Human beings spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not our beliefs are true. Even in these strange days where “I feel like” seems to have replaced “I think that” as the, ahem, trump card in a given dispute (how can you argue with a feeling?!), we still invest a fair amount of intellectual, emotional, and rhetorical energy into arriving at, and convincing others of what we believe to be true. Even amidst of the mountain of lies that can sometimes seem to overwhelm our socio-political discourse, the truth of the matter still seems to matter to us.
But of course we as the inheritors and shapers of late modernity can quite easily give the strong impression that the meaning of life is a primarily a cognitive exercise, an arms race to the top in the who-has-the-most-right-content-in-their-head-when-they-die game. We probably pay less attention than we ought to the behaviors that our beliefs demand, and how our behaviors (or the absence of behaviors) shape and reinforce what we think. And we probably pay even less attention still to the kinds of people the things we believe are inevitably turning us into.
Last week, I read Brian Zahnd’s new book, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God. It’s a quick read but an important one, particularly for those raised on the “angry God” theology made famous in the Jonathan Edwards sermon that Zahnd’s title is a riff on, and which various outposts of zealous evangelicalism have seized upon ever since. At one point, in a discussion of the doctrine of hell, Zahnd frames the matter in an interesting way:
