By Hayden Lukas

“Existence tends to be reduced to its own corpse; it lies outside the power of any philosophy whatsoever to resuscitate such a corpse.” 

-Gabriel Marcel

One way of defining a Christian is “a person with a certain set of beliefs.” There is good reason for this. When the evangelical Reformers of the 16th century wanted to prove that their conception of the Gospel was not an innovation, their first move was to cite the historic creeds of the Christian faith: “I believe in God the Father Almighty….”

While the creeds elaborate what the Church believes, a question remains: what are we doing when we believe the creeds? We might just say “we believe.” But in his Small Catechism, Martin Luther explains that the catholic faith is not held on account of our “own understanding or strength,” but only by the work of the Holy Spirit. This is, properly speaking, what the Church consists of: people who don’t understand why they to came to the conclusion that Christ is their Lord. For the evangelical Reformers, faith is not a simple exercise of reason, or some powerful analysis that the serious thinker must go through to achieve enlightenment. It is a simple gift of the Holy Spirit.

News and Knowledge

The novelist and philosopher Walker Percy tried to capture the tension involved in the Reformers’ claim by contrasting the positions held by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Lutheran philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. St. Thomas held that “The act of faith consists essentially in knowledge and there we find its formal or specific perfection.” ¹ In contrast, Kierkegaard held that “Faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and the historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.” ²

To put that simply: Thomas believed faith is the perfection of human reason, whereas Kierkegaard believed faith is not reason because it is absurd on its face. Kierkegaard’s claim is worth considering. In all fairness, the central Christian claim—that “the eternal (God) isthe historical (God)”—does seem absurd if you pause for a moment to consider its terms. The defining feature of eternity is that it is not historical, i.e., it has no events.

In trying to mediate the opposition between these two Christian thinkers, Percy develops a distinction between the terms knowledge and news. For Percy, knowledge is information “which can be arrived at anywhere by anyone and at any time.”³ If I—or you or anybody anywhere—wanted to dedicate enough time and energy, we could reasonably determine whether pieces of knowledge are true or false. Anyone can verify whether the earth is round. For millennia, many people with enough time on their hands have independently discovered and rediscovered this fact. Similarly, anyone could try to verify—as some Jungians have—whether specific dream symbols have determinate meanings, or whether—as most early modern astronomers did—the heavenly bodies in outer space portend events here below on Earth.

All of these, in principle, have a similar structure: some statement or hypothesis is made, and—given the proper amount of time and effort—they can be measured against some standard of verification and accepted as true or rejected as false. Scientists might bicker with a palm-reader about the apparently alternative conclusions of their disciplines, but the structure of their claims are the same: they propose knowledge. Knowledgeis a category constituted by the fact that it represents “the almost infinite number of true but random observations which might be made about the world.”

For Percy, news is of a different character. News “is precisely that communication which has bearing on [an individual’s] predicament and is therefore good or bad news.”⁴ News is something that matters to me, or to you, but can’t mean the same thing for us both. If a doctor tells me my child has a serious illness, I will take this news differently than the government bureaucrat who is told the same news. I hear it because of my child’s role in my life and my role in his. The bureaucrat hears it so that the State might track how many of their citizens has a serious illness.

What follows from this distinction is that “the criteria of acceptance of a news sentence are not the same as those of a knowledge sentence…To say this is not to say that news is of a lower cognitive order than knowledge—such a judgment presupposes the superiority of the scientific posture. It is only to say that once a piece of news is subject to the verification procedures of a piece of knowledge, it simply ceases to be news.”⁵ Of course, I probably would like to see the test results if my child did receive such a diagnosis (he hasn’t, thankfully). But if I trust his doctor, I will believe her. However, if I am “objective-minded” about my son’s diagnosis, I will stop participating in my life and will step into the role of a scientist. And of course, there is nothing wrong with asking the diagnostician to show and explain to me the test results that made her come to this conclusion. But in doing so, I am stepping into the role of a scientist—I am verifying the information. But the moment when I return from this scientific orbit and come back to the reality of my life and my situation, I remember that my child is suffering and I love him.

This leads to Percy’s two criteria for accepting news. First, we must decide if the news is relevant. For me, my child’s illness is news, but for the bureaucrat it is knowledge. Second, we must decide on the trustworthiness of the news-bearer. If my doctor is trustworthy, I will move on and not need to independently verify her diagnosis. If she is not—if she has botched other serious diagnoses or has a history of cruel joking—I will go to another doctor. 

