the next generation and Tolstoy's testimony

From Kyle's sermon last Sunday (probably on-line through this Monday), a focus on Philippians 1:12-14, the context in which Paul wrote the book (a prison stay within the narrative of Acts 21-28), and one of the answers to the perennial question of "why bad things happen to 'good' people".

In particular, I was struck by his discussion of 1:12 and his application to "advancing the gospel" to the next generation (11 minutes into the sermon). As Kyle noted, high schoolers raised in the church often walk away after they leave home. Or as Dallas Willard puts it in The Divine Conspiracy: “Forcing religion upon the young even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they ‘graduate’ from church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever."

Most of the time, the blame is placed on college and its temptations there (from "carnal living" to crafty professors). Although college is certainly a challenging setting for most students, the peculiar Christian failure is much more a function of inadequate preparation than the temptations per se. To note, too few "Christian" young people have ownership over their faith. They "believe" what their parents and peers believe. And of those who have a legitimate faith, too few have a tested faith. And thus, when it's tested, it's often found wanting.

As believers-- and as parents-- we must do better. We must test our own faith aggressively, wrestle with how to communicate its essence to those around us, and be careful to aim for the heart of Christ rather than the externals of the Pharisees.

I've enjoyed the first three chapters of Tolstoy's A Confession. His background provides a fine example of these principles:

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them, but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was very unstable...

...[I] drew from them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too seriously. I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very much.

My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a man's own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from life...

So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray - a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you still do that?"

They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them.

So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) these people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they have not yet noticed it.

The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God - but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I again could not have said.