On a recent Sunday morning, my five-year-old daughter asked me why she had to go to church. She didn’t feel like going. I explained that because God made her, she belonged to God, and though God had given her to our family, she still belonged to God, and he wanted her to go to church. Then she asked me how I knew God wanted her to go to church, at which point I said, “God told me I have to take you to church.” 

Strictly speaking, that’s not true: I’m not certain God has ever spoken to me, but I do know God has never spoken to me about my daughter’s church attendance. Yet neither is what I told her a lie. If she could understand and pay attention long enough, I might have explained that the church’s worship is a unique and necessary way we commune with God, that communion with God is why we exist, and that Scripture instructs parents to raise children in the knowledge and love of God. But she’s a child. “God told me” will have to suffice for now. 

But it cannot suffice forever. My daughter’s world must get bigger—big enough for it to seem strange that God would be mindful of us, big enough to notice the merits of religious perspectives outside Christianity, big enough for her to wonder whether there is God at all. Eventually, she will have to judge whether the faith she received measures up to the world. 

The Christian faith is not a philosophy, but believing it does mean having a particular perspective on the world. And while we can’t verify or falsify what Christians believe—that God exists, that the God who exists is the God of the Bible, that Jesus rose from the dead—we judge whether the faith is credible by measuring the explanatory power of the Christian perspective. On the one hand, some recent public converts to Christianity, such as Aayan Hirsi Ali or Louise Perry, have explained how they came to realize that their moral and social convictions, which they once took for granted as Enlightened views, actually originated in Christianity and still depend on Christianity to make any sense. On the other hand, lots of people in recent years have disaffiliated from Christian churches and undergone faith “deconstruction.” They have found the Christian perspective wanting, unable to deal satisfactorily with, for instance, same-sex-attracted people or the equal dignity of women. 

One simple way we can judge the explanatory power of a worldview—a term that has been so abused I’m slightly embarrassed to use it—is to ask whether it invites us into a bigger or smaller world. To illustrate: People who have undergone faith deconstruction might feel that when Christians insist on a literal six-day recent creation of the universe, they invite people into a smaller world that refuses to take in certain kinds of astronomical, geological, chemical, and biological evidence. Or they might deconstruct because, to them, a thought world without room for licit same-sex relationships and trans people is too small and can’t make sense of the actual experiences people have. For them, being “affirming” means occupying a position in a bigger world. Meanwhile, recent converts to Christianity feel that secular accounts of morality make the world too small, and they have come to believe that the Christian faith can take in a bigger world. 

Claiming that something is true means claiming that it invites us to see the world more fully. If believing something requires you to exclude some part of the world, whether the findings of science or subjective human experiences, that belief or idea makes the world smaller, which means the belief is either false or inadequate. A worldview with a truncated range of vision is useless by definition. The “size” of one’s world is the principal test of a worldview. A perspective commends itself by exerting great explanatory power. 

This is not an abstract intellectual problem. To use a sadly common example, when a Christian person (1) cannot endure one more day of marriage but (2) can’t justify divorce theologically and (3) knows the marriage isn’t null in the eyes of the church, that person faces a faith problem far more acute than the simple question of whether to obey Scripture or the church. Sure, the Christian can choose simply to buckle down and obey, but the more the three elements above pull at each other, the more likely this Christian’s tragic situation is to raise another question: Is this religious authority credible? The Christian who feels compelled to end their marriage feels they are having an experience outside the boundaries of the authority’s “world,” and that experience throws the authority into question. The more those in religious authority deny the experience, insisting, say, that every marriage can be saved, or that a spouse can change, or that a difficult marriage is sanctifying, the more the marital crisis grows into a faith crisis. People often describe faith as believing what you cannot see; the problem, in this case, is just the opposite: a faith that is asked not to believe what it can see clearly. When religious authorities demand this kind of faith, they say, as it were, “God told me you have to stay married—even if your experience tells you my word is not credible.” 

Orthodox and many Protestant churches have admitted divorce on precisely these grounds: Despite unconditional marriage vows and the spiritual union between husband and wife, life is sometimes tragic. The trouble with this response—as a Catholic might tell you—is that it solves the problem by revising the Christian perspective on marriage: If the historic Christian position is that marriage is unconditionally permanent, then we’re now saying marriage is permanent* (*terms and conditions apply). 

When the faith seems inadequate to comprehend the world, the Christian is tempted to subject the faith to reinterpretation, converting the challenge into a merely hermeneutical problem. When the experience of marriage seems bigger than the Christian understanding of marriage, which is to say, when life seems to falsify Christian doctrine, the impulse to reinterpret is in fact a coping mechanism—we are attempting to relieve the anxiety that comes with feeling some dearly held belief might be wrong or inadequate. 

