On the Road of Return to Christianity
It’s been about almost a year since I wrote my blog post about my spiritual deconstruction. In that post, I discussed why I left: the main reason was I felt that there were too many contradictions between the foundations of my faith and the findings of rational/scientific investigation in the world. In the time since writing that post, my thinking on Christianity has shifted. I became discontent with atheism and now consider myself Christian once again, or, perhaps, someone who is on the path to becoming Christian. The Christian path I’m following now is different than before: I used to be a non-denominational Protestant; now I am becoming Catholic.
I was originally planning on this post being a of direct response to my previous post, in which I would respond to each point I made about why I left Christianity. However, I realized that I still agree with those critiques of Christian apologetics, except I now see them as critiques against a materialistic view of Christianity rather than against Christianity per se. My return to Christianity was not catalyzed by those questions being answered. Instead, my worldview and ontology/epistemology have shifted. I am no longer bothered by contradictions between findings of science/history and historical/literal interpretations of the scriptures because I no longer see the literal interpretation as being the main point of Christianity. I see the symbolic and narrative elements as primary.
My return to Christianity has largely been catalyzed by an existential discontent with the fruits of a secular worldview in my own life and in society. I felt smug in my reddit-tier atheism, taking pleasure in dunking on creationism and other Christian superstition, but that worldview was empty. Making your own meaning in life is presented as this liberating solution because its not forced down on you from on high. But it was not fulfilling. While I did find some meaning (and still do) in life at the micro-scale through hobbies and achieving goals, not having a teleology of life at the macro-scale made it all feel hollow. I’m now convinced that religion and ritual are inevitable parts of human nature, and that they tend to manifest in bizarre and corrosive ways (the religiosity of wokeness being the prime example) when not channeled through the disciplined value hierarchy of an actual religion. My new understanding of Christianity gives me a defined structure of ritual and spiritual practice and the goal which gives my life meaning.
My new understanding of Christianity has been strongly influenced by Jonathan Pageau’s work. Pageau discusses an ancient and symbolic view of Christianity, which offers a picture of how reality lays itself out to us and how to live in that reality. Reality has an ordered structure: the heavens above (abstract principles) and the earth below (concrete and elaborated instantiations of those principles). Reality has this structure because perception is inherently value laden. There are an infinite number of objects and details we could perceive, and even a single object is a multiplicity of many things. Despite this, we are able to intelligibly perceive the world because of heuristics, and those perceptions are organized by our value hierarchy (both from the bottom-up by our drives and neurology, and from the top-down by our worldview). This patterned structure of unity and multiplicity plays out at every layer of reality. Those patterns are captured in symbols, and the meaning of a symbol is not arbitrary. While materialism has a sharp distinction between the objective and subjective, this view sees the two as being intimately linked. From what I’ve explained so far, this view of Christianity is just describing the patterns of reality. The religious elements are that God is the creator of the heavens above and the earth below and is the foundation of all being. It’s not a materialistic cosmology with the natural world with the supernatural layered over it. God is not a being, but is the infinite source of all being. The teleology of this view of Christianity is that we are called to mediate between the heavens and earth and to ascend the mountain of being, partaking in the divine nature through a process of deification called theosis. It’s not primarily about morality or about making sure you believe the right things so you go to heaven and avoid hell, it’s about continuously growing in the image of God through ritual, liturgy, and community.
Another thinker who has been particularly influential on my return to Christianity is John Vervaeke, especially his 50-part series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this series, he discusses how philosophies of meaning have developed through history and how to cultivate a life of meaning. Despite Vervaeke’s secular approach (his ultimate prescription is the cultivation of a “religion that isn’t a religion”), the concepts he discusses gave me a strong appreciation for the ritual and symbolic elements of traditional Christianity, namely Catholicism and Orthodoxy. He discusses the distinction between different types of knowledge: procedural, how to do something; participatory, the knowledge of something through engagement with it in a relationship or practice; perspectival, the knowledge of what it’s like to be yourself with your role in your community; and propositional, the knowledge that a statement is true. Modern culture elevates propositional knowledge at the expense of the other types. We are obsessed with knowledge but our traditional institutions for cultivating wisdom have crumbled. Vervaeke also discusses how the ancient view of faith was less about believing certain propositions were true, but more about being faithful to a particular practice. These ideas gave me a vocabulary and nuance to realize that my issues weren’t with Christianity per se but more specifically with the Protestant Christianity I grew up with. Over the past view centuries, Protestantism has reduced most of Christianity to propositional knowledge (salvation being offered in exchange for believing certain things to be true), and this emphasis on propositional knowledge is demonstrated by the fact that the focal point of a Protestant church service is the sermon. The point of a sermon is to give the audience more knowledge about the bible and how it relates to their lives, mostly only engaging the intellect. Catholicism and Orthodoxy embrace the other types of knowledge through icons, ritual, and liturgy. For example, the experience of a liturgy is embodied and communal. There is sitting, then standing, kneeling, and more standing, and the entire congregation does it together. Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t just offer a path to personal salvation, but an entire way of being in the world. I’ve been going to a Catholic church for about six months with my roommates, and am planning on going through RCIA to become baptized.
I don’t know if I would consider myself a Christian under the typical Protestant criteria (believing Jesus died for my sins and was literally, bodily resurrected). At the very least, I think I believe that the Christian mythos is true in a symbolic sense in which it is a map which lays out a way of being that redeems the world and brings it into communion with God. Maybe a conviction in those propositional elements will come with time and devotion to the practice (though even if it doesn’t, I no longer see that as particularly important). Despite my path resulting in a lot of existential anxiety and some nihilism over the past couple of years, I’m glad that I went down the road of skepticism, for my newfound faith has a much deeper foundation and richness than it did before.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” — C.S. Lewis
