An interview with Dr. Roger Lundin ’71, Wheaton's Blanchard Professor of English
by Katherine Halberstadt Anderson ’90
3 a.m. thoughts
These are the moments of doubt or anxiety that may come, “even when you are fully engaged in the faith, you feel close to God, and you have no real deep-seated anxieties about what you believe or the One in whom you believe,” says Roger Lundin ’71. “They can come upon a person unexpectedly— even in the middle of the night—and they can do so with considerable power.”
It is about those who have felt the “power and possibilities” of what it would be like to look at the world from a very different frame of reference that Dr. Lundin has written his latest book, Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age.
Named one of the “Best Books of 2009” by the Times Literary Supplement, Believing Again not only documents the rise of unbelief as a social, cultural, and intellectual option in the modern world, it also explores how the poets, philosophers, and theologians of the nineteenth century dealt with this tension in their own lives—and identifies what we can learn from their struggles for faith.
While Dr. Lundin is quick to note that doubt is not a universal, or at all necessary, facet of the “authentic” Christian experience, he does say that over the course of 30 years of teaching evangelical undergraduate students, he has seen it become a much more widespread experience, due to the incredible array of images and information so readily available today.
“Increasingly we are having to come to terms with so many different possibilities of belief and behavior that it takes some self-conscious work to orient around a stable identity,” he says, adding that the realities of our secular, modern culture—with its streaming videos, instant messages, social networks, and global contexts—make even deeply committed Christians aware of their need to renew and strengthen their faith.
How did you choose the title for your book?
The issues that concern me in Believing Again are encapsulated in a quote from the poet W. H. Auden: “There is a great deal of difference between believing something still and believing it again.”
In speaking of “believing again,” Auden refers to what it is like to reaffirm or renew one’s faith after a time of serious doubt or outright denial. He has in mind the large-scale experience of culture—what it means to reaffirm the ancient faith in the contemporary world— as well as the experience of countless individuals who return to the faith after a time of trial. For an increasing number of men and women, faith and belief are states of mind and habits of trust that are renewed after a brief crisis or a prolonged struggle. And Auden says things look different, forever different, for the one who comes back to that faith.
Perhaps the most important difference is that the person who “believes again” always has in mind the memory and possibility of strong doubt or open unbelief. There is something powerfully and particularly modern about this state of affairs, and I wrote this book in effort to understand its origins and to think hard as a Christian about its implications for the life I lead, for the students I teach, and for the witness we bear to the gospel of Christ
What inspired the book?
The three things that came together were my experience of 40 years of practicing and professing the Christian faith; my countless encounters with friends and students who grew up in the faith, but then departed from it either for a season or for the whole of their lives; and, finally, my personal and scholarly interest in the emergence of open unbelief in the literature of the past two centuries.
Can you share a bit more about how youwere inspired on a personal level?
The central experience came in my adolescence, when my 18-yearold brother died suddenly, and grief set to work in a devastating way on my family. I emerged from that time of sorrow and testing with a host of questions about life and death, about suffering and grief, and most of all about God. My parents had largely drifted away from the church by the time I was born, and as a teenager I didn’t know to whom I could possibly speak about the questions I had about death, God, and the problem of suffering.
Through the miracle and mystery of God’s grace, my questioning—and the responses some key people made to it— eventually brought me to profess my faith in the crucified and risen Christ. With that faith came a whole new way of looking at life and death, and I still remember the thrill of discovering a reason for hope at last. At the same time, having turned from darkness to light, from despondency to trust, I knew in the back of my mind that it was possible that I could stray from that light and plunge back into darkness again.
That is one measure of what it’s like to live in the modern world. Whether consciously or subconsciously, you know you may one day quietly slip away or openly walk away from your most intimate relationships or your most deeply held beliefs.
Why do you think this is an important topic for the church today?
Several years ago, I taught a summer course at Regent College (Vancouver) dealing with the theme of “believing again.” One student in the class was the pastor of an urban Canadian church. At the end he said the course had helped him understand a phenomenon he hadn’t been prepared for in ministry. It involved having watched a small but significant number of families simply drift away from the church over a period of several years.
The pastor said that when he visited these families, more often than not, they said they just had too many other things to do with their Sundays. They had garages to clean, lawns to mow, and park district soccer games to attend. This pastor was struck by how easily these parishioners simply walked away from one of the most intimate commitments of their lives. My response to him was that in these experiences he was coming face-to-face with the contractual nature of the way we now live our lives. From marriage to work to worship, we form relationships that are remarkably close and that most often proved, until recently, to be remarkably enduring.
