Abhesion
With the baptismal liturgy, from the early Church and still today, the person to be baptized is asked three times to renounce the forces within and without that resist God, and then to turn eastward and to confess faith in Jesus as Lord. A little used word, ‘abhesion’ from the old must precede adhesion to the new. However this act of detachment is often not easy. We can resist even when, to the outsider, the counter-evidence seems overwhelming. This can be true of secular world-views as well as religious convictions In fact several noted philosophers have thought about the reasons for our reluctance in terms that have entered common parlance. Let us consider four, with a fifth as a rejoinder.
Specimen A is Thomas Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.’ Humans work to adapt the assumptions they have (their ‘paradigm’) to new and challenging evidence. Their theory creaks under the load, until finally it collapses. Such was the eventual rejection of an heliocentric view of the world, in favor of the Copernican.
Specimen B is the theory of cognitive dissonance (which originated with a psychologist Leon Festiger). When a critical and public claim is contradicted, social cohesion requires doubling down on the refuted claim itself. When the world does not meet its predicted end, the cobbled explanation requires extra enthusiasm.
Specimen C is the sprawling history of the Church in Africa by the Swedish bishop-missionary Bengt Sundkler. He pointed out how much more difficult conversion was inside strong social groups with ramified views of the world. The first agents of conversion by contrast were people who moved in the interstices between cultures and tribes: traders, disinherited sons, soldiers gone abroad, young women fleeing arranged marriages. These fault lines opened space for a new claim, and were also the vectors of new ideas, including the Gospel.
Specimen D is Charles Taylor’s magisterial ‘A Secular Age.’ In it he describes how the Western secular worldview came about historically. He goes on to observe that seculars assume that their worldview, the ‘immanent frame,’ is not laden with assumptions, but rather is a cold look at the world as it really is in the light of day. It is this prejudice which makes abhesion hard.
People sometimes mock religious faith as ‘believing three impossible things before breakfast.’ But for those without faith not rejecting what we can no longer defend, but have grown used to, is no picnic either. As a gentle retort, consider this great book: Alan Kreider’s ‘Patient Ferment of the Early Church.’ Ferment was possible because of the early Church’s close-knit quality and well articulated credo. They also had the long view that patience makes possible. The sobering fact for us is that patience in our culture is on life-support. The encouraging fact is that the first Christians improbably overturned an empire, an event of abhesion empowered by grace.
+GRS
