospel. I thought about the unfathomable nature of the relationships we developed in that time. And I wrote that phrase down – ‘ambiguity, uncertainty, without fear.’
Tom’s fourth major thesis in engaging with the religion of Gen X is that ambiguity is central to faith. His first sentence in chapter 7 is “Xers make great heretics’. He talks about personal doubts he’s experienced in relation to the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and original sin. I’m sure he could add a few other doctrines to the list from the seven years since publishing the book.
Ambiguity in Popular Culture
Beaudoin helps us explore the motif of ambiguity in popular culture. It’s there in the fusion of sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual, orthodox and blasphemous. I remember having heated debates as a teenager/young adults over the acceptability of what was regarded as secular music. Being growled at for playing ‘Smoke on the water’ at a Pentecostal youth camp. Being banned for playing ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ at a Youth For Christ rally. As a teenager I’d given away all my Pink Floyd and Supertramp albums because I thought they compromised my spirituality. It cost me an arm and a leg to replace them all with CDs later once I’d grown used to the idea that sacred and secular were artificial categories. What I was grappling with was the common teaching that sexually oriented lyrics or rhythms were bound to lead us astray. In the long run neither I nor my peers bought that argument.
Tom takes a look at the gender ambiguity that is expressed by a number of 1980s rock singers – Annie Lennox, Michael Jackson, Boy George, David Bowie and so on. The blurring of such boundaries challenged the hard and fast distinctions made by previous generations.
We’re then taken on a tour through cyberspace – exploring the ways in which hypertext relativises everything, even the Scriptures. In many ways our interpretation of the Bible has always been informed by our experience and assumptions along with what we’ve heard of others’ interpretations. But culturally now we’re at a point where we’re not under as much pressure to provide an absolutely certain explanation of everything. Quantum physics has helped us realise that there is not just one cause behind every effect.
Doubt and Faith
How does this relate to doubt and faith? As a student training for ministry. I took a few threads out of the fundamentalist garment I was wearing and soon found I’d unravelled the lot! I vividly remember the moment when I sat down and said to God, “I don’t know if I can believe in you anymore. I’m not sure if you’re anymore than a tribal god made big. But here I am – with a faith that won’t go away.” In that experience I learnt something about humility – realising that the certainty I have today may be gone tomorrow.
One helpful concept developed in Virtual Faith is the freedom we are taking to recognise the multiplicity of our selves. Older generations, for whom a unitary, singular self was the ideal, have perhaps had more difficulty allowing doubt to take a central place in their spiritual identity. I’ve seen that in email conversations. I remember suggesting to my fellow NZ Presbyterians that ambiguity and uncertainty could be useful in our understanding of the resurrection. I was shot down for flirting with postmodernism by an older fellow minister. “We need certainty – that’s what the gospel is all about”, he said. Having said that, I know younger ministers than me who have ended friendships because they could not stand the thought that their friends did not share the same certainties.
Tom says that faith may be discovered and practiced in ambiguity. He’s not talking about surrendering faith to culture. He calls us to attend to the revelatory significance of hesitation, ambiguity, ambivalence, and instability in the lives (and faith experiences) of many Xers.