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The Fuller-Oord Project
claiming doubt as part of faith
This “constructing a house” view of knowledge has problems. One of the biggest is thinking we have certainties with which to start constructing. Many who deconstruct come to realize that absolute and unambiguous knowledge about God and life doesn’t exist… except in the minds of those who choose to be certain, despite the evidence.
Deconstruction is the demolition of the house of knowledge built on absolute certainty. It calls into question not only the decorations, rugs, and furniture but also the walls and foundation. It wrecks most, if not all, of the house structure. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
*
Believing after deconstruction means living the questions rather than seeking answers thought to be certain. Those who re-embrace God are skeptical that absolute answers are available. They believe life will always have a measure of mystery and ambiguity. That includes uncertainty about whether God exists, what God wants, and how we might live well. No one can be sure. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
*
A reason-and-experience trust in God provides a compass for our journey. We need a sense of direction, after all, to make progress. The compass doesn’t provide a detailed route, however, it points us toward undiscovered horizons. We navigate in response to the influence of God, other fellow-travelers, the nonhuman terrain, and our deepest intuitions. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
Tripp Fuller and Thomas Oord are writing a book, doing a podcast class, and holding an in-person lecture tour on the theme, “God After Deconstruction.” You can find a draft of their book-in-progress in Oord's website: click here. The quotations above are from their draft. This short essay is, in effect, an endorsement and review of their draft. It may have a very short shelf-life. If and as they revise it, all that I say may be outdated.
Adventurous Faith
In the draft, called "Doubt after Reconstruction," they develop the idea that doubt can be welcomed in the life of faith, and that faith itself is part of the adventure of life and not a resting place. They encourage individuals to live their lives in an open-ended way, in companionship with other people and the more-than-human world, recognizing that faith is not about having absolute certainty but about finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life's uncertainties. For them. an adventurous faith includes a sense of God, but not God as a source of certain knowledge. God is, for them, a companion and compass for life's journey. They believe people who have undergone a deconstruction of faith can, in their words, "re-embrace" God, but not God as a bully in the sky or an all-determining power. They can re-embrace God as creative and loving presence in life's journey. They call it a "reason-and-experience" trust in God.
Their audience for the project is, first and foremost, those who undergone, or are undergoing an unraveling, a deconstruction, of a faith that rests on absolute foundations. Many are evangelical or post-evangelical Christians. But their idea of an adventurous faith is relevant to others as well. I see seven kinds of people and contexts to which their ideas are relevant:
Academic philosophers and theologians will recognize that their idea of a faith that includes doubt is not new. Nor do they claim them as such. What is new is that they are taking this idea in actively encouraging it to the general public, and in language readily understood. While Fuller and Oord are at home in the world of academic philosophy and theology, they are, in this context, public theologians. focusing on the belief side of religion.
Plausible Faith
I say the belief side, because religion as practiced in daily life includes more than belief: rituals, community, ethical guidelines, stories, music and the arts, and various kinds of religious experience. They know this. They do not privilege belief as if it is the only or even the primary aspect of religion. They know that we cannot simply "live in our heads" and that even the ideas we hold true by many factors in addition to reason, narrowly understood. And yet they know that, for many in the world, questions of belief are immensely important; and that, for some, beliefs are the most important side of religion. For them, healthy belief avoids the pretense of certainty, lives the questions, and simultaneously seeks plausible things to believe in.
While “living the questions” means giving up certainty, it doesn’t mean we stop seeking the most plausible answers. We don’t say, “It’s all mystery, so believe whatever you like.” After all, we all act as if some answers are better than others, and some ways of living are healthier...Embracing God after deconstruction rejects both absolute certainty and blind faith. The middle way is the way of plausibility or reasonable trust.
And what are the criteria of plausibility? One option, they say, is what is recommended by the Wesleyan quadrilateral. When forming a view, so the quadrilateral says, learn from reason, tradition, scripture, and experience, without absolutizing any of them but with a willingness to learn from all of them. In their words, "no one source functions as a certain foundation. All contribute to the quest for greater plausibility for our beliefs."
