The anatomy of unbelief

An excerpt from Fool's Talk by Os Guinness.

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Do we truly seek to conform our thinking to reality, or do we also seek to conform reality to our thinking? Is this clash between truth seekers and truth twisters merely a problem for intellectuals and those who enjoy the life of the mind? Or are all humans double-faced, "dissonance in human form," as Nietzsche expressed it? What does Kant's view of the "crooked timber" of our humanity mean for our thinking and understanding? And what is it that W. H. Auden glimpses when he writes that "the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews"? Is this merely a colorful metaphor, or is there more there that we should take seriously?

The Bible's answer takes us to the very heart of its diagnosis of unbelief, for in the biblical view the central core of the anatomy of unbelief stems from its willful abuse of truth. In our treatment of truth we, and all human beings, are at the same time both truth seekers and truth twisters, and in a deep, mercurial, tenacious and fateful way. Sometimes we seek to conform our thinking to reality, and just as often we try to conform reality to our thinking. As Sir Thomas More's protagonist Hythloday argued in his Utopia, and the seventeenth-century Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole argued later, human beings "not being willing to render their actions to conform to the Law of God, have endeavored to render the Laws of God to conform to their actions." From Genesis and the story of the fall onward, a host of passages convey this understanding, but one of the deepest is in the first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans. Bursting with gratitude and pride at the glory and power of the gospel and its way of righting wrong in the world, the apostle turns to consider human disobedience and its consequences. Among the many claims he makes in a famous passage on sin and cultural degeneration, he asserts that those who disobey God "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Rom 1:18).

The Bible uses many strong terms to describe unbelief, including hardening, twisting, blindness, deafness, unnaturalness, lies, deception, folly, rebellion and madness, but none repays reflection more than Paul's phrase in Romans. At the heart of sin and disobedience, Paul says, is a flagrantly deliberate and continuing act of violence to truth. Sin and disobedience lay hold of truth, grasp it roughly, and will not let it be what it naturally is or say what it naturally says. In this way, the deliberate dynamic of unbelief is to suppress truth, stifle truth and hold truth hostage. What may be known about God, Paul says, is quite evident still, but it is adamantly denied by the determined act of will that is sin and unbelief.

The phrase grasp the nettle is too weak to picture what Paul is talking about, but it does begin to capture how the sheer force of a grip can be enough to counter the normal thrust of the nettle's sting. The experience of a hijacking comes far closer. When a terrorist hijacks a plane and holds the passengers hostage, he can put a gun to the head of the pilot and force him to fly wherever the terrorist wants, anywhere other than its intended destination. Just so, says Paul, unbelief looks at the undeniable truth of God's universe and at the unbeliever's own nature made in the image of God, but then denies their true force, suppresses their real meaning and turns their proper destination into a different one. The prophet Micah had charged that Israel's false leaders "twist everything that is straight" (Mic 3:9 NASB), but Paul goes deeper in analyzing that the heart of unbelief centers on its active abuse of truth.

It would be a mistake to hurry past this phrase or dismiss it as only a dramatic metaphor, for Paul's point grounds and underscores a variety of themes that run throughout the entire Scriptures when describing sin. Four prominent emphases recur most frequently, and together they form a multilayered view of the dark willfulness of sin, disobedience and unbelief.

First, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of suppression. Unbelief seizes truth, grasps it roughly, silences its voice and twists it away from God's intended purpose. By itself, truth speaks naturally and clearly, but its voice is censored, blocked and silenced, so that it is no longer allowed to speak as it does naturally:

They say to God, "Leave us alone; we do not want to know Your ways." (Job 21:14 NLV)

You who hate correction
and turn your back when I am speaking? (Ps 50:17 NEB)

They have denied the LORD,
saying, "He does not exist." (Jer 5:12 NEB)

For crime after crime of Edom
I will grant them no reprieve,
because, sword in hand, they hunted their kinsman down,
stifling their natural affections. (Amos 1:11 NEB)

Second, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of exploitation. Unbelief not only suppresses the real truth and twists it away from God's true ends, but wrests it toward its own ends and its own agenda.

The men who now live in Jerusalem have said, "Keep your distance from the LORD; the land has been made over to us as our property." (Ezek 11:15 NEB)

But you trusted to your beauty and prostituted your fame. (Ezek 16:15 NEB)

O Tyre, you said,
"I am perfect in beauty," . . .
they hung shield and helmet around you,
and it was they who gave you your glory. (Ezek 27:4, 10 NEB)

Your beauty made you arrogant,
you misused your wisdom to increase your dignity. (Ezek 28:17 NEB)

Listen to this, leaders of Jacob,
rulers of Israel,
you who make justice hateful
and wrest it from its straight course. (Mic 3:9 NEB)

Third, unbelief goes further still and abuses truth through a deliberate act of inversion. Unbelief not only suppresses truth and exploits it for its own ends, but seizes it and turns it completely upside down, inside out and the wrong way around, and then holds it there for its own purposes. Above all, through inversion we as creatures put ourselves in the place of our Creator, and we believe our own lie rather than God's truth. We make ourselves gods instead of God, so that proper self-love becomes prideful self-centering love. As Niebuhr states bluntly, "In an ultimate sense the self never knows anything against itself." In terms of truth, we are always self-right. In terms of goodness, we are always self-righteous. And in terms of God, we are always our own gods.

