Tony Campolo’s book A Reasonable Faith had arrived two years after I’d heard him speak in Gatlinburg, at the Christian Student Fellowship conference in the winter of 1981 (see above). The timing is uncanny: so filled was that book with ideas addressing my thoughts and feelings and issues at that moment in my life that I could believe he’d written it just for me, as cliché as that sounds.
I had just read and discovered the book when I had that momentous encounter with Kirk in my apartment in 1983. But speaking to him, I stressed the book’s respect for intellect and the importance of testing the ideas we base our lives and beliefs on; A Reasonable Faith emphasized that Christian faith need not be simply a surrender to one’s emotions, but an affirmation of the role of the mind in examining the impulses of the heart. Campolo was presenting a handbook for bringing heart and mind into harmony in an honest and healthy way, so as to inspire earnest personal growth and effective action.
That, I could get behind; and I said so to Kirk. He didn’t disagree, and he was appreciative of Campolo’s research and the sources he quoted in making his arguments (Kierkegaard, Einstein, Martin Buber, Émile Durkheim). Kirk’s response was essentially that all of Campolo’s excellent arguments and calls to action easily persisted beyond a dismissal of the mystical component of Christianity that Campolo still embraced. There’s baby and bathwater here, he claimed, and the Evangelical church had them backwards.
So taken aback was I by Kirk’s personal revelations that day, and my own almost unwitting response to them, that I never got around to the real consequence of Campolo’s thesis.
The book earned my respect early on as Campolo, a college professor and academic of note, relayed his experience with “non-believers” - persons who embrace ideas that are, he asserted, completely compatible with Christianity, yet who do not embrace Christianity itself. In the most gentle and conciliatory way, he shared with his Evangelical readers the truth that they have a tendency to demonize those who disagree with them, and in so doing, are dismissive of opportunities for connection and dialog:
“It seemed that many of my secularist friends were viewing Christianity as a naïve mythology that defied reason and required of its believers a schizophrenic mentality. They knew there were intellectuals who were Christians, but they tended to think that such Christians compartmentalized their thinking and held their religious beliefs totally apart from their academic disciplines. They tended to view us as persons who had one mind-set while performing our intellectual tasks and another mind-set for being religious.
“I wanted them to realize that such assumptions about Christians were wrong: that most of us worked hard at integrating our academic knowledge with our religious convictions. I wanted them to realize that we did not hold a set of beliefs that flew in the face of reason, even if reason alone could not make them into believers. I wanted them to recognize Christianity as a viable option for understanding the world, even if they themselves could not buy into it.”
Then he really grabbed me:
“I also had a need to defend my secular friends before the Christian community. In so many ways the discussions about secular humanists which I had heard in Christian circles convinced me that Christians had many misconceptions about who and what secularists are and what they believe. Too often Christians have assumed that secular humanists are joyless, unfulfilled people writhing in the despair of meaningless existence; that they are people restlessly seeking an escape from an inner, agonizing emptiness.
“For better or worse, I have not found them to be so. Oh, there are the expected neurotics and malcontents among them, but for the most part they are very much like the people I have met in churches. Most of them have a commitment to social justice, an appreciation for the worth and dignity of human beings, a compassion for the poor and oppressed, and a desire to enhance their own humanness. They are good people who seem to be gaining a certain fulfillment from their work and who seem to be enjoying life... secularists are generally happy people.”
Okay, wow. That’s a level of frankness and honesty I wasn’t used to seeing. Through my teen years and early adult years to that point, what I’d seen and heard in Evangelical contexts was exactly what Campolo described: circumspect (and sometimes outright) condemnation of those outside our circle, with a boatload of ominous (and completely incorrect) assumptions about those people, intended to scare me away from them. Now here was Campolo, telling the truth about people I’d been told to avoid.
He then went even deeper, addressing Evangelical misrepresentations of humanism itself.
“Some Christians view secular humanists as agents of the Antichrist who are out to destroy the church with their godless philosophies. Some even see them as agents of some kind of subtle communist plot to weaken the religious foundations of America, rendering us defenseless against a Russian takeover. I almost hate to minimize the drama, but I find secularists to be generally tolerant people.
“I need for my Christian friends to realize that humanist is not necessarily a bad word. If secularists... mean by humanism the desire to see every person actualize his/her highest potential, grow into peaceful, self-giving, loving persons, and build oneness among all the peoples of the world, then humanism shares much with Christianity.”
There was much, much more, and a lot of it will surface later in this book: cooperation vs. competition, the virtues of community, the nature of belief. But one final exposition of Campolo’s Christo-humanist view of human rang true.
He recounts a lengthy discussion with a troubled student of his who was wrestling with existential despair. “I want to become human,” the student shared, “fully human. We all want to become human. But we don’t know how...”
Campolo reminded the student that “socialization is the process whereby homo sapiens becomes human,” a basic tenet of psychology and sociology. We get our I from the group; as Lisa Feldman Barrett more recently wrote, “It takes many brains to make a mind.”
“The traits of humanness are gained by associating with someone who possesses them,” Campolo continued. “If you have an intimate and sustained interactive relationship with someone who is very loving, you will become loving, too. You know this from your own experience... you will become as human as the person who becomes the most significant other in your life.”
That wasn’t good enough for the student; he didn’t want to just improve his humanness, he wanted a path to full humanness.
And Campolo, naturally, put up Jesus as the exemplar of the fully human human, that significant other who could, through a relationship, transform his student into the fully human human he wished to become.
And Campolo has me again, with that simple idea: Christ, not as deity or all-powerful spirit being, but as the perfect exemplar of humanness.
“In short, I believe that Christianity is about achieving humanity... the theology I developed in the context of discussions with my secularist friends can properly be labeled Christian humanism, and affirms that the achieving of the fullness of humanity is the ultimate end...”
Campolo goes on to minimize the Evangelical focus on the sweet by-and-by, pointing out that red letter Jesus makes almost no mention at all of heaven and hell, instead focusing on how he had come “that we might have life and have it more abundantly... I’m sure that what he meant by that was that we might achieve the kind of humanness we’ve been talking about. I really believe that his purpose is to enable us to become fully human.”
And, of course, it hit me like a lightning bolt: Campolo is, in this exposition, describing Roddenberry’s Star Trek. In accurately describing humanists as he does, he simultaneously affirms Roddenberry’s frame: humanists are agents of social change, as well as individuals who aspire to virtue and growth with the same energy and commitment as (wait for it!)… Christians.
This integration, this unity, quickly took hold in me. It resonated deeply, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time (but which Kirk and I would fully explicate, after years of study and labor, during the next quarter-century).
Having arrived via Trek and the ideas of Roddenberry, I had embraced humanist values, which were in harmony with the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. I could, by keeping this focus, contribute meaningfully to the church, and find community among Christians.
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