Walking on Water (Speech)

(The following was given at the Wheaton College Philosophy Department Chapel in March of 2007.)

I’d like to offer a meditation on Matthew 14:22-33, a passage that has fascinated me for a long time.

Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.
During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.
But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”
“Come,” he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”
And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

While I don’t think that Matthew had any allegorical intentions for this story, or that if he were here he would endorse everything I’m about to do with it, I do think it has some interesting analogies to the situation that all of us are in: trying to be Christian intellectuals.

Jesus’ disciples are in a boat on the Lake of Galilee during a fierce storm. This is something like the position of the church in society, and especially like the position of a Christian institution like Wheaton College in the subsociety of academia, or mainstream intellectual culture. Though I don’t want to exaggerate, the wind is against this boat. Academia operates with different assumptions, values, and commitments than Christians do; it plays by different rules than Christian thought does; it has created plausibility structures that are unfavorable to Christianity. Which is not to say that it is a stable environment: it is constantly being swept by powerful “winds” (academic windbags) and “waves” (academic fads). The boat is a relatively—but only relatively—safe place to be. Although it absorbs much of the shock, it is still “buffeted” by these winds and waves. For the last couple of hundred years or so, and for the foreseeable future, Christian thought has been mostly on the defensive, reacting and responding to challenges rather than setting the agenda.

But some people, like Peter, aren’t content to stay in the boat and for whatever reason want to feel the full fury of the storm. This was how I fancied myself when I came to Wheaton, and surely it’s true of many of the people here. It can’t be an accident that Wheaton has a larger share of philosophy majors than most colleges do. Plato was right in saying that philosophy begins with aporias, and bringing two worldviews into contact is a very effective way to generate these.

In my opinion, the path of the Christian intellectual should not be undertaken without fear and trembling. There are some very powerful and very persuasive challenges to Christian doctrines and Christian worldviews, some explanations and interpretations of things that seem to make better sense than traditional Christian ones. Furthermore, the gospel is foolishness to the Greeks (the philosophers) and a stumbling block to the wise (the learned, the intellectuals). It has elements that are dogmatic, offensive, and paradoxical nearly to the point of being irrational. I highly doubt that a completely satisfactory integration of faith and learning, free of tensions and anomalies, will ever be possible in this life. Certainly, trying to be both a Christian and an intellectual is harder than trying to be one or the other. Many people who try it either retreat back to the boat or sink, and lose their faith. I’ve seen friends of mine do both. And I want to say that the former is by far the better option, and that there’s no shame in it. In many cases it’s not cowardice but prudence. I believe that God prefers the naïve believer to the sophisticated skeptic. Once I thought that all Christians should study philosophy, but now I doubt that it’s beneficial for everybody all the time. Jesus doesn’t command Peter to get out of the boat—it is Peter’s idea—and he doesn’t rebuke the other disciples for not getting out. In fact, Jesus’ most beloved disciple, John, stays inside.

I don’t want to paint too bleak of a picture, but we don’t do anyone any favors by denying or downplaying these dangers. They are real. And I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that “we scholars, we philosophers” are a spiritual elite with a superior vocation. Every path has its own spiritual dangers, and those of philosophy are probably not the greatest. We may analyze imagined ethical dilemmas in philosophy, but we are unlikely to be put in real ones.

So, in light of all I’ve said, why should we Christians try to be intellectuals too? Why should we subject ourselves to these hazards? When Peter sees Jesus in the distance, walking on the water, he is just not content to stay in the boat. By virtue of his personality, he is impelled to go to him, to see this miracle and this marvelous man up close. Now, all of us have probably been asked why on earth we’re studying philosophy, how we plan to make money with our philosophy degrees, and so on. And we realize that there is no convincing practical or utilitarian justification for it. But some of us are just impelled; by virtue of our personalities—which are quite different than Peter’s in this respect, but remember that this is an analogy—we are fascinated by abstract problems, captivated by intellectual beauty, moved by the love of wisdom for its own sake. And as Christians, we have an even deeper motivation. Different people experience God in different ways, and for us, the way to our hearts is through our brains. We want to love God with all our minds, and we want that love to abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. We want to know God and the world he has created, including ourselves, with as much clarity and fullness as is humanly possible. We feel that we can only do this if we commit ourselves to rigorous intellectual honesty, experiencing the full force of the challenges to that knowledge. And like Peter, we trust that, though what we are doing is dangerous, Jesus will keep us safe.

Peter gets out of the boat and walks a few steps. I imagine that he is thrilled, because men don’t defy gravity—but terrified, because men don’t defy gravity. Like deconstruction, but much, much better, this is “an experience of the impossible.” His mind can only sustain the tension for a few steps, when the terror wins out, and he begins to sink. He cries out, and immediately Jesus catches him by the hand and pulls him to safety. “You of little faith,” [Jesus] says, “why did you doubt?”