Problems, Solutions, and Mysteries

To further explore the nature of news and knowledge, it is worth taking a detour through the philosopher from whom Percy largely owes this idea: Gabriel Marcel. After explaining how Marcel frames news and knowledge through his own distinction between problem and mystery, we can examine the relevance of this to the idea of faith. Marcel was an early 20th century pioneer in what would later become the (rather poorly defined) school of existentialism. Marcel resented being thrown together with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, not least because he was a Christian. Percy discovered these writers while he was sick with Tuberculosis and on bed rest for several years in a sanatorium. After he was healed, Percy left his promising career in medicine and turned to writing philosophical essays and novels. In what follows, I am going to explain Marcel’s definition of the terms problem and mystery and how they relate to Percy’s conception of news.

Just as Percy takes the terms knowledge and news and transforms them into his own philosophical jargon, Marcel jargonizes the terms problem and mystery. For Marcel, “A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity.”⁶ A good example of a Marcellian problem is a math problem: It does not matter to a math problem if I am the one to solve it, or if Archimedes finds the solution, or if a government bureaucrat solves it.

But a mystery is different. A mystery is something which involves me. Much like Percy’s conception of news, a mystery is something which applies to someone in a concrete situation in their life. Mysteries engage the realities that call into question the nature of the questioner. A good example of this is the nature of evil—a problem Marcel’s generation acutely struggled with during and in the wake of the World Wars. There is a difference between (1) perpetrating or suffering evil and (2) speaking about or analyzing evil. To speak of evil as in a theodicy is not the same as suffering the evils of war. The problem of evil can be spoken of by anyone, the mystery of evil can be experienced by only one.

Crucially, Marcel argues that when I am dealing with a mystery, I am dealing with a reality that is larger than myself. Cognitive scientists call this the frame problem. The frame problem simply states that there are some problems I am able to frame in their totality—like a math problem. I am able to externalize the problem and find each of its constitutive elements. But there are some problems that are so big that the requisite frame is too big for my consciousness.

By trying to frame questions like the experience of evil, the experience of God, or self-consciousness, I call into question my own my relationship to these realities I am embedded in. To suffer evil is to expose I am embedded in the reality of evil. To live is to expose the fact that I am already embedded in life. To question God is to discover I am already addressed by God. This fact only draws me further into the question, and does not resolve it.

Marcel observes that problems can be solved, but mysteries can’t. It’s worth noting the simple etymology of the words “solve” and “mystery.” While etymology isn’t appropriate in every situation, Marcel has made such good choices in words that it is worth exploring for a moment. “Solution” comes from the latin solvere, “to break apart” or “to loosen/untie.” To solve a problem is to make the components of a problem stop being in tension. Solutions are deconstructive in the sense that they dissolve what is in tension into smaller parts. Interestingly, there is often no difference between the term “solve” and “re-solve” in English. A resolution to a problem is no different from a solution; to solve an issue is to resolve an issue. To solve a problem is to solve it again, because any number of people could have solved the same problem before this iteration—the solver is interchangeable.

“Mystery,” on the other hand, is a cognate from the Greek mysterion, which finds its root in mueo, “to shut/close,” and, eventually, “to initiate.” This might be a reference to the mysteries of certain cults being closed to the general public. This is to say, only specific individuals—initiates—were allowed to encounter the mysteries. For many centuries, the Church called the sacrament of the altar a mystery. The uninitiated (that is, the catechumens) were dismissed from worship when the sacrament was celebrated because they were not yet baptized (and therefore initiated) into those mysteries. Only the initiated were allowed to partake, and the sacrament was closed to those outside the Church.

In his Gifford Lectures, Marcel observes that we often treat God as a problem rather than a mystery. That is, we can treat God as if his purpose is to be accessible to anybody at any time. While this is true in some remote sense, we know God because he addresses specific people in concrete situations at specific times. God is, properly, a mystery. This is not (simply) because he is incomprehensible, but because the moment God addresses me, it matters that he addresses me and not somebody else. When God addresses me, I am facing a reality that is bigger than myself, a reality which I cannot make totally external to myself. To be addressed by God is to become aware that I can be a full person. 

To synthesize Percy and Marcel: If our relationship with God is treated as a mystery, the claim that Christ’s death and resurrection are Good News will make much more sense. News addresses people in situations. Good News from God will reveal to the hearer that their situation is not lack of knowledge, but insufficient encounter with a mystery. This will yield transformation and relevance for the lives of hearers instead of stagnation and indifference. God is not a problem to be solved; He is not a piece of knowledge to keep in our back pocket in case we need it. He has good news for his hearers.

