Resources for Further Study:

• Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber
• Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present by Carolyn Weber
• Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• On the Incarnation by Athanasius
• Paradise Lost by John Milton

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The Questioning Belief podcast explores objections to Christianity through in-depth discussions with experts. Drawing from her background as a former atheist and her experience in apologetics, Dr. Kathleen Noller invites you to explore thoughtful responses to serious questions about faith. Learn more.

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Explore written reflections from Dr. Kathleen Noller and get in touch with her through her Substack, The Reformed Gadfly.

Transcript

Welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast, brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Dr. Noller, former atheist turned Christian and biomedical scientist. Join me as we interrogate Christianity and see if it can stand up to some of our toughest objections.

So, today's objection to Christianity is a bit different than usual. It's not an objection to Christian theology or any core facet of true Christian faith. It's an objection to modern Christian culture, and it comes from my own mouth. This quote from G.K. Chesterton will sort of get us started with this objection. GKC says, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

I thought of this quote in reference to the ideals of art, beauty, and communication through the written or spoken word. I think about how many Bible verses tell us that God is majestic, arrayed with glory, and full of splendor, and how He’s also chosen to not reveal Himself through an encyclopedia or a telephone book, but a Bible full of beautiful poetry, chilling apocalyptic genre, and intriguing prophecy. Encounters with God should inspire awe in us, yet oftentimes they feel banal. This is the point that I find often controversial. Maybe half of Christians will agree with me and half will vehemently disagree, which is wonderful and that’s fine to do so. But in my opinion, much of modern Protestant art—for example, the God’s Not Dead movies, the repetitive lyrics of much of evangelical music, or even theology books, which are written at sort of a lower level of understanding—they seem more focused on being unoffensive than reflecting the glory of God. So, at best, they’re focused on clear communication of information, but that often seems to come at the price of complexity and attractiveness.

My summary for my objection is this: not only does this sap the mystical from the life of the Christian, but it does not attract the non-Christian’s heart. To discuss this objection, we have our wonderful speaker today, Dr. Carolyn Weber. She holds an M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford University and was the first female Dean of St. Peter’s College in Oxford. Dr. Weber is an award-winning author, professor, and international speaker on the intersection of faith and literature, as well as topics related to women and faith. Her first memoir, Surprised by Oxford, won, among other distinctions, the Grace Irwin Award, the largest award for Christian writing in Canada, and was made into a feature film. She has also written Holy is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present and Sex and the City of God: A Memoir of Love and Longing. Thank you so much for your time and for being here, Dr. Weber.

Carolyn: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Kathleen Noller: I’d love for us to start out with Surprised by Oxford. For those who haven’t read it, or even for those who have, if you could tell us a brief testimony of your coming to faith, and then maybe we can share a discussion over your favorite parts of the book or some of my favorite quotes that I’ve pulled.

Carolyn: Oh, well that sounds lovely. Thank you so much, Kathleen. Yes, it’s interesting—you come from a science background; I come from a literature background. In short, I grew up in a medium-sized town in Canada, nondescript, came from a broken home, divorced parents, and my mother had had some Catholicism in her background but had moved away from that. My father had been in and out of our lives and eventually left the family. So, I had some knowledge of Christianity from kind of a loosely European background, but by the time I was a teenager, I would have identified myself as agnostic because I couldn’t disprove God but really wasn’t going to trust in a heavenly father when my earthly one wasn’t trustworthy. Also, I think in my culture at the time, there really wasn’t much reading of the Bible at large or discussion of the Bible, even as a literature student. My only concepts of Jesus were through the mainstream media—television, big-hair TV evangelists taking your money, as my brother would phrase it. I didn’t really know very many Christians. So, I think like so many others, especially in North America, my concept of God was sort of removed, certainly not a personal relationship. And Jesus seemed like a kind of crazy name.

I was certainly going to depend much more on my intellect, on my reason, on my self-sufficiency, my ability to make my own way. There really wasn’t anything even attractive about it, except for the fact that I eventually recognized that I did have some sort of longing for something and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. This was later what I recognized resonated with me with Lewis’s description of Sehnsucht. But at the time, going off to Britain to study the Romantic writers, and particularly the 18th- and 19th-century writers that are very much defined by this sense of infinite longing, that kept tapping at me as I was studying different world religions. Eventually, I did scrutinize Christianity, asked it a lot of questions, beat it up quite badly, tried it and found it not wanting—found me wanting, both in the sense of lack and in the sense of desire. And eventually I became a Christian while studying at Oxford.

