We just returned from two wonderful L’Abri conferences, near Charlotte, NC and Portland, OR. They were both stimulating and exhausting, with the exhaustion gaining on us by the end. It was exciting to have so many people wanting to talk, interact and question serious ideas and issues. It seems as if people are starved for serious discussion. Even seminary students experienced it as something new.

Of course there is discussion and there is discussion. A lot of discussion is fenced by respectability and theological orderliness. This means that personal problems, serious sins and real doubts are put outside the fence. It has always been hard to be a Christian. But because of this we need to be able to talk, share, get help and perspective from each other – especially when it comes to personal problems, serious sins and real doubts.

What has gone wrong? There has been a failure to acknowledge the fallenness of the world, especially in our own lives. There has also been a failure to let grace (which we believe in theologically) be lived out between people. But along with these more obvious failures, there has been a constricting idea of faith based on a brittle notion of certainty.

Many think they are required to have a quality of certainty that they have never experienced, but are ambivalent about desiring. They feel they ought to have a mathematical-proof kind of conviction of the truth of the Christian faith. Anything short of boilerplate certainty meets with such Christian disapproval that the atmosphere kills open discussion and Christians with their questions and doubts retreat into isolation. They also fear such certainty when they see that in others it can shut down curiosity, reflection and ensure that new ideas are reliably met with indifference or defensiveness.

It should not be a surprise to you that our society is deeply suspicious of certainty, especially religious certainty. There is the dreaded “f” word, not the 4 letter version but the 14 letter version, “fundamentalist”. We are told that the fundamentalist is a threat to democracy and civility, having a “finished, proprietary version of divine truth”, that is, claiming to have exclusive ownership and management of the truth of God. This is painful to see and easy to ridicule but what acceptable alternative is offered? Some blissful freedom from all convictions? We do not need any more evidence that this is a false hope or solution. Surely we are all fundamentalists. The politically correct prime candidates. It just depends on what our “fundamentals” are.

At least some of the blame for our problems with certainty can be traced to Descartes as well as to other strands in the thinking of the Enlightenment. Claiming to prove God’s existence as certainly as a geometry problem, Descartes offered to give our faith the indubitability of a proof in mathematics. Most people could not make his proof work, but unhappily did not then conclude that the attempt itself was an arrogant mistake in the first place. They went in two other directions – some that they needed to keep on trying to fine tune the argument to make it work, and others because it had not worked, that there was no intellectual basis for belief in God at all.

This has been a problem that many of our students have been bringing us for years. They had been promised some watertight, bulletproof universal argument built on a model of science or mathematics -- but they had found it strained and unconvincing. They then developed a deep cynicism about the whole possibility of the Christian faith being true at all.

If we want to know if something is true, our strategy must depend on what it is that we are investigating – knowledge of what? Can we expect to know God with the methods of investigation that brought understanding in science where inert objects stayed still while we observed them with calibrated instruments, asked questions of them with detached mastery? We can’t even know another human person that way, let alone a transcendent Person. If we want to know a person we are dependent not just on our powers of reason and observation, but on the self-disclosure of that person.

It is not as if we must be content with a lower level of certainty. It is that we must gear our ideas of certainty to whom or what is to be known. Faith in Christ never needs to be a leap in the dark. We are told in the Bible to think, evaluate, judge, discern, weigh, listen, look, reason, count the cost and to not be fools. But it is not as if we were standing over an inert object or under a proposition written on a blackboard. If God is the object of our search, he is a transcendent Person who does not sit still, who (by grace) enables me to breathe my next breath, who may ask questions of me and who will one day be my final Judge. We, by contrast, are limited, fallen creatures with a predisposition to want to be independent of him. Scientific investigation can be a good analogy for the quest for truth about God, but if we do not respect the enormous differences involved in God being God, it can be like looking at stars through a microscope. Especially if the microscope is a powerful one, we are likely to conclude that there are no stars at all.

I don’t think we are promised a faith free from doubts. Enlightenment ideals of certainty not only failed but (for many) took all confidence in God down with them. The Bible and Christian experience are filled with examples of real and realistic trust in things that we cannot prove. Throughout our journey we must beware of taking any paths that treat God as our equal or subordinate. We must also work to create an atmosphere where it is safe to speak openly of these things.

This past term we saw a number of students in whom a loss in confidence in God’s truth drove them to cynicism about God, but who gradually were able to put together a better foundation. We are very grateful for this as well as for the really positive atmosphere among this large group of students. They worked hard, studied hard, and treated each other with respect and real care despite extraordinary differences among them. We thank God also for very helpful helpers, Tobiah, Christian and Sarah. Give thanks with us for this summer term.

Give thanks also for these two good conferences, each bringing around 350 people from all over the place. Pray for all those who were there. It was a wonderful mixture of faces from the past and many new faces as well.
It seems that we have had a sudden burst of new life all around us:
The big news this spring for the Keyes family has been the birth of Owen Henry Keyes in mid-May, our first grandchild, the son of Chris our oldest and his wife Liz. Everybody is thriving.

Then the big news within L’Abri has been the long awaited birth of Michelle Susan Ryan on July 10th. It was a long hot summer and Terri had a difficult pregnancy so her arrival came with high drama and great joy, with all the students being part of that celebration. They are all doing well and Michelle is growing by leaps. Pray for Mark and Terri as they readjust for this new member, and also for their work permit which is stalled in bureaucracy at the moment.

Near the same time, Ryan and Sarah Hamilton, who used to work here with us, also had Isabel Grace Hamilton in Detroit. They are doing well also.
Thank God for the new, healthy lives and pray for these vulnerable and precious children as they grow up into this world.

Pray for the Morrell children as Luke starts the 4th grade and Nate starts the 1st at Imago School. This will be Joe’s and Sue’s first experience of daytimes without children. They would like prayer that a trip to see Sue’s family in Australia after the autumn term would work out well
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Pray for us for this autumn term – for the right people to come, for them to be helpful to each other, for the lecturing, tutoring and the whole atmosphere. It is unusual for us to be almost fully booked for a whole term before it starts. Pray for those that we have had to turn away, that they could come later or go to another branch.

Thank God that our finances have still been good and pray that this might continue though the economy has not significantly improved.

Last January, we did a course in “Cultural Apologetics” as an intensive 2-week J-term course for Gordon Conwell Seminary. This year we are going to do it again, but as an open course for both seminary students and anybody else. It will be limited enrollment, of course, but we will run from the night of Jan. 11 to Jan. 23, 2004. Pray for this time and for the right people to come.
~Dick Keyes