When I began writing seriously, I thought the principal task was to explain what I believed as clearly as I could.
I still believe clarity matters.
But the longer I write, the more I realize that serious writing asks something more difficult of the writer. It asks whether the belief itself can withstand examination.
An idea can sound convincing in conversation. It can feel settled in the mind. It can survive for years as something we repeat without much difficulty.
Then we try to explain it carefully.
Questions appear.
Exceptions appear.
The strongest objection turns out to be stronger than we expected.
Experience refuses to fit neatly inside the theory.
And occasionally we discover that something we believed was wrong—or at least much less complete than we had imagined.
I have come to value that process.
A body of work should not merely preserve what a writer thought. It should reveal whether he became better at thinking.
Here is some of what the work has been teaching me.
Experience Is an Unforgiving Editor
I like ideas. I like frameworks. I like finding the principle underneath the problem.
But experience has taught me to distrust any philosophy that works beautifully until an actual human life enters the room.
The responsible choice can still produce a bad outcome.
A good person can make a poor decision.
Money can solve an enormous number of problems and remain powerless before others.
People we love can make choices we cannot prevent.
Illness does not negotiate with our plans.
A business strategy that worked for twenty years can suddenly stop working.
Faith does not guarantee that the thing we desperately want will happen.
And sometimes we can do everything reasonably within our power and still lose.
That does not make principles useless. It makes testing them necessary.
I want the ideas in my work to survive contact with ordinary life. The family. The business. The checkbook. The hospital room. The marriage. The mistake. The problem at seven o'clock in the morning that does not care what we wrote about responsibility the night before.
If an idea works only under ideal conditions, it probably is not strong enough.
I Am Becoming More Suspicious of Easy Answers
This is especially true in my writing about Christianity.
I am a Christian. My faith is not incidental to the work.
But I increasingly believe Christian writing does itself no favors when it uses familiar religious phrases in place of serious thought.
“Trust God.”
“Let go.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Have more faith.”
Perhaps there is truth somewhere inside each of those statements. But I want to know what the truth actually is.
What does trusting God mean for the businessman who is still responsible for payroll Monday morning?
What does surrender mean for the father whose children depend upon his judgment?
What does Providence mean when something terrible happens and no satisfying explanation ever arrives?
What does dependence upon God mean to someone who learned very young that being able to depend upon himself was one of the safest ways to protect the people he loved?
These are not objections to Christianity. For me, they are part of taking Christianity seriously.
I do not want a faith that survives only because I refuse to ask it difficult questions. Nor do I believe every difficult question will eventually produce an answer that satisfies me.
There are things to understand. There are things to do. And there may also be things we eventually have to trust without possessing them completely.
I am still learning what that means.
I Have Become More Interested in Distinctions
A useful distinction can sometimes do more for us than an entire argument.
Self-reliance is not the same as self-sufficiency.
Humility is not the denial of competence.
Dependence is not necessarily helplessness.
Conviction is not certainty.
Forgiveness is not pretending nothing wrong occurred.
Acceptance is not approval.
Responsibility is not control.
Faith is not passivity.
Legacy is not fame.
These distinctions matter because sloppy language eventually produces sloppy thinking. If we use one word for several different things, we can spend years arguing without realizing we are not discussing the same idea.
One purpose of these essays is simply to separate things that have become unnecessarily tangled.
Sometimes clarity begins by saying:
These two things are not the same.
That sounds modest. It can change an entire way of thinking.
I Am Learning to Put Myself Inside the Argument
It is easy to write about what other people are doing wrong. The culture. Politicians. Institutions. The wealthy. The poor. The religious. The irreligious. There will always be somebody available for examination.
The harder question is:
Where am I inside this problem?
If I write about pride, where does pride appear in me?
If I criticize materialism, what role does money occupy in my own sense of security?
If I praise self-reliance, where might my own independence prevent me from accepting legitimate dependence?
If I write about responsibility, where am I tempted to turn responsibility into control?
If I write about Christian faith, where do I use belief comfortably and where does Christianity actually challenge the way I live?
This does not mean every essay should become autobiography. It means I do not want to use ideas primarily as instruments for judging people outside myself.
If a principle applies to human beings, I am one of them.
The work becomes more credible when I remember that. And more useful.
Seriousness Requires Revision
One of the most liberating things about building this body of work has been accepting that I am allowed to change my mind.
More than that: I should change my mind when the evidence, reasoning, or experience requires it.
An essay is not a contract obligating me to defend forever whatever I believed on the day I published it.
What would trouble me is recognizing that something is wrong and leaving it untouched because changing it might appear inconsistent. Consistency is valuable when it comes from principles that continue to withstand examination. It is not valuable when it becomes loyalty to our former selves.
I would rather have a body of work that records intellectual growth than one that creates the illusion that the writer was fully formed from the beginning.
A man encounters questions.
He forms convictions.
Life tests them.
Some hold.
Some bend.
Some break.
He repairs what he can.
He changes what needs changing.
He keeps asking.
The writer is not standing outside the structure describing how it should be built.
He is inside it too.
Serious writing does not merely explain what we believe. It tests whether what we believe can hold.— Joseph C. Kunz, Jr.