I’d like to give Jesus some credit here by avoiding an anachronistic reading of these words. Peter’s conflict is, importantly, not between “reason” and “faith.” Especially not when, as is too often the case, reason is conceived as grounded belief and faith is conceived as ungrounded belief. In my epistemology seminar we entertained and rejected the thesis of “doxastic voluntarism,” the idea that you can make yourself believe a proposition p, irrespective of its plausibility, just by deciding to. If we were right that this is impossible, it would be unfair of Jesus to demand it. To digress a bit, however, something you can learn in philosophy is that pitting reason against faith is a false polarization. There are a hundred ways to show that there can be no view from nowhere, no complete escape from epistemic circularity, and no thinking without presuppositions; there can be no self-evident truths, no indubitable beliefs, and no inescapable arguments; all thinking, even the most rigorously scientific, must involve relying on authority, privileging some intellectual values over others, and being committed to ideals and to extra-rational goals. Philosophy qua philosophy is too limited in scope to answer many of the specific objections to Christianity, but it can help you avoid the dangerous fallacy of judging Christian beliefs against false standards of rationality.

Anyway, Peter suffers a great deal of cognitive dissonance, but of a different sort. On the one hand, he has an intuitive grasp of the laws of physics and physiology. He knows that he can’t stay afloat in stormy waters, and that if he sinks, he will drown. And this is not just theoretical for him, it is so deeply ingrained that walking on the water terrifies him. On the other hand—and this is the key—he knows that Jesus is much more than a man. He has seen him work miracles in the past, with his own eyes he sees him walking on the water now, and he has Jesus’ assurance that he will be safe. So you could say that Peter has at least as much evidence, at least as much of a rational case, at least as much epistemic justification, for trusting Jesus as for doubting him—although it’s a very different, incommensurable kind of justification. Peter has already affirmed Jesus’ divinity verbally, and this is a chance for him to affirm it, if you like, existentially. The great challenge for him now is to hold to this belief, to focus on the person of Jesus who is waiting for him on the lake, against the very strong power of his human instincts and emotions and the very real wind and waves that are surrounding him. But holding these truths in his mind is an act of the will. And it is for this failure that Jesus chides Peter. I think you will find that whenever the Bible talks about faith and doubt, it means it in this sense. Others may read the scene differently, but I imagine that Jesus is disappointed but not angry here, and that his voice is not harsh but gentle. At least Peter was willing to make the attempt, and no other mortal has ever walked as far on water as he did.

To elaborate this theme a bit I’m going to quote, without apology, from C. S. Lewis. This is from The Great Divorce, a conversation between one of the citizens of heaven, Dick, and one of the citizens of hell, a former believer.

“Do you really think people are penalized for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken. […] There are indeed [intellectual sins], Dick. There is hidebound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed—they are not sins. […] [Mine] were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.” “What risk? What was likely to come of it except what actually came—popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric? […] Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. […] We were afraid of crude Salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes. […] Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”

God seems to have a great respect for our cognitive autonomy. He seems unwilling, most of the time, to reach in and change our beliefs or to take away our doubts, even when we want Him to. But he has given us ways to stay faithful. Our minds work in coherentist fashion: we throw explanatory nets around the facts and theories that float to the surface of our consciousness. It’s also just a fact of our psychology that the facts and theories nearest the surface will be the ones we have most recently, or most powerfully, been exposed to. That’s why it’s important to continue dredging up the ones that bolster our faith—especially when we are bombarded by disturbing evidence, arguments that make Christianity seem very weak and pale and implausible, and the very powerful and not-to-be-underestimated social pressure to conform once we step out from under the Christian umbrella. This reminding is one of the reasons why we share our testimonies, remember God’s activity in the lives of others now and in the past, study the Bible, listen to sermons that tell us what we already know, participate in the liturgy, and worship. This isn’t my idea, it’s at least as old as Deuteronomy, when God institutes the yearly feasts to commemorate his mighty acts of deliverance, tells the Israelites to talk about the commandments “when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up,” and warns them, “be careful you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

These acts of remembering—which again are acts of the will—are vital spiritual disciplines. But I don’t claim that they make anyone impervious to doubt. Not even the presence of Jesus in the flesh, right in front of him, keeps Peter from doubting, and I doubt that any of us can do better. When Peter begins to sink, he cries out for help. I hope that you and I, when we begin to sink, will always have the humility to cry for help as well, to say, “Lord, I want to believe, help my unbelief.” If I can share some of my own experience, I can think of three or four times in the last few years when I nearly reached the breaking point, when the cognitive dissonance was nearly unbearable. Each of those times, I had to surrender my intellectual pride and decide that my identity as a Christian was more important than my self-image as a thinker. I am not a very spiritually sensitive person, but those are some of the few times I am willing to say that I have felt the hand of God. Those are the moments that I need to continually bring to the surface of my mind. And it was only after those crisis moments, after sorting out those priorities, that I began to see new possibilities for integration.

In conclusion, if I had to boil down my four years of reflection on these questions to one statement, it would be this. If you take this narrow path of trying to be a Christian intellectual, if you decide to walk this tightrope, you probably won’t remain a Christian unless you really want to. If you aren’t committed, you will find it easy to leave the faith and easy to justify your decision. But if you are committed, though you may undergo some mental anguish and spiritual strife along the way, you need not fear losing your soul. I hope that I, and everybody here, will one day join the great crowd of witnesses who testify to this.