Kathleen Noller: I really find it interesting how you have this intellectual component, which I’m sure most people do—as well as the longing component, the sort of emotions that you can’t analyze or necessarily put into scientific language. So, for your more intellectual component, were you interested in philosophy? Did you believe in things like absolute truth? Or was that something that also came later with your study of Christianity, perhaps other world religions?

Carolyn: Well, that’s a fantastic question. I do agree with Socrates to some extent that the unexamined life is not worth living. And as I think, like many high school students, I certainly hadn’t read or thought deeply about a lot of philosophical topics. College undergraduates opened some of those doors. But for me, it was very much an emphasis in my undergraduate studies on postmodernism—on the fragmentation of our current culture, the fact that Waiting for Godot sort of idea by Samuel Beckett, that the idea that God has left the building and he’s not coming back. That was really the shaping of my undergraduate. But I began to realize, I think what you were saying earlier about allowing space as well as the mystical, which is why I think it’s so wonderful that you chose Chesterton as your opening point, because he himself is fascinating—very much about logic and reason, and yet very much mystic himself as well. And I think all the disciplines have room for that. But I think it’s something that we long for. No one on their deathbed wants an argument. Even Socrates himself—Plato kicking out the poet—was writing poetry on his deathbed, per se. So, there’s something in which those things reconcile. As I was studying more stories, literature, religions around the world, I saw that so many religions had shards of this truth or pointed to these mythologies or had these archetypes and symbols. I felt that that was really fascinating—that they all seemed to draw from the same river. They all seem to point to the same wants and needs and desires that we had in this longing, just in different ways. But ultimately, I did hear what Tolkien was saying to Lewis: that these were all myths pointing to the true myth, which was the Christian myth. I did believe in absolute truth in a sense because we must take something as a priority. Everything we believe must start somewhere and take that at face value, so to speak. We must bet. We all must place a bet on the horse. Even not having faith is placing a bet. But as I started exploring the other world religions, there were so many other things that were far more compelling about Christianity and the Bible and this God that became human and died for us—that resonated with all these myths and stories and actually pointed to a great truth that satisfied and spoke to that longing, but also left room for mystery and for the mystical, that didn’t answer all our questions, that couldn’t be put in a box. And that I think transcended all the disciplines. It really didn’t matter whatever we were studying—all pointed to that.

Kathleen Noller: I wonder what you think of—I very much identify with your conversion story and especially upon exploring other world religions, seeing those symbols and those commonalities, those archetypes and myths across the board. And I think folks can take that in one of two directions: in sort of a pluralistic direction or in a direction that makes them say, “Well, there’s a common recognition of truth or common drive here towards something transcendent. Let me drill down and figure out which exactly is the truest myth.” There are a lot of secular folks nowadays, like Jordan Peterson, who are making this study of myth very popular and popularizing it amongst folks regardless of their religious background. What do you think of that sort of study of myth divorced from the religion itself? Do you think it has any power, or is it a steppingstone to something transcendent, or is it just merely academic?

Carolyn: I don’t think it’s anything new. It’s been around from the moment Satan whispered in Eve’s ear—these things, as soon as there’s been an alternate message of truth that has a little truth in it that makes the lies of the falsehoods more convincing. I think there’s an attraction to mythology. It keeps coming back up because it does speak to those things that run very deeply within us. So, if we’re speaking Freud or Jung, there are ideas, there are archetypes that we do identify with as part of being universally human. But I think people are drawn to story because story is where we find our identities. Jesus, I think one of the reasons He is such a compelling figure—I agree with Madeleine L’Engle that He was not a theologian; He was a storyteller. We hear ourselves in the parables and we find ourselves—parts of ourselves and parts of other people we know—in these smaller stories within the overall greater story of the Bible, which is also incredibly intricate. I mean, who makes this up? I could never make it up in a million years, but there’s so many levels of meaning in it. When you look at someone who is working with mythology, I think it’s a very human impulse to try to find meaning within those stories. I think that the Christian story just runs deeper beneath it all.