Back, then, to the question of God. Is there a plausible way to think about God after Deconstruction. The draft to which I am responding deals primarily with the reality and potentially constructive role of doubt, not with a plausible understanding of God. A more complete treatment will come later.
But the draft hints that such an understanding can emerge when considering the axiological or (as Andrew Davis would put it) the axionetic side of life. This is that side of experience amid which we live with values such as truth, goodness, and beauty, for example. The dogmatic atheist no less than the dogmatic theist is beckoned by the ideal of truth: the dogmatic atheist thinks it "truthful" to deny the existence of God, the dogmatic theistic thinks it "truthful" to affirm that existence. Neither can escape the call of truth in their lives. Goodness functions in the same way. The person who lives tenderly, with respect and care for others, finds "goodness" in the tenderness, and the person who lives resentfully, with a desire that others be harmed, likewise thinks it "good" to exact vengeance. Neither can escape the call of goodness, even as they differ on what it means. The same holds for beauty. People who find beauty in music, for example, find beauty inherently compelling, even as they may differ on what is beautiful in music. The beckoning of these ideals, however concretized in particular lives, is, they say, an "experiential non-negotiable." We can hide from the beckoning, but we cannot escape it.
I sense that, when it comes to articulating what they consider a plausible way to think about God, this side of experience will be highlighted. God will be the horizon, the ground, in which the ideals reside, such that, when we experience them, we are experiencing God. God will be the lure toward truth, goodness, and beauty, and perhaps also a companion, a friend, a tenderness: "The values we assume on this adventure reside in a Valuer. Nudges toward something better imply an invisible Nudger. The beauty we see suggests an imperceptible Artist. A sense of friendship hint at the presence of a Companion we cannot perceive with our senses." (Oord, Fuller)
Mystical Doubt
Is the divine lure toward truth also a lure toward doubt? Might the beckoning of truth within the human heart include a call to question, and thus avoid absolutizing any given belief, however plausible or implausible, when it becomes an idol in the imagination? This is where the draft offered by Fuller and Oord touches upon a more mystical and apophatic side of life: a side which rests in "I don't know," a cloud of unknowing.
To be sure, Fuller and Oord are not inclined to welcome Mystery with an upper-case M, if appeals to Mystery function to shortchange rigorous questioning and inquiry. They are not interested in Mystery as unanswered questions. They like answers, albeit held tentatively without the illusions of certainty.
But they simultaneously recognize, with the philosopher Whitehead, that the depths in the nature of things cannot be understood or "sounded" by even the most plausible of beliefs. The depths are not really an "answer" to anything. Whitehead writes:
"There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
Here, when Whitehead speaks of the depths in the nature of things, he is not speaking of God alone. Or of the creativity. Or of any particular anything. He is speaking about the depths themselves, which may well include God and creativity and all the particulars, but which cannot be contained in any mental framework. He is speaking of the unfathomable depths from which even God emerges.
I cannot help but wonder if the doubt of which Fuller and Oord speak includes a small taste of these unfathomable depths. And yet the search for answers, and the recognition that formerly held answers no longer work, can be a context for tasting the depths. Here "I don't know" becomes a sacred saying in its own right, an act of humility and insight, a taste of the deep.
A taste of the deep is not what a person undergoing a deconstruction of her beliefs is seeking. And yet the doubt she experiences may well include such a taste, implicitly if not explicitly. She will realize that whatever beliefs she arrives at, however plausible, will always be succeeded by something more. Her faith becomes an adventure, not in search of final answers that never come, but as living from the depths. In the spirit of Fuller and Oord, she may be faithful to a primordial nudging that emerges from them, a nudging who might also be a companion, a fellow sufferer who understands. She may find it plausible to believe in beckoning companion, and indeed to entrust her life to its love.
But she knows that life is more than answers. Life is a bubbling up, moment by moment, from unfathomable depths that can never be fully plumbed, but that are known in a certain kinds of experience - love, beauty, courage, and doubt- that transcend all answers.
