Tim Dumb

“I tried to study the Bible once, but I got confused,” the guy said to me. “When I try to put it up against itself, I don’t make a lot of sense out of it.”

“How so?” I replied.

“For example: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ right?”

“Correct.”

“Then why does God sanction war? I see that line in the ‘Big 10,’ but I make no sense of it elsewhere. And, too, how can we justify Christians going to war? War implies killing. Does that mean they’re going to hell?”

I had a reply. I almost gave it, but I stopped myself just before I spoke. I must have looked rather dumbfounded and stumped, and in some ways, I guess I was. This was not the first time I had been asked this question; I had asked it of myself as well, but how could I honestly give him my answer?

You see, my first reaction was to say that the command applied only to unjust killing; that it was meant to pertain only to killing in a murderous fashion. I know some of you are nodding your heads in agreement with that, but I had to stop before I said anything of the kind. The Bible doesn’t say that. I had to admit that to myself in a split second before I looked the fool by adding meaning to the reference which could not have been inferred by merely reading it in context.

“I’ve just decided that I’m going to go on with dumb faith,” he said. He must have seen a hint of puzzlement in my eyes as I pondered his questions. I don’t know that he was looking for an answer, but I’m sure he felt that I thought I should have had one. “I’ve asked myself this stuff a hundred times about far more than this one instance, so I decided to leave it alone in order to keep some measure of faith.”

Dumb faith? How is that appealing? I thought.

I make it a point not to initiate religious or political conversation with people, especially those I’ve not called friend for very long. No one likes someone with an agenda and those topics are trigger points for every almost every human. If it’s going to come up, I want it to come up naturally, and, if possible, on the other guy’s terms. Some may interpret that as spineless or non-evangelistic, but I think it’s the more mission-minded approach. By the time the religious conversation rears its head, trust has become a key issue and vulnerability essential.

Tim was opening himself up to me in a big way. Not only had we arrived at a point in which he felt comfortable telling me that he had committed a Southern cardinal sin by question the Bible, he was also letting me know that he had decided to be dumb about that which he believed. That is what dumb faith is isn’t it? Even if we took the word literally to take a little of the edge off it would still mean something along the lines of faith without a voice, speechless faith, faith inherently incapable of explaining itself. It takes a great deal of trust to provide the courage to divulge to someone else that you’re living within that perspective.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking dumb faith. I think a lot of people are satisfied with that, and I guess that’s okay. It’s certainly worse if someone arrives there as a result of laziness, but I don’t think that’s where Tim was. I think he had grown so tired of being asked to believe things he couldn’t explain or without reason that he had mentally thrown his hands up and did the responsible thing.

By responsible I mean that many do not choose this route and end up far gone. This type of questioning can lead to a lot of things and the most common destination is some form of atheism.

It goes like this: Something makes no sense to someone; they ask questions and request guidance, and are greeted with skepticism and heresy rhetoric as if questioning were the unpardonable sin. Since, as humans, we are built to reject that, that someone typically reacts negatively feeling that the mere act of seeking should have been viewed as progress. That rejection is devastating.

Tim, instead of giving up on God, realized that God was real, and, being God, quite complex. His complexity doesn’t mean that He cannot be figured out, but it does mean that He may not be understood by a human mind, or if we can, we haven’t figured out how using the methods of reason and thought we are taught to employ presently.

Dumb faith. I’m not so sure it’s wrong, and I can’t say I’m convinced it’s right, but I know surely that it is, in its basest form, giving up.

Here are a couple things I’ve learned: I know that there are answers to every question, and I know someone knows those answers beyond doubt.

What I have had to conclude without any proof beyond logic, though, is that if I believe in another realm with beings who inhabit it i.e. Heaven, then perhaps those inhabitants know some of the answers that we simply can’t figure out here simply because we're here and they're there. That makes sense to me. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Still, if that is true, then I must also recognize that I can’t know what they do and do not know and must therefore continue to search in case what I am seeking can be found here.

Well, maybe I added that last line in there because I just don’t like thinking that I can’t know something. I mean, I have no problem understanding that I don’t know something because God knows there’s plenty of that: Calculus escapes me, math in general bores me, science, man's greatest map to the mind of God, means a lot to me in terms of figuring out the intricacies of God, but I don’t care if I ever understand the mystery of pi or the mystical physics of gravity, black holes and String Theory. My point is that I just like the safety of knowing that I can know something if I want to.

I guess that’s the reason we have libraries.

I say all that to say this: I can’t figure out, as of this writing, the answers to Tim’s questions. I’m sure there are answers, and I’m sure they can be figured out if I just give them time and effort (or maybe just time), but for now, I just don’t know them.

I do think, however, that there are more researchable questions in the story: why do so many people go Tim’s route? Do they not understand the gravity of not understanding the scripture? Is it possible that they are just giving in to their own desires and attempting to make God’s theology match the way they want to live?

I know, statistically, that it has to be a fact that some readers have shouted a resoundingly self-righteous "YES" to those last two questions, and I would be a fool not to concede that there are some believers like that, but I think that the sincere ones have figured out that they can resign themselves to be that way, and it won’t send them to Hell.

I think there’s an issue at hand causing this mentality that most certainly can be fixed, but there are few who are willing to go there.

“I don’t know if the way I’m thinking on all this is wrong or not,” Tim began to conclude. “If it’s wrong, then I guess I’ll have to live or die with that. I just know I’m tired of getting nowhere and feeling bad for it.”

I had nothing to say.