Kathleen Noller: You talk about postmodernism in your education—you’re educated at Oxford. I wonder how that love of story and that desire for transcendence interacted with your experience in formal education, because in my education I’ve gone to secular schools exclusively. I would not say that the love of the mystical is something that’s encouraged; I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily discouraged, and I come from a STEM background too, but it’s very factual, it’s very analytical—even in textual analysis, it’s comparative literature. That’s what I took away from my education. So how was it for you being at Oxford and studying at such a high level? Did that lead you more into this comparative side? And how did that impact your relationship with story and your relationship with the Christian story as well?

Carolyn: As I was reading richly in this history for various comparative literature and for antecedents and influences, I realized that there were these great thinkers—and this is a lot what C.S. Lewis has said; a lot of his favorite thinkers were Christians. That’s either downplayed, I think, in the secular academic arena or not taught or shared or highlighted. Perhaps there’s a fear there. But there’s this great, rich tradition of thinking about who God is, and of apologia, which makes incredible sense, and of the blending of mythology, the coming of Christ. For example, the historical relevance of the period in which Jesus came as a human being was incredibly powerful. We all talk about, “Oh, why doesn’t He show up now?” Well, that would be great. But aside from that, the intersection of when He came—at the time of Herod, with incredible intersection of the Jews, the polytheistic approach, the Romans, the occupation, all that world stage—just thinking of who Paul, for instance, had to share the gospel with, all these different mythologies pouring into what it is, and even the accusations and the stage for atheism.

It was incredibly historical and timely and representative, I think, of these cycles that keep repeating. So I think it was really compelling again to recognize that many of these authors I was already studying and enjoying actually had Christian sympathies or ideas or that even virtues and reforms and things that I appreciated in my current culture had their roots in the Christian world—that we were no longer predominantly, in my society, a culture ruled by Herod. And that’s how its change happened very distinctly because of Christ and His teachings. But people can walk around and spout those rights they have and not recognize at all from whence they came. For me, the long literary tradition—recognizing that many of those authors that I did love or admire or were moved by had this view and this faith. And even those that didn’t, or other things I was reading—tragedy, comedy, whatnot—all pointed to this story. There wasn’t a single thing I had read or have ever read that hasn’t. Sitting alone with that is a powerful thing. There was the Christian intellectual tradition of reading—if you think about even reading the first-century saints, even if you’re not a Christian, the incredible apologia they present, and for why mythologies are not enough—for instance, what they’re pointing to, but why they fall short, why the coming of Christ was so radical.

The early church fathers explained so crisply and clearly what the incarnation is and what the symbolism and the beauty is of the virgin birth and all these things that might seem incredulous or ridiculous really have beautiful, powerful symbolism and theological consistency. I found the Christian worldview then to make sense—it was not a haphazard set of beliefs; it was coherent. In addition to that, it also had the space for mystery, that it reconciled that dissociation of sensibility, as T.S. Eliot calls it. Secular places—for instance, I can remember at one point, and I’ve taught at secular places too, but I remember at one point wanting to teach Paradise Lost, which is a seminal text by John Milton. You would think for English majors, very basic. My secular students usually need to read Genesis to know the story well; my Christian students don’t—they can jump in at a different level. But there have been places I’ve taught where they have not wanted that to be taught, either because it was a Christian text or they saw it as complicated. This sort of concern about even historically Christian texts that can be seen as objectively even just stories of the beautiful—stories that are beautiful or poetry that is powerful—have a different controversy than non-Christian texts, which I also find fascinating. But what do we do with these texts that speak of this Christ and speak of this faith that actually are coherent and compelling and raise the deepest needs and concerns and problems within ourselves, such as the reality of sin—words we don’t want to talk about, that we think of as too offensive, that really get to the root of all the problems? I found just reading widely and deeply in a tradition that was very rich—that we were not even seeing the tip of the iceberg on, it had been buried in our culture, or we’ve been distracted from—but was really, really empowering because it gave me the tools to make those decisions for myself.