Doubting Doubt
Doubt is not for everybody. There are times in people's lives when, in order to endure a tragedy or cope with a loss, they must hang on to their beliefs and dispel doubts. I think of a grandmother, living in Gaza, who is holding on to her view that whatever happens in life, the sufferings can be entrusted into God's heart and given meaning. She is grieving the death of her daughter, son, husband, and cousins. I think of a grandfather, living in Israel, whose grandson and daughter were killed in a terrorist attack. There is no need to absolutize doubt or to romanticize it when it can be harmful not helpful. There are times in people's lives when advising them to "live the questions" is cruel not kind. They hold onto what makes sense to them, and sometimes the 'making sense' is a sheer act of the will, to make it through the night. Yes, an adventurous faith is very helpful for people who underdo deconstruction of their inherited convictions. But not everyone needs this kind of adventure. There is no need to make deconstruction a norm by which all faith is measured. There is no need to believe that everybody, everywhere in the world, should undergo it. The world is too complex, too varied, too rich, and too beautiful to insist that there is one way to salvation, namely deconstruction and doubt. Fuller and Oord know this. They are speaking mostly to people in Western societies, mainly Christians, who are undergoing the darker sides of modernity and find that the "faith of their fathers" doesn't work. There are many of them, of us. The Fuller-Oord project can be immensely helpful to many people" in many context. But not all contexts. When necessary, it is good to doubt "doubt" - in service to life.
- Jay McDaniel, Nov. 13, 2023
Deconstruction is the demolition of the house of knowledge built on absolute certainty. It calls into question not only the decorations, rugs, and furniture but also the walls and foundation. It wrecks most, if not all, of the house structure. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
*
Believing after deconstruction means living the questions rather than seeking answers thought to be certain. Those who re-embrace God are skeptical that absolute answers are available. They believe life will always have a measure of mystery and ambiguity. That includes uncertainty about whether God exists, what God wants, and how we might live well. No one can be sure. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
*
A reason-and-experience trust in God provides a compass for our journey. We need a sense of direction, after all, to make progress. The compass doesn’t provide a detailed route, however, it points us toward undiscovered horizons. We navigate in response to the influence of God, other fellow-travelers, the nonhuman terrain, and our deepest intuitions. (Tripp Fuller, Thomas Oord)
Tripp Fuller and Thomas Oord are writing a book, doing a podcast class, and holding an in-person lecture tour on the theme, “God After Deconstruction.” You can find a draft of their book-in-progress in Oord's website: click here. The quotations above are from their draft. This short essay is, in effect, an endorsement and review of their draft. It may have a very short shelf-life. If and as they revise it, all that I say may be outdated.
Adventurous Faith
In the draft, called "Doubt after Reconstruction," they develop the idea that doubt can be welcomed in the life of faith, and that faith itself is part of the adventure of life and not a resting place. They encourage individuals to live their lives in an open-ended way, in companionship with other people and the more-than-human world, recognizing that faith is not about having absolute certainty but about finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life's uncertainties. For them. an adventurous faith includes a sense of God, but not God as a source of certain knowledge. God is, for them, a companion and compass for life's journey. They believe people who have undergone a deconstruction of faith can, in their words, "re-embrace" God, but not God as a bully in the sky or an all-determining power. They can re-embrace God as creative and loving presence in life's journey. They call it a "reason-and-experience" trust in God.
Their audience for the project is, first and foremost, those who undergone, or are undergoing an unraveling, a deconstruction, of a faith that rests on absolute foundations. Many are evangelical or post-evangelical Christians. But their idea of an adventurous faith is relevant to others as well. I see seven kinds of people and contexts to which their ideas are relevant:
- Those Undergoing Faith Deconstruction: The idea of an adventurous faith without absolute foundations is particularly relevant for individuals who are in the process of deconstructing their religious or spiritual beliefs. It acknowledges the common experience of doubt during this process and provides a framework for navigating the uncertainty that often accompanies it.
- Spiritual Seekers: People who are exploring different belief systems or searching for spiritual meaning can benefit from this perspective. It encourages open-mindedness and a willingness to embrace uncertainty in the quest for spiritual understanding.
