Faithful Disbelief: Christopher Morse Between Foucault and Barth

Abstract

“And what do you do?” As a graduate student studying Christian theology in a country that increasingly expects education institutions to focus primarily on the production of tech-savvy laborers,1 this is quite an awkward question. What role do academic theologians play in this kind of educational system? What is the task of theology in this context? In pursuing answers to these questions, I return to one of the first works on theology I studied, written by one of my first theology professors: Christopher Morse’s Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief. In Not Every Spirit, Morse examines the task of theology (in particular, dogmatics, that field of theology concerned with the faithfulness of claims regarding God), and rehearses the theological work he prescribes. As I will be focusing on the task of theology in this paper, I will engage with the corresponding section of Morse’s book here. Not Every Spirit begins with Morse’s claim that “to believe in God is not to believe in everything.” In other words, while the emphasis in some churches may be on what ideas about God or authorities on God are to be believed, such belief necessarily implies a disbelief of other ideas and authorities. Christian faith is, then, a matter of “faithful disbelief.”2 Morse clarifies this notion of faithful disbelief by comparing it to doubt and skepticism. Doubt refers to the “distrust of God that remains present even within our struggles to be faithful.” Skepticism is centered on the claim that one should not believe something without having been presented sufficient evidence. Faithful disbelief, by contrast, is a matter of discerning what one is called, by faith, to disbelieve. It is not about the distrust of God, but the distrust of what is not of God. It is not about the justification of belief in God, but about what that belief rejects as unjustifiable.3 So, while doubt and skepticism are each of value to an academic theologian and likely to any Christian, Morse rejects them as orientations that are definitive of theology, in favor of faithful disbelief. This provisional rejection is grounded in Morse’s reading of the Bible, rather than in a philosophical opposition to doubt or skepticism. This notion of a call to faithful disbelief, as well as the title of Morse’s book, is drawn from 1 John: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are