In Defense of the Faith?

~ by Nathan Brown, Editor, Signs of the Times, Australia/New Zealand

I like to think of myself as a mild-mannered editor by day—something of a Clark Kent, perhaps. But a couple of nights each week I play in a local basketball league. Sadly, I don’t become a Superman character—it’s generally uglier than that. Too often, it seems I’m a bad sport—I spend too much of my time complaining to the referees about the referees. Each week I challenge myself not to say anything to the referees and consider I have had a good game if I just play the game without backchat.

Bit it isn’t easy. We play in a pretty rough league. Players get hurt. In the past season alone, our team injury list included a broken arm, broken ribs and many lesser bruises and scrapes. Some of my team members have jobs that require them to be fit; they can’t afford to be injured or they will be unable to work. With this kind of play being allowed, there is also a greater risk of aggression between the players on the court and push-and-shove late in an unrestrained game has the potential to flare into something uglier—and sometimes does.

And my sense of “justice” is offended when referees allow this kind of play to continue when they have the authority—the whistle—to keep the games cleaner, fairer and safer.

I believe I have a good case when I try to point this out to the referees. I believe that even some of them would agree with my championing the cause of fairness on behalf of my team, if only they would consider my arguments. The problem, of course, is context.

In the heat of the game, when the scores are close and the clock is running down, the referees are not interested in my impassioned pleas for justice. They just see a big, angry, sweaty player, who seems to argue with them too often and whose team is about to lose yet again.

Context is important to any communication. And the more important the communication, the more we need to consider context and how that might impact on the attempt at communication. In her superb—and Pulitzer Prize-winning—novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson has her narrator comment that, in the face of attacks, he consistently refused to defend his religion. “It only confirms them in their skepticism,” he reflects. “Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

  Unfortunately, too many of us religious types don’t pay enough attention to the context in which we talk about God. And often religious discourse—particularly in public forums—is styled in such a way as to be unable to be anything but defensive. We are always “resisting the attacks” from other religions, philosophies and world views. And our whole way of believing is molded into a “posture of defense.”

That’s why we need new ways of speaking about God and new contexts in which truth can be spoken and shared. Rather than a posture of defense, we could try a posture of embrace, a posture of listening or a posture of serving. It is in these postures that the truth about God can be heard and can shine.