“To be addressed by God is to become aware that I can be a full person. “

Sobriety and Absurdity: Christianity as a joke

Percy’s concern was that Christianity is so often misunderstood primarily as a piece of knowledge when it should be understood first as a piece of news. The way some preachers preach, Christianity often fits exactly among the random assortment of facts and oddities that populate our universe that might pique the interest of certain onlookers. Indeed, be it through liturgical tricks old or new, the intent is to get people to be invested or interested rather than soberly addressed. Percy observes:

If one thinks of the Christian gospel primarily as a communication between a newsbearer and a hearer of news, one realizes that the news is often not heeded because it is not delivered soberly. Instead of being delivered with the sobriety with which other important news would be delivered—even by a preacher—it is spoken either in a sonorous pulpit voice or at a pitch calculated to stimulate the emotions. But emotional stimuli are not news. The emotions can be stimulated [anywhere] and at any time.⁷

This brings us to Percy’s second criterion for the acceptance of news: the credentials of the newsbearer. Once we are certain that Christianity is not some piece of knowledge that helps us solve our God problem (or any problem), but a piece of news that invites us to join in the mystery of God, it changes the operation of Christian faith and mission, and our identity as newsbearers. As Kierkegaard put it: a student comes to a teacher for a teaching, but a Christian comes to Christ for the teacher. Instead of seeing our faith as knowledge to teach others, we are seeking to introduce others to the mystery of God in Christ, a mystery we ourselves participate in. To invite someone into a mystery, you must participate in that mystery yourself, as the foundation on which your own reality is built. 

This is not to say you should found your faith and witness on yourself—quite the contrary. There are many ways to make God intelligible and credible to others. But if this essay has meant anything, it means that for God to be intelligible and credible to others, he should be intelligible and credible to you. The great insight of Lutheran theology is that this process depends very little on you; faith comes by hearing the Good News. But even more importantly, faith comes from the Word of God, Christ, through the working of the Holy Spirit. Christ, the God-Man is the only news-bearer who could credibly tell us news from God, because he is God. We are just echoing his message. The only one who could trustworthily tell us where we come from and for what we are destined for is the one who knows by right and by might what the world is all about.

To close, I want to return to my earlier suggestion that faith is absurd. To state my position clearly: if faith is absurd, it is because the human predicament is absurd. After all, humans have spent the entirety of their existence being violently tossed to and fro by the vicissitudes of history, grasping at one piece of knowledge after another, looking for solutions to the endless problems of historical existence until their tanks run out of gas and the mystery of their life is left to die unframed, unsolved, and buried along with their memory. The entire world is built upon the premise that there is nothing the right piece of knowledge cannot cure. From what I can tell, Christians believe the Good News is that your claims to knowledge will not save you.

“The entire world is built upon the premise that there is nothing the right piece of knowledge cannot cure.”

This might seem hypocritical, because Christians have claims to some kind of knowledge. But this is why we must also heed the instruction of St. Thomas. He understood faith as the perfection of knowledge, not its negation. Indeed, if Marcel and Percy, Kierkegaard and Aquinas can all be correct, they might explain what Paul means when he says he wants us “to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ,in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

Knowledge of God is a mystery, and the mystery of God is Christ; the eternal God is the historical God. If this is not some kind of cosmic joke God decided to play on the world, I don’t know it could be. The content of the Christian faith is knowing the mystery of God intimately. The only thing that can save the world is the one thing that can’t. The best thing in the world comes from Nazareth, not from a university or from the military. Salvation doesn’t come from a scientist, an influencer, a health guru, a hashtag, a drone strike, or a bunch of people holding up signs. It comes from a homeless man who liked to go out into the desert to pray so much that the people around him crucified him for it; eternal life comes from the tomb. To believe this, by the work of the Holy Spirit, is to have knowledge of the mystery of God.

The Church often thinks she needs to remain strong, stern-faced, and ever-wagging her finger at a world gone off the rails. There are definitely times for warning. There are times for weeping for the world, too. But too often, the Church forgets that more knowledge will not save the world, only the good news will. More knowledge is interesting, nice, and sometimes engaging, but if it isn’t exposing people to the mystery of God, it is usually not worth it. The one who sits in the heavens laughs at the world. If you’ve been initiated into this mystery—the cosmic joke, the God-man, the servant king—it’s good to remember to laugh about it, yourself.