Kathleen Noller: You’ve used the words wonder and mystical, and I’ve talked about beauty in this discussion. I’d like to bring in a new term, which is my favorite, to encompass these. C.S. Lewis uses it; it’s called numinous, but it was coined by a Lutheran theologian, Rudolf Otto, and he uses it to describe feelings of awe and mystery and profound emotional experiences which give us that transcendent sense of the supernatural. It has three components, and I hope I pronounce Latin correctly: mysterium, tremendum et fascinans, where mysterium means it’s wholly other, it’s not ordinary, it’s wondrous; tremendum is the sense of power and awe; and fascinans are potently attractive. How do you see these terms interfacing with the Bible? And how can the church and Christians today sort of ascend past the intellectual aspect of theology—which is very valuable—into the numinous to experience the divine?

Carolyn: What an incredible question. I remember before I was a Christian seeing on the cover of Bibles the title Living Bible, and I thought that was so creepy—like a kind of book that would sprout legs and run away or something. But it was after I first read the Bible cover to cover, I thought, “Oh, gosh, not only can I not make this stuff up, but there are so many facts and believable things here and people that would act in a way that I would have or people I know.” There are very real details that make the story very real, very believable. But there’s also running underneath it and overarching it a great mystery, a great sense of wonder of something that we can’t fully know, that we but see through a glass darkly right now. I was amazed at something like the Lord just announcing, “I am”— “I am the great I AM,” like that’s the answer: “I AM.” The mysteries that take place—everything from the burning bush to all of creation shuddering at the fall and at the crucifixion. Things that the way that God, having power, having created everything, would be able to create miracles or interrupt any regular patterns as He saw fit. That wasn’t incredulous but seemed actually—I remember reading on in the On the Incarnation by Athanasius and being really struck again by the early Christians embracing of wonder as part, yes, it was wonderful, it was amazement, but it was also kind of par for the course. That of course God would be able to do this if all things are in Him. What was more wondrous was the fact that He would want to—that He would want to enter our bodies or our suffering and not be a hypocrite but be a God that was fully human and fully God. So I think the space for the numinous really points again back at wisdom and the idea of the sublime, which is what I was drawn to when I was studying the Romantics, but the idea that fear and awe can be held in the same component, that awe originally meant to also have fear of the Lord, but to also have wonder, and that those two go together. Maybe that’s what we’re missing sometimes in our more highly academic or intellectual conversations, not fear as punishment, because that’s where we can also go to the extreme sometimes with conservatism and shame, that there is certainly discipline in fear and appropriately so and direction, spiritual direction, but there’s also awe and wonder in it too. Those two, again, are that kind of paradox, but that’s where wisdom is found. In many ways, it’s all the difference. When I was reading the Bible, Kathleen, it struck me—the difference between Eden and heaven, and the points between those of suffering and experience and the tree of knowledge and essentially the tree of wisdom later represented by the cross as the connection between those two, that all these deep roots pointed to that fruit. So, I think there’s probably not enough embracing of the mystical or the numinous out of fear as well.

Kathleen Noller: Do you think art is a way for us to help embrace that mystical? When we think of art, how would you define it? Is it something more than just aesthetics? Is the beauty of it subjective, or is there some objective aspect to it which can link us back to God?

Carolyn: That’s a huge conversation, but personally, I think what’s at the heart of art is something that moves us out of ourselves in the sense of that transcendent—the transcendent being beauty and goodness and truth that point to the nature of God, art in the nature of God, that constant need to move us out of ourselves through empathy, through contemplation, through meditation, through prayer, because that’s the trap of ourselves—that’s the preference for ourselves over God. So, anything that is a tool that helps us, reminds us, resets us to be moved outside of ourselves to contemplate the glory of God—I think that’s art. It’s not like the old argument: is there actually Christian art? L’Engle and Sayers argued that it just must be good. I think it’s something that moves us out of our empathetic and metaphorical illiteracies to a way of contemplating the goodness and the beauty and the truth of God. It doesn’t have to be explicitly about God to do that.

Kathleen Noller: That was going to be my next question. Especially as a writer, I often hear pressure from Christian writers to be very explicit in the focus. I often find in some modern literature that they want to write about a Christian character more than they want to point to God. So, what do you think the aim of Christian artists—let’s narrow it down to Christian writers—should be? Should the aim be to point to God, and how explicit should they be about that?

