Stranger than Fiction: Strange Faith for a Strange Reality

Black Hole Sun: Life is Weird Sometimes

10 weeks ago, I was flying back to the US for a mission conference. I was exhausted before I left, but found myself unable to sleep more than a few minutes at a time on the 14-hour flight, and tried to pass the time with in-flight movies. The plane was a 787 "Dreamliner," impressively new with a well-designed interior and auto-dimming windows. Those windows turned into a problem when they didn't dim quite enough, and the sun just happened to rise directly outside my window. I was at first confused at the alien, blue sun which rose, until I realized the windows had auto-dimmed and the manual controls were disabled. The best I could do to avoid this piercing cyan orb, dimmer than it would have been but still painful to tired eyes, was to shift in my seat and pull my hat down low. I had already watched a couple of movies and nothing looked interesting, but an old classic-era movie about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel caught my eye, partly because it starred both Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. (Title: The Agony and the Ecstasy)

I don't remember if I watched Total Recall before or after that one.
Either way, Ginger Ale is the best choice on flights, always.

Growing up on old movies, I knew both of these men tended to play strong-willed protagonists, and thought perhaps the two of them theatrically butting heads would be entertaining in a way that yet another trope-filled recent Hollywood production would not be. The movie itself was quite unique, beginning with a long introduction about Michelangelo and his art (which brought back memories of Francis Schaeffer's old but legit video series – with his impressively non-ironic goatee and knickerbockers), before moving into the story of how a warrior pope got a capricious sculptor to spend years painting a ceiling on his back, and how the perfectionist artist convinced the tight-fisted pope to keep extending the project until he was finished.

It occurred to me what a weird, existential sort of moment this was—flying in thousands of feet over Alaska, awash in the weird, blue glow of an auto-dimmed sun, watching an old technicolor period film about Michelangelo and Pope Julius II starring the Professor from My Fair Lady and also Moses/the NRA guy, while eating Japanese snack mix.

Life is full of these weird, surreal moments, and they strengthen my faith.

They strengthen it because recognizing those weird moments is a defense against a subtle but strong temptation to doubt, which is that believing the Bible explicitly and worshiping the God it describes in 2016 can sometimes feel a little weird, a little unreal.

The Strangeness of Faith (Mirrors the Strangeness of Life)

Maybe you have never felt this particular temptation, but I often have. "This is the era of instantaneous global communication, of metamaterials, of Facebook, of satire-as-news and social upheaval. Isn't bowing over your Chinese dumplings to thank a 1^st Century Jewish Savior-King a little... weird?"

Let's be honest with ourselves, from the world's perspective, it's quaint at best. It doesn't always feel weird to us, of course: belief in God can feel entirely natural while we can see answers to prayer, the testimony of changed lives, those times we especially feel God's presence, etc. Rationally the evidence for God is there as well, both historically and logically. So it's right and good that our faith should seem as real and instinctive to us as it often does.

It's obvious, however, that there is much about believing the contents of a canon of books closed almost 2000 years ago and making life decisions based on the will of God, the Creator of our universe that we cannot ever directly observe, that will necessarily seem weird in a culture that calls movies that came out 10 years ago "old," and which struggles to explain even the obvious existence of the human soul or mind. To our modern, cynical world, sincere faith is weird.

But—real life is weird. Even if you've chosen to stay inside a zone of life that has become comfortable and familiar, there are those really bizarre moments where you just have to shake your head. For those of us who have left what was comfortable and familiar, those moments occur much more frequently.

So when your faith seems weird, remember that reality is weird too. In some ways, in this modern era where we live immersed in fiction—TV shows, movies, books, etc.--we come to expect reality, contrasted to all that fiction, shouldn't have that weird feeling. But that's a little misguided, because fiction is usually strange in a way that makes sense to people, a consistent weird, if you will, because it's coming from the minds of people. Most fiction is either seeking a balance of fictional but plausible events, or occurs in an alternate world where nothing has to conform to our perception of what normal is.

But reality is both real and yet also stranger than human-devised fiction. Things happen in real life that no one would find plausible in a novel or movie. One of those things is that, once, among a people who for hundreds of years had expected a Messiah from God, a man declared he was that Messiah, and furthermore the Son of God, and that the proof of this was that He would be killed, and then be raised back to life again. He was in fact executed by the colonial government, yet on the third day the tomb was empty and he was seen alive by hundreds of people, and those who knew him and wrote about it suggested that if you didn't believe them, you could ask any of those people. A very falsifiable claim, then, yet instead of being proved false, its proponents willingly went to their deaths for the sake of it, and the faith spread across the entire world. Clearly something happened which cannot be accounted for by the banal theories of skeptics, and for those of us who have experienced God in our lives, there is no reason to doubt the Biblical account, as we have encountered the One of whom it speaks.

