evangelical confidence

I think everyone should write the sort of tribute Philip Yancy does in Soul Survivor, presenting all the authors and people who have most shaped his views. If we followed suit perhaps it would acknowledge that most of our most profound ideas are not our own but borrowed and it would also would attest to the truth opined by the writer of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun.

One of the writer's in Yancy's book who intrigued me most was novelist and preacher Fredrick Buechner. Bridging the gap as he did between evangelicals and the cultural despisers of religion was courageous, but his initial introduction to evangelicals was characterized by shock as he described to Yancy his impressions of evangelicals: "some reminded him of American tourists in Europe who, not knowing the language of their listeners, simply raised their voices. He expressed that such Christians spoke confidently about matters he viewed as veiled in mystery. This alarm was a source of both fascination as well as alarm, "I was astonished to hear students shift casually from small talk about the weather and movies to a discussion of what God was doing in their lives. They spoke of 'prayer diaries' and used phrases like 'God told me...' If anybody said anything like that in my part of the world, the ceiling would fall in, the house would catch fire, and people's eyes would roll up into their heads."

I wonder whether this sort of astonishment with confident certainty is an appropriate response to this attitude dominating evangelical circles where, in my experience, the more sure you are about a spiritual matter, the more faith and passion for God is often attributed to you. If God is both immanent and transcendent, perhaps we would do more justice to this latter quality with frequent admissions of human ignorance and frailty.