Whenever I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I kept seeing applications of the author’s arguments to my own Christian life. And perhaps your Christian life, too. In order for anyone interested to be able to understand what I’m talking about, it’s necessary to work through the development of narrator’s thought as well as my own.

Early in the motorcycle journey from Minnesota to Montana, the speaker (for the book is written in first-person limited) takes time to explain his understanding of understanding. He says,

“But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds – classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . .

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. . . .

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. . . .

“The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior . . .”

The narration goes on but I want to interrupt for a moment. When I read “romantic” and “classic” I think “Praxis” and “Theology.” And by “Praxis” I mean the living out of the Christian life, not something divorced from reason or knowledge but instead something growing out of it and also informing it. I could call it Peripateo, the word for “walk” but Praxis, “practice,” is perhaps more familiar and thus preferable.

I am not saying that experience or Praxis should determine doctrine or Theology. I am saying that Praxis should illuminate Theology. And illuminate it by both demonstrating the truth of the doctrine and deepening or even modifying our understanding of knowledge and doctrine.

Then narrator says, “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical.” My application is this: “Although Praxis is romantic (as defined here), Theology is purely classical (as defined here).”

He adds,

“The classic style [Theology] is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control.”

And then he adds this important observation:

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one more or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

If this doesn’t describe most of the division in evangelical Christianity, I don’t know what does. It is not only in the “world” that reason is elevated and affect marginalized: it is certainly true any many segments of evangelicalism, too.

Having been spiritually raised in a Bible Church environment, I have looked disdainfully in the past at those who seemed to draw their knowledge of God almost exclusively from their experiences. And their experiences, it seemed to me, tended to dictate their doctrine and beliefs.

I no longer look at such people with disdain but I still think the generalization is largely true. Such people are the romantics of Christendom, enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of Christianity but negligent or ignorant of the structure and foundation necessary to support it.

But the knife cuts another way, too. My own experience has been largely, if not exclusively, in classical or Theological understanding. It has been cerebral and reasonable, clinical and sterile. Feelings, emotions, experience have been relegated to a lower status, as though they were creations of a lessor god.

The merging of these two ways of understanding lie down the path of Christian maturity. I have only begun trying figure out how to think about these things and how to live them out. I’ll talk later about what constitutes excellence or genuine maturity, but for now I’ll only say that it requires both of these modes in proper relationship to one another.

Important and significant as this has been for me, it is not what caused the seismic paradigm shift for me. That lies elsewhere, but much needs to be explained before I can get there.


2 Cor 1:13