Carolyn: I think it’s simple and complex at the same time—another paradox. For all of us, regardless of what we’re doing, I do believe that the catechism of what’s the purpose of man is to enjoy God and glorify Him forever. Art, is one means of doing that; writing is one means of doing that. I do believe strongly that our writing is our voice in our absence. So how are we thinking about writing in ways that people will be reading so that they are not alone? But I don’t think that dictates having a character be a cookie-cutter or a certain type. Again, this is why I love the Bible—there are no stereotypes there. Stereotypes exist for a reason; in many ways they have truth in them. But if I were to have crafted a story, I would have had Jesus meet some guy at the well who was thirsty, not a woman who’d been, quote unquote, married five times before and has a witty conversation with Him and He meets her where she’s at and says, “Here’s the living water, but you’ve also had these five husbands.” He’s able to speak the truth with her and meet her needs and her thirst and talk with her in the bright of day when no one else would—so many elements of poignancy and meaning and longings met in that to be seen and known. So many ways of telling that story—that’s the power of good art.

Kathleen Noller: Do you ever think there are topics or specifically vocabulary off limits for the Christian writer?

Carolyn: I can understand why swearing isn’t popular profanity. I do remember an editor being concerned with mine. It’s not like I use a lot of profanity as a literature professor, but when I was writing Surprised by Oxford, I was quoting a professor, and that was a little controversial. I do think that we should be salt and light, and I do think the directives of watching what comes from our mouths reflect our heart. I also think that there are probably great poignancy and time and place for appropriate profanity. Even Paul himself, in a way, used it when he compared everything else except Christ to BS. I think there can be a time when it’s appropriate. And I also think paying attention to people’s languages—not just their dialects or their linguistic language, but also the language of their culture, of their community, and understanding what might make someone feel comfortable or having what you think is an appropriate way to express things but respecting how they might express theirs.

Personally, I don’t know about off limits for me because I think about the controversy around Dorothy Sayers when she wrote the screenplay, the radio play for The Man Born to Be King, and it was the first time there was going to be a dramatization of the life of Jesus in which He would really be portrayed. Prior to this, the BBC had certain rules, and it could only be portrayed off-stage or whatever else. She had the added challenge of doing it only by radio. She decided to choose the vernacular—to choose, in many ways, Matthew the tax collector has a Cockney accent, people from different communities. She kind of buckled down for the issue that was going to cause. But the director of the program stood behind her because she said Jesus didn’t speak Bible. He came from a small village; these are people He’d be chatting to at John’s baptisms; there would be familiar sayings; there would be people of different dialects. Her holding on to what she believed was the veracity of that rendition I believe was important. I don’t think it was done to be gratuitous or to be shocking. It was done with a very prayerful and careful heart because much of Scripture is sewn into all her own screenplay very meticulously. And on the other hand, she’s of course translating Dante. So, she was nobody’s fool except for God. There’s a way in which we do have to watch our hearts and our mouths and our minds, as we’re commanded to do so. But there’s so many ways, ultimately before God, that language can be representative or appropriate.

Kathleen Noller: That’s very well said. A topic of controversy I often hear about is the horror genre. My husband’s a particular fan of this genre. He always cites the original Exorcist and says that horror, like you mentioned, if it’s simply horrible to be gratuitous and to be enthralling viscerally to the viewer or the reader, there’s really no purpose for that, and so that’s not appropriate. But oftentimes horror can show us—especially for those of us like myself who have seen certain natural evils but certainly have not seen anywhere near the extent of moral evil people are capable of in this universe—for those of us who live in sheltered, comfortable lives, horror can really bring evil to light. That’s a discussion that I’ve heard a lot of Christians have about the horror genre.

Carolyn: I’m personally an old black-and-white Goldie oldie and musicals girl. But I’m speaking more objectively, though I do have a love of film. There’s something to be paid—in many ways there’s grains of the Greek tragedies in these. We can say that these are horrific when Oedipus gouges his eyes out; we play it again with Gloucester in King Lear; when we see Lady Macbeth with her hands dripping blood, it’s Clytemnestra from Agamemnon. We go back to that question of the old mythologies that run deep in us: what is it in us that is both horrified by horror and drawn to it? The power of the Greek tragedies is that it allowed, Aristotle said, the theory of catharsis—which is basically Freudian theory. What we also understand is that if we have repressed emotions and they’re not allowed to come out in some sort of civilized way, in some sort of way that we can process them through art or whatever, they will fester and they will not only be destructive to the individual but to the polis as well, to the social body. Something like horror allows us to examine the depths of something that we need to know exists and is very real—is a big reason as to why God came and died for us.