But where we used to speak in terms of bonds and commitments, we now organize our lives along the lines of conditions. And when the other party in the relationship—whether a spouse or a church—fails to engage us any longer, we are free to walk away. Within the last 100 years, we’ve created a world in which there are few costs to be paid for dissolving our most intimate relationships. Just as we have no-fault divorce, we have no-fault ecclesiology, and, it appears, no-fault belief. In pointing these things out, I am not in any way trying to lament the freedom that we have. I am only trying to point out some of the possibilities and perils that freedom holds for the life of faith.
In your book, you refer to the period between 1789 (the start of the French Revolution) and 1914 (the outbreak of the First World War) as the nineteenth-century. Is it fair to say that within this period, the study of the humanities replaced the study of the Bible in many of America’s universities?
Most historical observers agree that in the cultures of the North Atlantic a new dynamic of belief came into play in the late nineteenth century. James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America has deeply influenced my own thinking on this subject.
Turner argues that until the 1860s and 1870s, widespread open unbelief was neither socially acceptable nor intellectually feasible in the Western world. Significant unbelief only came upon the scene in the era of the Civil War and the decades that followed. The reasons for its emergence were many, and they had to do with powerful developments in science, particularly the impact of Darwin, as well as with the astonishing pace of industrialization and urbanization.
One intriguing thing about that culture of unbelief had to do with the way in which it quickly found a home and shelter within the modern university. As historian George Marsden has impressively documented, in The Soul of the American University, the modern research university and modern unbelief developed hand-in-hand in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
At that time, in a matter of years, universities became for a number of disenchanted souls a surrogate church in which the humanities—the study of literature, philosophy, and the fine arts— seemed to serve as the new scriptures and the alternative sacraments. To those who were weary and heavy-laden, a growing cadre of professors and critics offered the lyrics of Wordsworth and the plays of Shakespeare as gospels and epistles for a disillusioned age.
To what extent have the novelists, poets, and philosophers of the nineteenth century shaped where we stand today, and could you describe a few of the specific ways in which the reflections of these authors can encourage and engage Wheaton graduates who may have moved away from the faith?
One fascinating aspect of modern literature has to do with the way many of our greatest writers have refused to accept the supposed triumph of unbelief. To be sure, they’ve wrestled with unbelief, and they understand what it means to look at the world as though it were godforsaken.
As English Professor Beatrice Batson M.A. ’47 taught me many years ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky knew these feelings of deep doubt and godforsakenness from the inside. It’s the honest, intense struggle between belief and doubt—the struggle between Christ and the spirit of non-being—that gives his stories such searing power.
Not long before he began to write his novels, Dostoevsky outlined his struggles in a letter to a woman who had ministered powerfully to him at a time of peril and crisis. “I will tell you that
I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt, I am that today and [I know it] will remain so until the grave,” he explained. Out of his experiences of suffering and joy alike, he had fashioned a simple creed. It was “to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ.” And he would worship Christ, Dostoevsky tells this woman, even if he knew that the New Testa ment accounts of Him were nothing but bunk; “Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality, the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
The tension between the longing to believe and the fear of there being nothing—or no one—to believe in animated many writers in Dostoevsky’s day. Emily Dickinson spoke openly of this tension in a letter written near the end of her life. “On subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings–,” she wrote, “we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour—which keeps Believing nimble.”
Dickinson gets at something here that I have experienced and that I have come across in any number of students and friends over the years. It involves what I might call the changed nature of doubt for many in the modern world. In standard evangelical accounts, doubt is often depicted as a temporary phase, an experience we may have on the way to belief, but that we leave forever behind in the life of faith.
But doubt looks a bit different today. For many, it is not a foe vanquished once and for all in the past. Instead, it is a possibility that always hovers in the background. If you have come to belief through a struggle with strenuous doubt, you remember how the world looked when you once viewed it through the eyes of unbelief. And occasionally, when circumstances turn against you—when a life-threatening disease strikes, or a child strays, or a marriage collapses—the darkness of overwhelming doubt may descend upon you once again. As a scholar, a teacher, and a friend, I have been trying in recent years to understand what we are to make of the fact that the modern experience of faith often includes an element of doubt.
How do we reconcile doubt with belief?
Things I read and heard during my student days at Wheaton powerfully formed my thinking on this subject. One event from my undergraduate years particularly influenced me. During what was then called “Spiritual Emphasis Week,” the College invited a team of evangelists and apologists instead of a single speaker. At an evening session, one team member focused on the nature of Christ’s suffering, both physical and spiritual, during the last 24 hours of his life. He quietly laid out the evidence from the Gospel of Luke. He spoke of how Jesus pleaded with God—“If you are willing, take this cup from me.” He was in “agony” and “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:41-46). And on the cross, as death neared, Jesus cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). That message proved to be a lasting gift. Over the years, in moments of doubt or despondency, I’ve taken great comfort from the assurance that Jesus Christ— who, according to the Apostles’ Creed, “sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty”—knows firsthand how it feels to be forsaken by God.
At roughly the same time, at the prompting of Wheaton theology professors, Drs. Morris Inch and Bob Webber, I began to read the sermons of Helmut Thielicke. One was a sermon Thielicke had preached in the bombed-out ruins of Germany near the end of the Second World War. In speaking of Christ’s cry from the cross, Thielicke told his congregation that if “I am anxious, and I know Christ, I may rest assured that I am not alone with my anxiety; He has suffered it for me.” Or as Emily Dickinson put the same point in more graphic terms in a letter written not long before she died: “When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.”
If you look at it in a certain light, the emergence of widespread unbelief in the nineteenth century was a gift to the church. Because it exposed the emptiness of the overly optimistic, highly moralizing theology of the day, unbelief paradoxically drove many back to a richly textured and deeply orthodox view of Jesus Christ as the fully human, fully divine Son of God. Years ago, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr witheringly summarized the drift of nineteenth century liberal Protestant theology. It was a system, he wrote, in which “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” As Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and many others from the period demonstrate, the desire to believe in a God who could comprehend the fullness of human experience—including our sorrows, our suffering, and our anxieties—drove many into the arms of the one “acquainted with grief,” Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord.
Tward the end of your book you write, “As we engage in the life of culture and strive to teach others to love what we have loved, we do well to remember that the connections between Christ and the life of the mind may be more readily discovered in Emily Dickinson’s tunnels than they are to be glimpsed in Robert Frost’s treetops.” Can you speak to this idea a bit?
The “treetops” come from Robert Frost’s witty and wise poem, “Birches.” The speaker in this poem is an adult who longs to go back to his childhood experience of swinging on the branches. Those times come, he says, when he’s “weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a pathless wood,” where your eye stings and weeps, because a twig has “lashed across it open.” At those moments, he dreams of climbing the branches away from earth and “toward heaven.” It’s good “to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.”
That’s one thing that literature can do for a person—a poem or story can help us step back and get a deeper understanding or a wider perspective on our experience. But the purpose of that stepping back is that of gaining strength to go back into the world with joy and in a spirit of service. As the speaker in Frost’s poem reminds us, “Earth is the right place for love.” It is in this life on this earth that God would have us bear witness to the gospel, as we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God and our neighbor.
I’ve always liked the “Birches” view of life, but in recent years I’ve come to treasure even more a perspective on faith that crystallized years ago, when I was working on a biography of Emily Dickinson. The poet’s mother suffered a stroke when Emily was 45, and over the next seven years, Emily and her sister cared for their mother on a daily basis. When Mrs. Dickinson died, Emily wrote to a friend: “We were never intimate Mother and children, while she was our Mother—but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling, and when she became our child, the Affection came.”
What a splendid expression of the Incarnation! Many in the modern world find it hard, if not impossible, to relate to a God who seems somehow distant and disengaged. But when that God becomes a child—when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us full of “grace and truth”—then our alienation and fear may turn mysteriously into feelings of affection.
As the only surviving child in my family, I had the privilege of caring for both of my parents during their final illnesses. Those times were filled with moments of unspeakable sadness and sweetness alike. Just as my mother and father had welcomed me into the world in a hospital room decades before, so was I now saying goodbye to them in a similar space. Just as I had been a helpless bundle of needs when I first saw light, so too were they—once so strong and powerful—now utterly dependent upon the care and mercy of others as they entered the darkness. I had always loved my parents and had tried, in my fallen and fitful ways, to honor them and make them proud. But I had never before known the feelings of brokenhearted affection and cherishing care that swept over me as I watched them slip away from me, and from the world, at last.
You asked earlier about what a Christian can do or say to those who are assailed by doubt. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to bear witness to the astonishing claim the Christian faith makes—that the God of heaven and earth, the One through whom all things were made, and by whom all things are sustained, became a defenseless child in a distant outpost of the Roman Empire, in a dark and forbidding time. What a remarkable thing it is that the God we worship is the One who has come to know so intimately the depths and heights of our lives, our wonderful joys, as well as our deepest sorrows.