In John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Satan is unequivocally clear: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" or "Evil, be thou my good." Sartre expressed this dynamic famously when he said, "To be man means to reach toward being God." And before him, Nietzsche declared in the same spirit, "If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god?" Carl Gustav Jung recognized that this was the heart of Nietzsche's assertion of the Superman. It is "the thing in man that takes the place of God." After the triumph of the Russian revolution, Lenin even had "God-defying" towers designed to demonstrate his Babel-like and Promethean pretentions, though most of them were never built. As these examples show, sin is essentially and willfully narcissistic, and it includes both a truth claim ("God is dead") and a task ("I am now out to be God in my life").

Sin, then, is the claim to the right to myself, and all our worldviews as unbelievers are in part a shrine to ourselves. This can be seen most clearly when atheism declines naturally into its religious phase, as it so often does (as in Auguste Comte's "religion of humanity," Alain de Botton's "religion for humanity" or Sam Harris's atheistic "spirituality"). We humans then become both idolater and idol, though we mask the folly from ourselves. The absurdity betrays itself, however, in various odd developments that take place. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, pointed out that the same people who scornfully dismiss the doctrine of three persons in one God as irrational, think nothing of worshiping seven billion persons in one God.

Such statements are only the modern corroboration of the biblical view of sin, and the reason why John Calvin spoke of our human hearts as an idol-making factory. St. Paul made the same point centuries earlier. Unbelievers reject God and, in an act of absurd inversion, worship the creature rather than the Creator. They swap the splendor of the immortal and infinite God for breakable images of things that are puny and mortal like ourselves, and they exchange the natural, God-given view of sexuality for unnatural forms. Earlier still, the Hebrew prophets focused on this same inversion, and excoriated the skeptics and the enemies of God for the ludicrous absurdity of what they were doing in worshiping idols.

Shall the axe set itself up against the hewer,
or the saw claim mastery over the sawyer,
as if a stick were to brandish him who wields it,
or the staff of wood is to wield one who is not wood? (Is 10:15 NEB)

How you turn things upside down,
as if the potter ranked no higher than the clay!
Shall the thing made say of its maker, "He did not make me"?
Shall the pot say of the potter, "He has no skill"? (Is 29:16 NEB)

In your arrogance you say, "I am a god; I sit throned like a god on the high seas." Though you are a man and no god, you try to think the thoughts of a god. (Ezek 28:2 NEB)

Fourth, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of deception that ends in its own self-deception. Unbelief seizes God's truth, twists it away from God's purposes and toward its own, and is therefore forced to deny the full reality of the truth it knows. But in the futile act of trying to deny the undeniable, it both deceives others and deceives itself, and so becomes self-deceived. Unbelief therefore manufactures not only idols but illusions. The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions."26 In that sense, all unbelieving worldviews are not only a shrine to those who hold them but a shelter from God and his truth.

The logic behind this drive to deception and self-deception is simple. If sin is the claim to "the right to myself," it includes the claim to "the right to my view of things." And since we are each finite, "my view of things" is necessarily restricted and simply cannot see the full picture. We therefore turn a blind eye to all other ways of seeing things that do not fit ours, and especially to God's view of things. As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are." There is therefore a close link between the prideful love of self, its aversion to the full truth and its creation of illusions. Kierkegaard wrote, "But spiritually understood, man in his natural condition is sick, he is in error, in an illusion, and therefore desires most of all to be deceived, so that he may be permitted not only to remain in error but to find himself thoroughly comfortable in his self-deceit."

St. Augustine and his later disciples, such as Pierre Nicole, developed the same point. A key part of deception and self-deception is the fact that evil must imitate good, unbelief must copy truth, and vice must mimic virtue. Thus whereas properly ordered love relates everything to God in trust, gratitude and humility, improperly ordered self-love relates everything to itself in prideful self-love. Such pride works constantly on behalf of its own body and its own mind in two ways. First, it serves the self-love of its body through the pursuit of pleasures; and second, it serves the self-love of its mind through the pursuit of approval and honor.

Needless to say, the latter is fateful as the source of our human hypocrisy. If we can act so as to produce the appearance and effects of proper love in spite of motives that are quite contrary and come from improper self-love, we can appear to be honorable and generous before our fellow humans. Just so did the Pharisees love to pray on street corners in the sight of all, and just so many big givers have loved to have their benefactions trumpeted to all when there is little real love behind their generosity. Just so, as we shall see later, does sin's imitation of good deeds provide a stalking horse for hypocrisy. We may despise blatant self-love when we see it in others, and we certainly do not want others to see it in us. So we mask our own motives to produce the consequences that will win us the approval and admiration of others. In Nicole's words, this is a "Traffick of Self-love," but one in which we "find satisfaction in this lovely Idea of ourselves."

