Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age by Roger Lundin

Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age Reviews

• 
  Steve

  Boy, do I miss Roger Lundin. Every time I read one of his books, I feel in some way that I'm back in his Modern European lit class at Wheaton during my junior year of college, and I certainly recognize so many of his ideas present in my own teaching. His writing and argumentation are profound, and his insights reveal powerful truths that years of wide-ranging reading and research have provided him. *Believing Again* simultaneously serves as a provocative intellectual and cultural history and a winsome analysis of the way some of Lundin's favorite poets, novelists, and theologians--Dickinson, Melville, Emerson, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Milosz, Frost, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Faulkner--reckoned with wide-scale disbelief in the Christian faith which emerged as a viable option in the 19th century. Each chapter is assigned a single word (History, Science, Belief, Interpretation, Reading, Beauty, Story, Memory) to demonstrate the ways that cultural and intellectual developments born out of modernity created the stage whereby the conflict between belief and unbelief was waged.
  
  Many of the discoveries and ideas that led to the 19th century's understanding of God and self originated at the dawn of modernity--the birth of Protestantism, the mechanical view of the universe posited by the Scientific Revolution, the critical historical-theological method of skeptically reading Scripture, the turn inward inaugurated by Romanticism, and finally, the theories of Darwin and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" enacted by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Desperate to re-enchant what seemed to have become a dead, lifeless world of purposeless "things" and objects, many artists sought refuge in the beauties of their own subjective creations (a "radical opposition between outward banality and inward beauty"). Yet bestowing the imagination with godlike powers to fill the vacuum of an apparently godless universe led many to a tyrannical subjectivism/perspectivalism that failed to appreciate the beauties of the finite, the material, and the timebound. It also encouraged artists to construct their own "higher reality" in order to protect themselves and to liberate themselves from mess, disorder, and apparent meaninglessness. Unfortunately, we always end up learning that the self and its own individual consciousness can't bear the burden of creating a fully unified portrait of reality. As he puts it, "How are we to believe in anything, if we consider truth to be something that has been *created* entirely by our desire to believe rather than something that has been *discovered* through our capacity to learn and to receive?"
  
  One of the things I most appreciated about Lundin's work was the poetic conclusion to each chapter in which he demonstrates how a proper understanding of orthodox Christian truths about God the Father, His son Jesus Christ, and the world around us offers the most satisfying and fulfilling lives. But that doesn't mean that we don't reckon with what Bonhoeffer referred to in his *Letters and Papers from Prison* as our "world come of age." Nostalgia for a pre-modern past, free of the challenges and difficulties thrown up by the "brave new world" of science, philosophy, and technology is a non-starter and fails to appreciate the ways God always condescends to graciously meet us in the midst of our confusion, grief, and pain. As Emily Dickinson wrote, most of us now "both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble." Yet instead of lamenting that belief and faith seemed so much easier for pre-modern individuals, we can confidently rejoice that the God of history has embedded us here and now "for such a time as this" and gratefully receive the gift of "explor[ing], envision[ing], and bear[ing] witness to the world in which God has placed us."
• 
  Derrick

  A fascinating volume that tackles the nature of secularism and atheism from the vantage of changing literature, especially in the 19th century. Returning frequently to the works of Melville, Dickinson, Milosz, Wordsworth, Frost, and many others, Lundin marshals his considerable knowledge of literature to watch how sensibilities and struggles changed from the early modern period through romanticism, the age of Darwin, up until the turn of the 20th century. Combined with this is frequent returns to the works of two swiss master-theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth, Lundin focuses on the theme of what it means to "Believe Again" by which he means to look at what "Belief" means in the radically changed conditions of our modern age.. While Lundin's specific points can occasionally remain a bit murky or lost amid his examples, this is nonetheless a fantastic work that stands as an excellent supplement to other works analyzing the nature of secularity like those by Charles Taylor, Michael Allen Gillespie, or Louis Dupre.
• 
  Hannah Conner

  Lundin writes a great deal about the development of 18th-19th century thought and its impact on the centuries following, but very little about believing again; I believe the book is mis-titled.
  
  The writing is good, except that the chapters read like distinct essays, complete with repetitions of what had already been said in previous chapters.
  
  There are definitely gems, but no overall exposition of the idea of "believing again".
• 
  Thomas

  As Lundin states, this book is an "extended exercise in cultural memory" since to "believe again" we must "remember what we have forgotten or forsaken." This book could be read as a sort of literary/theological exploration that, like the philosopher Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" challenges certain versions of the secularization thesis - chiefly those that imagine secularization as the inevitable loss and decline of belief in God. Lundin is especially good at illustrating Taylor's idea of the modern self as essentially "cross-pressured" in his readings of different literary figures and examples of "nimble believing." Lundin is also excellent at placing certain contemporary cultural/theological trends in a larger historical context and providing a beneficial critique.
  
  The book is broad and wide ranging, although it focuses primarily on 19th century literary figures (Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Emerson and Melville among others) in dialogue with 20th century theologians (Bonhoeffer, Barth and Balthasar). As some chapters were previously published, there is some repetition and the narrative thread between some of the chapters sometimes stretches thin. However, highly recommended for anyone concerned with the struggle to "believe again" in modernity and crises of belief in modern culture; especially for those who find Taylor's mammoth "A Secular Age" intimidating or inaccessible.
• 
  Jake

  Lundin explores the recent history of western belief and, in particular, western belief about what it mean to believe. Confronted by opposition on every front, and even internally, the modern believer is who who has a "nimble belief," capable of stepping back from belief to examine it critically, and then step back, willing and able to believe again. Lundin's exploration of belief's phenomenon is not balanced on the backs of theologians as much as dredged from the writings of western philosophers and authors such as Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Kant, Barth, and more.
• 
  Readnponder

  An examination of writers and thinkers in the 1800s when Darwinism began to gain traction and faith was on the decline. Much of this book was over my head. The author may very well have been brilliant in laying out his thesis, but I had a hard time following it. Those with a literature or philosophy background may get more out of it.