- Interfaith and Intersectarian Dialogue: In a diverse and pluralistic world, individuals from different religious backgrounds or denominations can find common ground in the idea of faith as an adventure. It promotes respectful dialogue and a recognition that absolute certainty may not be attainable.
- Secular or Non-religious Individuals: Even those who do not identify with a specific faith tradition can relate to the idea of embracing life as an adventure. It emphasizes the importance of finding meaning and purpose, irrespective of religious beliefs.
- Counselors and Therapists: Mental health professionals may find this perspective relevant when working with clients who are struggling with religious or existential crises. It can provide a framework for coping with uncertainty and exploring existential questions.
- Interfaith and Multifaith Communities: In settings where people from different religious backgrounds come together, the concept of faith as adventure can foster understanding and tolerance. It encourages individuals to appreciate the diversity of beliefs and to engage in respectful dialogue.
- Educators and Philosophers: Those involved in teaching and philosophy can use this perspective to explore the relationship between faith, doubt, and meaning in the context of ethics, philosophy, and religious studies. This includes college chaplains.
Academic philosophers and theologians will recognize that their idea of a faith that includes doubt is not new. Nor do they claim them as such. What is new is that they are taking this idea in actively encouraging it to the general public, and in language readily understood. While Fuller and Oord are at home in the world of academic philosophy and theology, they are, in this context, public theologians. focusing on the belief side of religion.
Plausible Faith
I say the belief side, because religion as practiced in daily life includes more than belief: rituals, community, ethical guidelines, stories, music and the arts, and various kinds of religious experience. They know this. They do not privilege belief as if it is the only or even the primary aspect of religion. They know that we cannot simply "live in our heads" and that even the ideas we hold true by many factors in addition to reason, narrowly understood. And yet they know that, for many in the world, questions of belief are immensely important; and that, for some, beliefs are the most important side of religion. For them, healthy belief avoids the pretense of certainty, lives the questions, and simultaneously seeks plausible things to believe in.
While “living the questions” means giving up certainty, it doesn’t mean we stop seeking the most plausible answers. We don’t say, “It’s all mystery, so believe whatever you like.” After all, we all act as if some answers are better than others, and some ways of living are healthier...Embracing God after deconstruction rejects both absolute certainty and blind faith. The middle way is the way of plausibility or reasonable trust.
And what are the criteria of plausibility? One option, they say, is what is recommended by the Wesleyan quadrilateral. When forming a view, so the quadrilateral says, learn from reason, tradition, scripture, and experience, without absolutizing any of them but with a willingness to learn from all of them. In their words, "no one source functions as a certain foundation. All contribute to the quest for greater plausibility for our beliefs."
Back, then, to the question of God. Is there a plausible way to think about God after Deconstruction. The draft to which I am responding deals primarily with the reality and potentially constructive role of doubt, not with a plausible understanding of God. A more complete treatment will come later.
But the draft hints that such an understanding can emerge when considering the axiological or (as Andrew Davis would put it) the axionetic side of life. This is that side of experience amid which we live with values such as truth, goodness, and beauty, for example. The dogmatic atheist no less than the dogmatic theist is beckoned by the ideal of truth: the dogmatic atheist thinks it "truthful" to deny the existence of God, the dogmatic theistic thinks it "truthful" to affirm that existence. Neither can escape the call of truth in their lives. Goodness functions in the same way. The person who lives tenderly, with respect and care for others, finds "goodness" in the tenderness, and the person who lives resentfully, with a desire that others be harmed, likewise thinks it "good" to exact vengeance. Neither can escape the call of goodness, even as they differ on what it means. The same holds for beauty. People who find beauty in music, for example, find beauty inherently compelling, even as they may differ on what is beautiful in music. The beckoning of these ideals, however concretized in particular lives, is, they say, an "experiential non-negotiable." We can hide from the beckoning, but we cannot escape it.
