David Brooks is one of my least favorite journalists, and Mark Oppenheimer is one of my favorite ones. He is also a friend and, at times, my editor. So it is with some trepidation that I find myself admiring Brooks’s spiritual autobiography and disagreeing with Mark’s rejoinder to it.
The core of the disagreement, I think, is over what Brooks calls “faith.” At the outset, let’s agree that this is a misleading word—though less so than others Brooks might have chosen, such as “spirituality,” “mysticism,” or Schleiermacher’s “intuition of the infinite.” Generally, faith means faith-in– that is, a belief in a set of potential facts. I have faith that the bus will come on time, I have faith in my partner, I have faith in the capacity of human beings to do better than we’re doing right now. And for many religionists, faith means faith in God: a belief that God exists, and a trust in God as well.
From the first sentence in his essay, however, Brooks rejects this definition. “When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief,” he begins. But, over a period of years marked by several encounters with the numinous, Brooks comes to a very different definition:
I experience faith as a yearning for something beautiful that I can sense but not fully grasp. For me faith is more about longing and thirsting than knowing and possessing.
I share this faith, and I share Brooks’s openness to finding expressions of it in multiple sources: for me, Buddhism, earth-based spirituality, psychedelics, and mythic/mystical Judaism; for Brooks, Judaism and Christianity.
Here is where Oppenheimer demurs. Brooks can’t be both Jewish and Christian because “the definition of a Christian [is] one who believes in the Old and New Testaments.”
But Brooks didn’t say he believes in the New Testament. He said, in the passage Oppenheimer quotes:
Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang.
Admittedly, I don’t know what “assent to the whole shebang” means exactly, or why anyone would want to write that phrase. But the rest of the essay isn’t about belief in the resurrection or baptism of Christ, which is what Oppenheimer says makes someone Christian. It’s about finding inspiration in Christian as well as Jewish sources, going to church (again: not belief), and wrestling with some of the tensions between these two traditions.
In fact, the only people who say Brooks believes in the theological or ontological claims of the New Testament are his fellow Jews:
My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.
That is Oppenheimer’s point as well, but Brooks explicitly rejects the equation of faith and belief. “Faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question,” Brooks writes. But Oppenheimer insists that it is about finding certain answers, believing certain propositions, and assenting to the whole shebang.
I’m with Brooks here. I, too, am moved by the “celestial grandeur” of the Beatitudes. I, too, quote Tillich alongside Heschel. And I, too, find that religious values inspire my journalistic work, which is why I usually can’t stand Brooks’s pieces. I also think that religious hybridities like Brooks’s and mine are becoming increasingly common, and that the dichotomies Oppenheimer insists upon are increasingly obsolete.
To be sure, I have quibbles with Brooks: his stark dichotomy between “a state of my own mind” and “the source of love itself” is intellectually sloppy, for example. And I agree with Oppenheimer that much of what Brooks associates with Christianity is also found in Jewish traditions that Brooks seems not to understand very well.
But where Oppenheimer labels Brooks a kind of heretic, I find him—in this rare instance—to be a fellow traveler.