It wasn’t done because this is a green and pleasant land. We’re promised that, but it takes that work to get there, to get it restored, because it also lies dangerously within each of us. We can deny that it doesn’t, but it does. Sin is dark and deep in all of us. I am very nervous of anyone who puts any kind of adjective in front of them being a sinner—an occasional sinner, I’m not a blatant sinner, don’t have these big sins. There’s sin, and we all have it. In a way, horror—I think of the old Greek tragedies and the notion of that order there—allowed you to sort of dish it up, examine it, look at the repercussions of it, and then make way for the new order, the cleansing for the new order, which in many ways I do think anticipates, foreshadows—however you want to read that again—how these old mythologies speak to the deepest and truest mythology of the necessity and coming of Christ. Nothing’s more horrific than the cross—what happens on the cross and the crucifixion on every single level; even the very last thing that He tastes is bitterness. You can’t make up the details. But it’s also the eucatastrophe of all of time. It’s the turning point and the redemption point of everything and changes the trajectory of what would happen to us all without it. That has old tragic stories in it. Because we can also conversely say our comedy is ridiculous—are they just sugar-coated? Should we not be watching those rom-coms and things like that? At all points for the glory of God.

Kathleen Noller: I’m curious as to which works of literature or just which pieces of art in general have helped you best connect to God or have been most formative for you throughout your journey and your maturation of faith. Which one should our readers look at after listening to this discussion?

Carolyn: Oh, Kathleen, there’s so many. There’s such a rich Christian intellectual tradition and even in non-Christian writers that have brought those questions to the table for me in such deep and powerful ways. Obviously, the Bible—and I just can’t overstate that enough to really read it, devotionally and in Lectio Divina and lots of different ways to enter something in small bites and in overarching, but simply to walk through it as a story never gets old. There’s something new every time; it’s such a profound story. There’s also so many things that are disturbing and require our questions. There is every element of every single—Frederick Buechner writes that wonderful book, the Bible is tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale, and it’s all those things. It’s horror and humor and wit and worry and all those things and wonder. So not to underestimate it and not to think of it as time-worn—that it really does bear rereading and rereading. I love Paradise Lost because I do think it is a beautiful read, or Dante’s Divine Comedy because it’s interesting to think about representations of journeys to hell and to our earth from a different perspective and different levels of paradise, those kinds of fantastic imaginative journeys that are all just representations of our own soul journeys. Metaphysical poets—John Donne, George Herbert especially during Lent—reading those I think are beautiful and meditative and complex, but they really capture the struggle that we have in our own souls again as well. I love reading all the saints; they’re so fascinating. Athanasius is just clear on theology, but so is someone like St. Teresa of Lisieux, who just writes beautifully about being a small flower before God and our complete dependence upon Him. I love the Inklings—they’re one of my favorite groups. So obviously C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Sayers and George MacDonald. I think George MacDonald is beautiful and asks also the big questions, addresses things like hypocrisy even among believers that we’re afraid to talk about at times—just completely shines the spotlight on atheists and on people of all stripes and on people who would identify themselves as knowing everything in Christ. So many are my favorites, but those are probably my immediate handful.

Kathleen Noller: That’s a wonderfully curated list. I love the fact that the early church fathers are in there. It took me longer than it should have after my conversion to start reading the works from early church fathers. They’re just so beautifully written—I really like St. John Chrysostom, golden mouth; he just has a way with words, and Athanasius as well. Augustine’s Confessions are timeless—I have teenage boys who are like, “Wow, that’s me.” They still resonate with everyone. It dives back down to all those common roots that we all have, and we need to address somehow through literature or life or something else. Thank you so much for sharing that list. That is a very rich list, and I’m sure our readers will love to pick some of those.

Carolyn: It’s so small, but there’s so many beautiful things to read. There’s so many.