I sense that, when it comes to articulating what they consider a plausible way to think about God, this side of experience will be highlighted. God will be the horizon, the ground, in which the ideals reside, such that, when we experience them, we are experiencing God. God will be the lure toward truth, goodness, and beauty, and perhaps also a companion, a friend, a tenderness: "The values we assume on this adventure reside in a Valuer. Nudges toward something better imply an invisible Nudger. The beauty we see suggests an imperceptible Artist. A sense of friendship hint at the presence of a Companion we cannot perceive with our senses." (Oord, Fuller)
Mystical Doubt
Is the divine lure toward truth also a lure toward doubt? Might the beckoning of truth within the human heart include a call to question, and thus avoid absolutizing any given belief, however plausible or implausible, when it becomes an idol in the imagination? This is where the draft offered by Fuller and Oord touches upon a more mystical and apophatic side of life: a side which rests in "I don't know," a cloud of unknowing.
To be sure, Fuller and Oord are not inclined to welcome Mystery with an upper-case M, if appeals to Mystery function to shortchange rigorous questioning and inquiry. They are not interested in Mystery as unanswered questions. They like answers, albeit held tentatively without the illusions of certainty.
But they simultaneously recognize, with the philosopher Whitehead, that the depths in the nature of things cannot be understood or "sounded" by even the most plausible of beliefs. The depths are not really an "answer" to anything. Whitehead writes:
"There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
Here, when Whitehead speaks of the depths in the nature of things, he is not speaking of God alone. Or of the creativity. Or of any particular anything. He is speaking about the depths themselves, which may well include God and creativity and all the particulars, but which cannot be contained in any mental framework. He is speaking of the unfathomable depths from which even God emerges.
I cannot help but wonder if the doubt of which Fuller and Oord speak includes a small taste of these unfathomable depths. And yet the search for answers, and the recognition that formerly held answers no longer work, can be a context for tasting the depths. Here "I don't know" becomes a sacred saying in its own right, an act of humility and insight, a taste of the deep.
A taste of the deep is not what a person undergoing a deconstruction of her beliefs is seeking. And yet the doubt she experiences may well include such a taste, implicitly if not explicitly. She will realize that whatever beliefs she arrives at, however plausible, will always be succeeded by something more. Her faith becomes an adventure, not in search of final answers that never come, but as living from the depths. In the spirit of Fuller and Oord, she may be faithful to a primordial nudging that emerges from them, a nudging who might also be a companion, a fellow sufferer who understands. She may find it plausible to believe in beckoning companion, and indeed to entrust her life to its love.
But she knows that life is more than answers. Life is a bubbling up, moment by moment, from unfathomable depths that can never be fully plumbed, but that are known in a certain kinds of experience - love, beauty, courage, and doubt- that transcend all answers.
Doubting Doubt
Doubt is not for everybody. There are times in people's lives when, in order to endure a tragedy or cope with a loss, they must hang on to their beliefs and dispel doubts. I think of a grandmother, living in Gaza, who is holding on to her view that whatever happens in life, the sufferings can be entrusted into God's heart and given meaning. She is grieving the death of her daughter, son, husband, and cousins. I think of a grandfather, living in Israel, whose grandson and daughter were killed in a terrorist attack. There is no need to absolutize doubt or to romanticize it when it can be harmful not helpful. There are times in people's lives when advising them to "live the questions" is cruel not kind. They hold onto what makes sense to them, and sometimes the 'making sense' is a sheer act of the will, to make it through the night. Yes, an adventurous faith is very helpful for people who underdo deconstruction of their inherited convictions. But not everyone needs this kind of adventure. There is no need to make deconstruction a norm by which all faith is measured. There is no need to believe that everybody, everywhere in the world, should undergo it. The world is too complex, too varied, too rich, and too beautiful to insist that there is one way to salvation, namely deconstruction and doubt. Fuller and Oord know this. They are speaking mostly to people in Western societies, mainly Christians, who are undergoing the darker sides of modernity and find that the "faith of their fathers" doesn't work. There are many of them, of us. The Fuller-Oord project can be immensely helpful to many people" in many context. But not all contexts. When necessary, it is good to doubt "doubt" - in service to life.
- Jay McDaniel, Nov. 13, 2023