We deploy this hermeneutical coping strategy in the other direction too: We reinterpret the world to fit it into our faith. I believe the recent surge of interest among Christians in “re-enchantment” exemplifies this temptation. At their best, Christians who reject a “disenchanted” world—a world of only material matter and devoid of spiritual reality, without the miraculous and transcendent—are responding to the poverty of the modern scientific worldview, which really does lack explanatory power in certain dimensions. At its worst, Christian talk about re-enchantment may be a plea, not to affirm a reality unaccounted for by the scientific method, but to excuse ourselves from some of the horrors, perplexities, and oddities of the world, including many scientific discoveries. Kepler was disappointed when he discovered that the orbits of the planets were elliptical rather than spherical, but that disappointment didn’t nullify the implications of his findings. In much of the discourse about re-enchantment, I fear we turn away from the world and retreat into something like Narnia or Middle-earth because it simplifies the complications of living in the modern world. This is faith-by-gestalt-switch. Our yearning for re-enchantment exposes our desire to return to the comfort of a smaller, cozier world and a simple faith that can be at home only in such a little world. 

Like any worldview that would be taken seriously, the Christian worldview cannot sacrifice its willingness to be falsifiable. But to be falsifiable means the Christian faith must be a secular faith. What I mean is that the person who believes the Christian message must believe and be able to articulate why the Christian faith is an invitation to a bigger, not smaller, world—and it must be a faith that is livable in the world. I think it is noteworthy and concerning that the Christian communities who seek most radically to embody the ideals of the gospel are also the ones who seem inevitably to remove themselves from the world to live out the faith. By being sectarian in this way, these communities disobey Jesus’s words to his disciples that they must remain in the world, taking on the difficulties of a faith that is truly in and comprehending of the world. Likewise, the Christian faith must not be intellectually sectarian—that is, a set of ideals that cannot speak to the breadth and depth and contradictions of actual life. If the Christian faith is a secular faith, it is also a realist faith. 

If one strategy for faithful Christian living is sectarian, aspiring to believe and live out the Christian faith in a manner that is radically set apart from the world, and even treating the Christian faith and life as totally incommensurable with other perspectives, then a competing strategy is realism, which understands Christianity as faithful only when it remains distinct from, connected with, and answerable to the world around it.  

The tradition of “Christian realism,” which is closely associated with the thought of Protestant theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, leans so heavily on realism that people are right to question its adequacy as Christian. Niebuhr, who dealt candidly with human self-interest and corruption, stood in a long line of theologians who reinterpreted the Christian faith to accommodate inconvenient realities. Early Christians, after all, were committed pacifists, held property in common, and were uncertain of the salvation of those who were wealthy or who sinned after baptism. The realist temptation is to put distance between us and any words of Jesus that strike us as too small to comprehend life in the world: “Be perfect.” “Unless you give away all your possessions, you cannot be my disciple.” “Do not resist an evildoer.”  

It’s not hard to see that some versions of Christian realism lead to indifference and resignation, revising Christianity into a religion of cheap grace that perhaps saves our souls but leaves our embodied lives to the ugly realities of the world.  

Surely we have choices other than (1) resigning ourselves to reinterpreting Christianity as a spirituality that doesn’t demand anything difficult (the realist temptation), (2) closing ourselves off from reality in order to fully live out the demands of the Christian faith (the sectarian temptation), or (3) abandoning the faith because life seems too big to accommodate it. We must strive for an authentically Christian realism: a Christian faith that engages the world without being resigned to it. 

Again, this is no mere abstraction, nor am I referring simply to the relationship of faith to reason. In recent months, I have struggled seriously with two related problems in relation to the Christian faith: mass immigration and the market economy. I have felt at times that the knee-jerk Christian response to these challenging questions is a simplistic moralism. 

In some ways, this simplistic moralism is a testament to effective Christian formation, if only absorbed from the atmosphere of Christian community. It is not an accident that, for many Christians, a restrictive border policy is morally wrong and it offends God when we round up and deport people who are in the country illegally. The biblical writers attest that we are morally obligated to the foreigner, and they remind us of this obligation so overabundantly that we’re right to be skeptical when people suggest contrary moral duties. The Bible commands not only the love of neighbour but also the love of the stranger and the enemy. And lest there be any confusion, Jesus clarifies in his parable of the good Samaritan that the neighbour you are commanded to love is the stranger with whom you have enmity.  

