What do you know?

Today is my wife's birthday. Congrads to her on starting a new year of life, as well as for carrying new life inside her! Thanks to her for being part of my life, for which I'm much better off, as well as a better person for having had her in my life.

On the bus home from weekly church staff meeting today, I started reading the chapter "Spiritual Formation Through Belief" in Doug Pagitt's Reimagining Spiritual Formation (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2003). He is the pastor of Solomon's Porch in Minnesota and, in a section titled "What do you know?", writes the following:

For the last few centuries, the Western worldview has the assumed belief that leads to spiritual formation comes about in exactly the same way. People start out as empty vessels--so the model goes--that must be filled with information, which leads to knowledge, which leads to right belief. Thus, knowledge is power: If we give people the information, they will believe. This perspective pervades education, business, art, entertainment--and the church, which has adopted it for spiritual formation with such vehemence that it can be hard to imagine a church's people coming to belief in any other way. (p. 114)

But the belief that leads to spiritual formation is not simply knowledge: It is centered in the way we understand and live in the world. Most beliefs are based on the ways we experience life, on the things that happen to us. We hold our most important beliefs at such a core level that we can hardly imagine not believing those things or explaining how we came to such beliefs. (p. 115)

The concept that knowledge comes through information is foundationalism--in rough terms, learning as a construction project. Information is the foundation upon which our hopes, ideas, and experiences rest. The foundation, then, is critical to sustaining belief. New information that coheres with the old strenghtens the foundation; in contrast, information that seems contrary, weakens the foundation. If too much weakening is allowed, the entire belief may collapse like a skyscraper when the first floor is demolished. Formal debate depends upon this notion: Show that a line or argument rests on a faulty premise, and you've shown that the entire line of argument is faulty. (p. 115)

I understand this way of thinking because I used to think this way, too. I assumed that people based their beliefs upon certain sets of information, and so to get them to believe differently. I simply needed to give them new information. And I was good at offering new information that demolished someone else's viewpoint in order to lead logically to right belief. (p. 115)

If only belief really were that simple. I could send out an annual e-mail to my church to explain all the stuff of faith, then go to Bermuda for the rest of the year while all that good information reshapes hearts and minds. (p. 115)

But information alone rarely suffices to create belief; it needs to partner with other aspects of how we understand and live in the world. So the practices we are developing at Solomon's Porch are built on the understanding that belief is formed when information finds a partner with people's hopes, experiences, ideas, and thoughts. (p. 115)

Now I don't mean to disparage the cognitive process nor to downplay the importance of thinking right. Nor am I interested in arguing about whether thinking is more important than feeling or less. That's an old, tired argument. Instead, I'm suggesting that in belief there is always a complicated interaction, like a well-executed, spontaneous, free-form tango between information and one of the belief partners. (p. 115)

A few years ago I had a conversation with a girl who held beliefs about animal rights and abortion different than my own. As we talked, it became clear to me that attempting to counter her information with my information wouldn't be useful. Her beliefs (and mine) were not based on information but on her hopes and experiences. I begain to realize that someone can take in new information and understand it perfectly well without changing beliefs. Until I said something that jelled with her hopes and experiences, I would play no part in her formation of belief. I discovered there was no need for me to attempt to deconstruct her foundational belief--she wasn't going to let me, and I really didn't feel a desire to. Rather, it seemed right to enter lift as an invited guest, one she could trust to suggest she swap her hopes. After that conversation, I began to wonder what my role as a spiritual guide would look like if, instead of focusing on desseminating religious information, I served more as an interpreter and suggester of alternative dreams, desires, and possibilities. The more I considered this option, the more excited I became: People who can change our beliefs are people to whom we give authority to suggest alternatives to us. It's hard to get around the idea of belief as a relational process. (pp. 116-7)

At Solomon's Porch our desire is to form friendships where we are invited into each other's lives with a level of trust that allows for spiritual formation. We can learn from one another because we have proven ourselves trustworthy. (p. 117)

This malleability of our beliefs isn't bad. In fact, there is considerable good to the challenge of living a faith that's based on more than information and that is connected to the frailty of our humanity. In our community we've found that this understanding of belief actually helps us to take risks by keeping us open to ideas we haven't yet had. It's a beautiful thing when, during our Bible discussion group, someone responds to an idea with, "I've never thought of it that way!" The sense that spiritual formation is happening in that moment is palpable. What's more, it's often traumatic to be forced to question something we're not ready to question--but when we accept that everything is questionable at one point or another, we are more ready to ast least talk through those questions. (p. 117)

In our community, we've found that mingling information with hopes, experiences, ideas, and thoughts often brings with it wonderful surprises. Bringing information alongside belief partners creates a fascinating kind of mutuality as all of the partners shift and grow with the contributions of the others. My belief that God is loving will be affected when the hopes of an infertile couple are fulfilled in a pregnancy. That experience will affect the way I talk about God's love with someone else. That person's experiences will affect the way he responds to my words, and his response will affect the way I talk about God's love in the future. This process in no way devalues information, but elevates the partners of belief to an equal level of importance. (p. 117-18)