Holy Skepticism (Pt. 1)

A short-series on John's teaching on discernment

*Note: My last two books have primarily been about the relationship between our formation as Christ-followers and the way that we think. One is on teachability and the other is on theology. A Teachable Spirit was my attempt to show that a Christian should have the means and need to wisely embrace learning from anyone and everyone. At the same time, my co-authored Slow Theology (with Dr. Nijay K. Gupta) was an attempt to explore how to do this thinking at a pace of wisdom and discernment in our thoughts about God. This short mini-series on “The Low-Level Theologian” will try to bridge these two concepts: what does it mean to be a slow learner who can learn from anyone?

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In 1955, the great Southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor received a letter from a freshman at Emory University, Alfred Corn, asking for advice on maintaining his Christian faith amid the intellectual chaos of his new educational environment. Corn’s professors, he wrote, were edging him toward doubt and disbelief. At the end of her written response to the young man, O’Connor wrote:

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. Faith is still there, even when you can’t see it or feel it, if you want it to be there. You realize, I think, that faith is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free—not free to anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.¹

Surprising advice, indeed. Skepticism, for O’Connor, was not something that the Christian should run away from. Quite the opposite, she argued, a Christian could only withstand the “invisible sea” of ideas by cultivating a form of what she called “Christian skepticism.” In the same letter, O’Connor would admit that it was this kind of skepticism that had helped her own Christian faith flourish through college. Rather than believing everything that was being put in front of her, she chose to withhold judgment in the name of discernment. “What kept me a skeptic in college was precisely my Christian faith,” Flannery writes, “It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.”²

Don’t believe it just because someone else thinks it. In my experience of serving the intellectual journeys of many young Christian undergraduates, I continually find myself wanting my students to cultivate not less skepticism but holier skepticism. For most of these students, their minds are constantly swirling about with the chaos of Instagram posts, Twitter spats, and YouTube posts. Were they to believe everything that the algorithms put in front of them, they’d be conspiracy theorists and heretics overnight. I am constantly wishing they would slow down in how quickly they believe things and be far more cautious in flinging wide their intellectual doors. Be more skeptical! This kind of holy skepticism could very well save us years of bad thinking and faulty beliefs.

Photo by Dali Bek

This is, I’ve long believed, the pastoral force behind the apostle John’s writing of his letters to the churches in and around Ephesus in the first century. John is the oldest and last-living one who had been one of the named apostles that had followed Jesus. So he is seeking to equip the generations of Christians who will follow him. In his first writing, John outlines what I believe to be his invitation to holy skepticism:

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. (1 Jn. 4:1-3)

What does “do not believe every spirit” mean? Especially for us? I think it is holy skepticism. In her commentary on John’s letters, Marianne Thompson likens what John is saying here to birdwatching. A birdwatcher needs a field guide—namely, to identify what one is looking at out in the wild. Without such a field guide, complete with images of species and families of creatures of flight, we can mistake what we are looking at.³ For the Christian, we need a field guide to know what we are looking at. For without a field guide, what we may think is an exotic bird from South America may just be a pesky invasive species.

“Why,” Thompson asks, “does it seem that so many people cannot see the spirits for what they are and fall prey to all varieties of heresies, misinterpretations of Scripture, cults, and fads?”⁴ For John, the answer is that unsuspecting followers of Jesus were believing things about Jesus that ran contrary to what the apostles had taught. And the result was disastrous—dividing the very communities John was writing to.

Before we move on to the other components of John’s paragraph on discernment here, it is critical that we see—in a moment of chaotic digital information—that believing too quickly and too uncritically is dangerous and harmful. I remember when my son came home from school a number of years ago and told me that a peer at school had told him, “If it rhymes, it must be true.” I shared the irony with him that what he’d been told didn’t actually rhyme. He cocked his head, looked at me puzzled, and then realized that maybe his new aphorism wasn’t faithful and true. Indeed, it wasn’t. And believing it was could destroy his life.

Christian. Don’t be less skeptical. Be more skeptical—with a holy skepticism.

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Thanks, as always, for being a supporter and reader of the Low-Level Theologian. You can always find me wasting as little time as possible on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or, check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. Remember my most recent book, entitled Slow Theology: Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World. See below! And, as always, don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or comments in the comment section below.

1. I’ve smoothed out the entry lightly for readability. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 477–78.

2. O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, 477.

3. Marianne Thompson, 1-3 John (IVP, 1992), 111.

4. Thompson, 1-3 John, 111.