Joseph M. Spencer: Living Proof

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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“I must remember that the gospel is not on trial so much as the integrity of those who can honestly testify of it.” – Richard Lloyd Anderson

A Healthy Aid to Honesty

For a scholar, writing a personal essay can be an act of self-honesty. The whole apparatus associated with scholarly writing—disciplinary jargon, citations and footnotes, stylized hesitance—too often becomes something to hide behind. The fact is that it is easier to pile up mere indications of authority than to actually risk attempting to speak authoritatively. It is in this way that the personal essay can be a healthy aid to honesty for the scholar. At the same time, however, asking scholars to write personal essays might wrongly convince them that their hard-earned knowledge amounts to a kind of wisdom. I am young, but I have certainly already learned that knowledge and wisdom are not the same. Study does not alone produce wisdom—and even knowledge, as Hugh Nibley used to say, is not bought as cheaply as we tend to think.

I am also mindful of the generational distance between me and the authors of essays in the original volume of A Thoughtful Faith, and I feel that distance with more humility than pride. I do not wish to have lived at another time than my own, but I do worry that I hail from a generation far too convinced of its own moral superiority. Young Latter-day Saint scholars can be tempted to believe themselves uniquely prepared to do things never imagined by their intellectual forebears. They (we!) often forget that they (we!) can only do what scholars before them (us!) have made possible. For me, then, this essay is partially an exercise in remembering—in remembering that I have only just started.

In light of all the above, to give structure to my reflections here I have decided to write in dialogue with an essay from the original volume of A Thoughtful Faith. And because I call home the same institution and even the same department that Richard Lloyd Anderson did before me, I have chosen to write in response to him. I present the following pages under a few headings, each a phrase drawn from Professor Anderson’s essay. I mean to amplify moments in his wise words where I hear an echo of my own thoughts. Like he did before me, I find myself with a double commitment due to the academic position I occupy: a need to speak to average Latter-day Saints uninterested in specialized scholarship, and a need to do serious academic work on my faith tradition. I am convinced that such a double address needs to be heard more often—and more loudly.

A Generation without Moral Courage

I am a philosopher, so I will ask a philosopher’s question here. What does it mean to be thoughtful? Or better, What does it mean to think? This question does not come from nowhere but responds directly to the title of this book: A Thoughtful Faith. If we hope to articulate a faith we might call thoughtful, we ought to reflect carefully on what it means to think. We can eliminate cheap interpretations right away. Of course, we use the words “thought” and “thinking” unreflectively most of the time, as if they just named what Louis Althusser called our “spontaneous ideology”—whatever we “happen to think” about things. But I cannot believe that a thoughtful faith is that of someone just interested in expressing a point of view. We are all (symptomatically) interested in talking about our perspectives. There is nothing surprising or special about that. It is therefore wrong to associate thinking solely with the narcissistic pleasure of appreciating and expressing oneself.

So what does it mean to think? I will not lay out a long philosophical argument here, but, simply put, I would insist that thinking concerns itself with questions more than answers—with problems more than solutions.

What I have in mind here is this. It is far more difficult to discover and satisfactorily articulate a genuine question or a real problem than it is to provide possible or likely answers or solutions. Actually, that is probably too weak. It is far more difficult even just to understand a genuine question or a real problem than it is to provide possible or likely answers or solutions. A serious thinker does not read Plato or Aristotle to learn and then to assess their proposed solutions to obvious problems. Rather, a serious thinker reads Plato and Aristotle to riddle out the obscure problems they came to see with astonishing clarity. Similarly, it is an unserious or at least still maturing thinker who reads René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding just to decide which of the two was right about the nature of knowledge. The philosophically mature thinker takes up Descartes and Locke primarily in the hopes of seeing the essential problem of knowledge that the Meditations and the Essay help identify.

A more recent historical example may be more illustrative. I have a soft spot for the work of Sigmund Freud, but I have learned how impolite it can be to bring up Freud or his disciples. It is not that people are offended by the sometimes-lurid nature of Freudian work, nor that people think Freudians have too depraved a view of human beings. Sadly, Freud is too unpopular today even to elicit these kinds of worries. Instead, the objection I hear is usually that psychology and the brain sciences have both basically proved Freud wrong. That is probably fair (though I am neither a psychologist nor a brain scientist). For my part, however, I am uninterested in Freud’s solutions. “Fine,” I want to say, “but what’s most interesting about Freud isn’t his theories; it’s rather the set of problems he identified and articulated. We’re still grappling with those problems, and I’ve found that we often do so with less clarity about those problems than Freud and his associates.”

Perhaps I am wrong about Freud. He may be less interesting than I think he is. And anyway, I might have made the same point with someone else—anyone whose answers and solutions are dated and who is therefore supposedly irrelevant today. For example, these days I hear people talk about Hugh Nibley this way, although I am convinced he is often closer to the real problems than are those who criticize his solutions. At any rate, I hope my point is clear. Thoughtfulness is an attentiveness to things that mutes the urgency of answering and solving because it is satisfied to sit with questions and problems themselves. Let the practical-minded produce answers and solutions (and let us thank them), but thinkers insist on attending to questions and problems. Do we even know what the problems are? Are we even sure we are asking the right questions correctly?

This is what I hear in the phrase “a thoughtful faith.” In my view, a thoughtful faith is not necessarily informed or sophisticated, as we often assume. It is not a faith that is simply critical or hard-won or open-minded. It is, rather, a faith attuned to the fundamental problems that come along with faith—problems that are probably invisible without faith and perhaps invisible even to those with faith. A thoughtful faith is unafraid to postpone the practical work of solving problems so as first to probe the problems themselves.

The kind of patience required to be thoughtful in this way takes moral courage. I am convinced that this particular form of moral courage has become rare, that it is largely foreign to today’s younger generations in so-called “developed countries” (that is, to my generation and others like it). Perhaps the internet is to blame, or maybe widespread prosperity in certain contexts. Whatever lies behind it, we are too impatient about problems and questions, too eager for solutions and answers. We lack the moral courage needed to be patient. Indeed, as often as not, what we call “questions” today (“I’ve just got a few questions about Church history”) are not actually questions but demands for instant answers. In short, I hail from a generation too often lacking the moral courage to think.

Structural Intricacies