Kathleen Noller: I’d like to read a quote from Surprised by Oxford. You are talking about your educational experience. The quote is as follows: “Rather, the opportunity to study here seals an experience marked by intense personal growth resulting from a genuine desire to learn—a heady, hearty experience that changes you forever because it cracks you open ultimately to the humility of learning, which is where all of this wanted to take you in the first place.” For students listening in or even lifelong learners like all of us, how would you recommend they crack themselves open to the humility of learning? How did humility play such a vital piece in learning—perhaps your conversion as well as your learning journey?

Carolyn: I think I love libraries—I love their smell; I love sitting among books and feeling all the company of others that have thought great thoughts before me and the weight of that as well. I think it induces humility. I remember sitting in the Bodleian Library, one of the largest libraries in the whole world, and all these portraits and things looking down. There is, I think John Keats calls it, anxiety of influence—how will I ever write like John Milton? So, it does induce this humility: okay, here I am, one small voice; what do I have to add? What do I have to say? But it is a conversation through the ages. We’re all made in the image of God, right back to the beginning of time as He would have it. We all bear that image and we all carry the word and the word within us and the word that’s in all that He’s created. Sitting with that and realizing that takes—I can see why the Beatitudes begin with meekness, that there really is a fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, a humility, recognition that we are not enough on our own and that we are in all respects the small vapor, the small speck. And yet we are also seen and known—He knows the number of hairs on our heads and He sees the sparrow fall.

So how do we hold that paradox in our hand? It seems like a contradiction, but one of the things that I’ve really discovered at Oxford in my studies is that a paradox is only a seeming contradiction. That sliver that gets in between reason and emotion is the mystical and the seeming. Being able to hold those two. Instead of arriving where it’s very easy, I think especially that time in our lives as a freshman student, to feel you know everything—or as I’m embarking on that, or I’m here by my own merit and I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, or if I work hard enough I can get this grade, or if I apply myself I can control this material. Yes, the accumulation of information is an important, empowering thing, but it’s not wisdom. We have so much knowledge now at our fingertips more than ever before—we can literally speak to ourselves, we can speak and ask for knowledge, for information—but it’s not wisdom. When we call it Siri we can get facts, but we can’t ask Siri what loyalty is. Siri can give us a whole definition of sex, but not what chastity is and not what care or love is. Humility, that sense of being receptive to others that have thought of millennia prior to us, in addition to what others are thinking now, and that all of that has the divine network instead of really pride, which I used to think was such an easy answer. I thought that was like an over-easy answer to the problems in the world or to sin. But it is—it all is the preference of self to God and making all these other things gods, not just the idols. All the idols in mythology are just the idols that we substitute with our modern mythologies.

There are the age-old ones—money and all those sorts of things—but there’s also the equivalent of golden calves now would be our cell phones or however we want to—how many thumbs up? Likes are just replacing Caesar’s judgment on Facebook. There are just these constant mythologies that play themselves out and exchange other gods for the God. But at the root of it is our preference for self. Thinking that we know it all, thinking that no one’s the boss of me, setting ourselves down in that way—and oftentimes I think that comes out of fear too, whereas perfect love overcomes fear. Being open to asking questions, having questions asked of yourself and asking questions yourself, and having a stance of humility goes a long way because I also think that intellectual pride is one of the most dangerous forms of pride—they’re all dangerous, but C.S. Lewis has this wonderful essay called “Lilies That Fester,” where he talks about actually when lilies rot, they smell worse than weeds. The idea is that we can think of ourselves as these lilies—educated or having these opportunities or engaging our professors or pushing back on something—and all those things can be very important, but we can become so full of ourselves with that idea that we have information or that we are right or that we are immovable or that it’s really a position without much grace and without much wonder and without really much invitation to the Holy Spirit or to others.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you so much for being here with us. I’m going to close us with a quote from C.S. Lewis from one of his letters to Cynthia Donnelly. It’s about his advice to writers. He says, “But we needn’t write patently moral or theological work. Indeed, work whose Christianity is latent may do quite as much good and may reach some whom the more obvious religious work would scare away. The first business of a story is to be a good story.” That’s from his letters. Thank you so much, Dr. Weber, for being here and for chatting with us. Thank you, everybody, for listening. This was the Kathleen Noller Podcast. I’ll see you all next time.