Messy Reality vs. Fragile Atheism

So then, for believers in God, a weird world makes sense.
There are rules by which things are supposed to work, to be sure: the laws of physics are the equations that describe God's order. He called it good, and He doesn't randomly violate them. There are commonsense laws about our world as well. (I love the poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" which cleverly illustrates how the basic principles of humanity, society, and life don't change, even when we manage to convince ourselves we've finally escaped them.)

But believers are free to acknowledge that, at times, weird things happen, which cannot be explained via the laws which explain how things operate by default, and we have an exception, what we call a supernatural event. If God is real, this makes perfect sense: that the One who set up the system and pronounced it good could still occasionally choose to make changes here or there as the situation requires, or in answer to the fervent requests of His people.

Materialists are forced to either explain away every single inexplicable event by natural means, or else shrug (Sometimes Christians forget.. under modernism you were forced to answer, but postmodernism lets you shrug. It's a nihilistic shrug, though). The only other way out is to deny the inexplicable thing happened at all, regardless of whatever evidence exists (as an atheist once said/unconciously admitted to me: Of course that couldn't be true. If it were, there would have to be a God) and at other times they simply come up with some other complicated explanation which they claim is much simpler or less crazy than "invoking a divine being" as the explanation (because they have already rejected that explanation for personal reasons) as if disbelief is the default normal (actually belief in God is by far the historical norm). It is as if color-blind people insisted color did not exist, and claimed any other explanation for people's claims of seeing color was preferable to the crazy, outmoded idea that things had a magical property they couldn't personally observe.

But preferring a very complicated explanation which does not involve God to one that does involve God is merely a sign that one has made up one's mind regardless of the evidence. If you don't want to believe in God, you'll find other explanations more appealing. If you already believe in God, whether weird things turn out to be less-common application of natural laws, or something more, it's equally reasonable in both cases.

In other words, Theists have much the less fragile position. Atheists tend to rebuff all challenges to their position with indignation and/or mockery, because without turning the burden of proof back on the other person, it becomes apparent just how narrow is the ledge to which they cling. (Polite atheists certainly do exist, but they typically will not debate the question either.)

Stranger than Fiction: The Implausibly Real God

In the end, a view of our world that excludes the strange and inexplicable is insufficiently broad to describe the real world. So when you are tempted to find the truths of scripture, the concept of God, or any aspects of our faith to be fundamentally strange (and if you haven't ever thought that, you might have a different problem...), don't feel bad about it, but recognize that it is because they are not plausible fiction, but part of messy reality. If the animals on an alphabet chart were hypothetical, I would consider U's unicorn to be quite plausible, but E's elephant to be a bizarre fantasy (Tusks coming out of its face on both sides of a skinny hose-like trunk and fan-like ears, all stuck on the front of a fat, bulky body? What was this artist smoking?). Yet the elephant is real and the unicorn is mythical. So there is no point in insisting that reality conform to what is theoretically plausible, in fact one of the marks of reality is that it never fits neatly into its own apparent cliches, and goes in directions we couldn't have expected if we were allowed to guess first.

We see this in our own walks of faith: Hypothetical faith is a nice pleasing continuity; real faith has odd corners and rough patches, even bits that seem missing. Fictional God is plausible: Allah—a simple, inexorable Unity, or the million specialized gods of Hinduism, one for everything. The Biblical God is not something we'd have ever imagined: One, but Triune; internally diverse in a way that defies human description, a Divine being who starts on the edge of what we can grasp conceptually and goes far past it. Prophets are more or less plausible—specially chosen people to communicate the ideas of Heaven to mortal men—but a suffering Messiah is so implausible that His own disciples didn't see Him happening under their own noses.

As C.S.Lewis has famously stated, a real God would be something we couldn't guess, versus something humans would come up with themselves. Reality is stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and that makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (because reality is what the mind of God has come up with, whereas fiction is what the minds of humans come up with), unlike overly simplistic materialist explanations. Christianity is the one faith that can accommodate rigorous logic and inexplicable miracles, that doesn't only make claims to mysterious and inaccessible truth, but actually introduces concepts of reality that you can grasp at but not succeed in comprehending, that are grounded in the concrete and not merely mystical hand-waving, yet range far into the mystical realm in that they exceed our ability to comprehend and have no perfect analogues in the material world.

All this is exactly as it should be, and clashes with our expectations yet "rings true" with reality in exactly the way that real things do. So, rather than retreating to fictional conceptions that are less mentally tiring, that seem to make more sense precisely because they were conceived by humans for human consumption, let's continue to forge ahead into the weirdness of reality, and of our faith, and be comforted that the mutual correspondence between the two is simply more evidence that our faith is indeed real.