The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness. This theme is prominent in St. Augustine's Confessions, and comes directly from his own radical self-scrutiny in light of the teaching of the Bible. "Falsehood," he wrote, "is nothing but the existence of something which has no being." But if this is so, "He who utters falsehoods utters what is his alone," for nothing is more private than a newly minted lie. There is therefore a lie at the heart of each person's unbelief, and Augustine speaks of it as "the huge fable which I loved instead of you, my God, the long drawn lie which our minds were always itching to hear." Augustine brings all the themes together in one extraordinary passage in book 10 of Confessions:

Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

Some people scoff at this passage as the jaundiced thinking of a Calvinist before Calvin. But there has never been so much evidence for the omnipresence of deceit, and there has never been an age like ours that offers so many inducements to deception. For a start, this is the era of the "looking-glass self" and of "impression management," an age that is bursting with multiple reinforcements of our capacity for deception. These range from the lack of face-to-face reality in the new social media to the proliferation of modern enhancements, such as cosmetics, Viagra, Botox and plastic surgery, to the improved science of selling, propaganda and manipulation. But even these are beside the point, for modern thinking has only deepened our understanding of how human and how common deception is and always has been. As Pascal wrote centuries ago, "Human society is founded on mutual deceit."

Consider the whole treatment of the unconscious, mixed motives, rationalizations, white lies, "cognitive dissonance," alter egos and "shadow personalities." Consider the place of "active forgetfulness" and deliberate "inhibition" in Nietzsche and postmodern thinking, and the former's view of humanity as "incarnated forgetfulness." Think of the enduring appeal of books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Or consider D. H. Lawrence's reflections on our human capacity for self-deception. Human knowledge, he argued, is broadly of two kinds—the things humans tell themselves and the things they find out. The trouble is that the things humans tell themselves are nearly always pleasant, but they are lies. Why?

Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages . . . which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorous on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees the light. . . . Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes before him like the carrot before the ass.

In Marar's survey of the modern understanding of deception, he summarizes the situation simply: "Our minds are equipped with a convincing knack for cooking the facts, whether future, present or past." Can there, then, be any quarrel with the diagnosis of the Bible, which has long seen deception and self-deception as an inescapable part of human living and a core feature of unbelief? Deceit and the folly of trusting deceit are core themes in the prophets. For example, Jeremiah:

The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)

Realism about deception and self-deception is a hallmark of the Christian mind. Reinhold Niebuhr was fearless in applying it to thinking about foreign relations, but how much more is it relevant to apologetics. Niebuhr argued that the folly of the modern mind is to make the precision of scientific thinking the model for all human thinking, and so to forget the bias, self-interest and moral defect at the heart of all thinking—sometimes even in thinking about science. According to his analysis, which makes St. Paul's diagnosis central, human thinking has caught itself in a triple bind. First, all human thinking is sinful. As finite, fallen and sinful creatures, our thinking can never be other than self-interested to some degree. Second, all human thinking is idolatrous. As humans made in the image of God, we still have a spiritual and rational power that can inflate even our worst and most self-interested thinking beyond its natural range. And third, all human thinking is hypocritical. Rather than acknowledging the bias and self-interest in our thinking, we are able to hide our dishonesty by aligning our ideas with higher ideals and more general interests—so that we can appear nobler and more generous than we really are.

So the moral defect perpetuates itself down through history, but we refuse to admit that our problem is much more than ignorance. It turns on the impossibility of genuinely disinterested thinking because of the demonic twisting of sin. Sin insinuates itself into all human thinking, so that even the loftiest and most high-minded thinking of both individuals and nations displays certain common features. There is, Niebuhr writes, an "implicit idolatry," a "constitutional self-righteousness," a "lurking dishonesty," a "stupidity of sin" and a "spiritual source of corruption" in history that leads to a "vain imagination" and finally to "spiritual impotence." This is the reason why human ideals are never able to fulfill the soaring visions of which they dream. It is also the reason why these recurring features stain all our thinking and sow the weeds of the ironies and unintended consequences that grow alongside our better ideas. Behind the crooked timber of our humanity are our crooked minds, and that crooked timber now warps even the brightest and best visions that flow from it.

If all this is so, can there be any question that our Christian advocacy must never be a matter of trundling out tried and trusty one-size-fits-all arguments and surefire proofs? Pascal described the challenge well. "We think playing upon man is like playing upon an ordinary organ. It is indeed an organ, but strange, shifting and changeable. Those who know only how to play an ordinary organ would never be in tune on this one. You have to know where the keys are."