Letters to Stagnant Christians #12: The Paralysis of Analysis

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Dear Jeremy,

It’s always enjoyable to spend time discussing theology with someone like you. You have a very fertile imagination and a robust logic, which combine for stimulating conversation.

Your strength is also your Achilles heel. It is your intellectual aptitude that is your enemy when it comes to the things of faith. You are one of those Christians who gets “stuck in his head”, and hopes to think his way out of the problem. When he can’t, he assumes the only explanation must be that Christianity is faulty (for if it were not, his brilliance would have solved the mental conundrum, right?).

We call this the paralysis of analysis: the Christian who becomes immobile in his devotion, commitment, or even Christian relationships, because he has to “solve” the problem in his mind first. The problem can be of many kinds: how does Christian growth happen, how does prayer really work, how does God’s sovereignty correspond with human choice, how does God’s foreknowledge work with human sinfulness, why does evil exist in a world made by God, why are there so many religions, what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel, could there really be an eternal hell, or many other questions.

Now most thinking Christians face and tackle these questions in some form and at some point in their lives. The difference between them and you is that other Christians integrate these questions into the broader experience of being a Christian. The Christian experience is more than a mental, cerebral experience of problem-solving: it is a life of loving, obeying, serving, and worshipping. In your case, however, these questions become like errors in an equation that must be solved before proceeding one step further. You become fixated on them, chase them around and around, and become quite despondent if you are unable to resolve them in your head.

What you cannot see is that it is quite arrogant to reduce the Christian life, and indeed all of life, into mental events taking place inside your head. While you chase these questions as if all of life depended on it, there are all kinds needs around you: people needing to be loved, served, and helped. And you cannot see that while you magnify these questions into all-consuming dilemmas, you are being quite lazy, neglectful, and irresponsible in other areas. By treating your inner world like a grand intellectual debate worthy of Socrates vs. Hume, you get to ignore and slough off the everyday stuff that everyone is supposed to do: do your work, love your family, go to church, serve others. And you cannot see that the real problem is not the intellectual question you wish to solve; it is the moral problem of refusing to submit to life’s demands unless Christianity satisfies you intellectually.

This is why the Bible refuses to dance to this tune. God knows that the perverse human heart, once it has found one answer to its “problems with God”, will simply find another. In the meantime, the same heart is in rebellion to the simplest duties and responsibilities that are laid upon a human. The hubris of the human heart wants to pretend it is on a deep intellectual quest to solve theodicies, while refusing to make the bed, take out the trash, and say thank you for breakfast.

The Bible teaches that believers who want to know God’s will must be prepared to do God’s will. This is all over Proverbs (Prov 1:7, 1:28-29, 2:5, 8:13, 9:10, 14:26-27, 15:33). In other words, submission precedes knowledge. No one gets the right to swill God’s will around in the test-tube of our own ruminations before we actually begin doing His will. God’s will is not a project we get to dissect with the scalpel of our own limited logic. No one is permitted to first challenge the coherence of the will of God like some kind of mental Sudoku, and then decide if he will actually submit to it. If you aren’t interested in loving your neighbour, God has no reason to help you understand the mysteries of predestination. If you won’t be nice to your cat and dog, it’s frankly laughable to imagine that the Creator of the universe is going to explain to you why he permitted Satan’s fall. God is not playing mental chess with us; He is interested in worshippers and friends.

Yes, your knee-jerk reaction to this might be that this is a Christian cop-out, calling on you to exercise “blind faith”, or to just “be quiet and carry on”. You’d be very wrong to assume that. Plenty of Christians have found deeply satisfying and intellectually sophisticated answers to questions that troubled them. But they always found them because they were walking with God at the time, moving in His direction, obeying what they already knew, while waiting on Him to teach them further. The man refusing to budge until he gets answers is really the child with a folded-arms sulky posture: demanding God give an account to him of the secrets of the universe or he’ll refuse to come along. The book of Job answers the man demanding explanations by saying that the answers are a lot more than you could comprehend. Trust and submit to what you do understand, and do not presume that you could squeeze the ocean of God’s ways into the the 2 litre bottle of your own intellect.

Jeremy, this is difficult for you to swallow, because you will feel as if you are ignoring the problem. You are not, indeed, you will not be able to. But you are humbling yourself to accept that resolving the loose ends of your mental harmony takes second place to doing the very simple and obvious things that you know ought to be done – things that are done by people with far less mental aptitude than yourself. And if simpler people can obey; all the more reason for someone like you to obey all the things he already knows.

Explanations will come. But before God honours you with lofty explanations, you should honour Him with some lowly obedience.

Your pastor and friend,

David