In our time, many nations have rejected the idea of global citizenship and universal humanity—that people are interchangeable across cultures—and have insisted instead on radical cultural particularity that disfavours diversity and insists that ethnic and cultural groups are real, distinctive, and entitled to self-determination as distinct peoples. This rejection has largely defined global politics of the last decade, and it represents a pragmatic challenge to the Bible’s moral teaching. The baptized person who believes that his or her country must sometimes turn away the refugee and the immigrant would be right to ask himself or herself, “Am I still a Christian?” 

Like marriage, however, immigration is not a simple question of obedience or disobedience to Christian ethics, nor a simple matter of greed or racism. Rather, too many people are having an experience of the world that seems to go beyond the Christian view of how reality works. 

I say all this as a Christian person who agrees that mass migration has had enormous, undeniable downsides and that the morally superior position belongs to those willing to address those downsides directly. I wish the Christians who would like to abolish ICE or not regulate migration would say something like, “The hospitality to which the Lord calls us will cost us and our children dearly.” Alas, few are saying this. Instead, we hear an intellectually sectarian fantasy of hospitality with zero negative consequences—a view of the world that is unable or unwilling to admit what is otherwise plain to see. 

What we must never say is that the teachings of Jesus are to be received and obeyed only within reasonable limits. That would be an attempt to resolve our moral anxiety by resorting to hermeneutics. No one who reads the Gospels in good faith can say that Jesus was being hyperbolic and just wanted us to be nice people. Nor, in my opinion, can we solve the problem simply by reaching for the ordo amoris—that is, the order of love—which was much discussed after J.D. Vance invoked it when he suggested that our obligations to love are first to those immediately around us and only thereafter to those farther away. When the stranger shows up at your door—including the door of your country—this kind of reasoning just doesn’t work. 

At this point, it is worth asking whether it is even possible to solve this problem, and if not, whether I’m guilty of the very thing I’ve described, clinging to my Christianity despite its inability to address these challenges. I confess that I am acutely aware I am tackling a problem that is undoubtedly greater than I am. However, if the goal is a “secular” faith whose aim is to see the truth of the world most fully and realistically, then I believe the only available help is the cross. The cross represents simultaneously Christ’s victimhood and his victory, his passive submission and his radical action against sin, the reign of the spiritual forces of evil and that “Good” Friday on which God rescued captives and transferred them into the kingdom of his Son, all that’s wrong with the world and the world’s only hope. The cross is therefore the symbol of the contradictoriness of human experience and, for the Christian, the way God enters into that experience in order to contradict the contradiction. It teaches us to hope that by losing our lives we shall find them. 

The cross, then, transfigures the problem I have been exploring into its own solution—a transfiguration that expresses the deepest meaning of Christian realism. You might have noticed that each example I’ve used could be argued to make the opposite point. The world-comprehending realism I’ve described—that the failure of some marriages is a tragic inevitability, that disenchantment is the unavoidable cost of scientific naturalism, and that we face unavoidable limits to our capacity to be hospitable and to see everyone’s shared humanity—could just as easily be characterized as a pessimistic narrowing of the world, foreclosing any hope for the unexpected. And this possibility, that the same belief can be world-narrowing or world-expanding, is how the problem is transfigured into its own solution. We don’t simply flip pessimistic realism into optimistic realism; rather, we hold on to both and endure the cross of their contradictoriness. The Christian life is about anticipating, not realizing in history by our own efforts, that this contradiction will be resolved—and God alone can do it. 

Plainly, to use the same marriage example, an authentic Christian realism demands that we affirm the real, unequivocal permanence of marriage. By affirming this belief, our faith works as a force that is always pushing to expand our view of the world, even as we must acknowledge that our present experience of reality is one in which some marriages are going to fail. Likewise, we can never let go of the belief that the stranger at the door is indeed the neighbour God has commanded us to love, and this faith commitment should always disrupt and challenge us to see the world more fully, even though we presently cannot see a world in which that kind of radical hospitality is possible. Only by this cross of contradiction and uneasy conscience, by refusing to resolve the tension with easy answers, can we avoid resignation to a depressing realism or the misguided task of reinterpreting the faith or the world to deal with our guilt and anxiety. The cross must stand at the centre of the Christian’s worldview. Only then is faith a commitment to a larger world; only then are sin and death, the most relentless and limiting features of reality, comprehended by the larger view of justice and resurrection. 

Most simply, what I am describing is the irresolvable entanglement of faith and doubt. And if this is true, then the faith with which the Christian looks out on reality is captured in the simple prayer of the man in the Gospels who was faced with the impossible: “I believe; help my unbelief!”