COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Cognitive dissonance, in the study of psychology, is the internal tension that results when our experience doesn't match our beliefs and values. It is a sense of unease when I encounter something that contradicts what I have held to be true. The older I get the more often I experience this tension in the course of learning new ideas. But perhaps dissonance is felt most acutely when it occurs in the realm of faith commitments. A good example of this came about the other day when a friend (whom I have not seen in 44 years) and I were conversing about the aspects of temptation and how we have a propensity to follow our base instincts, after sixty years of Christian discipleship. We contemplated such questions as: How could dear friends even consider a divorce if marriage is God's ideal? How is it that my prayers go unanswered if I have been so faithful to pray? How do I reconcile my personal or the global experience of suffering with a view of a good and loving God?

Now, those who have never experienced (or noticed) cognitive dissonance as a reality in their own lives might be quick to offer all kinds of explanations for me, who doesn't find it quite as easy to reconcile the spaces between beliefs and experience. They might advise and explain with something like: you have drifted away from our moral center. Or that I have not studied the Scripture enough, or prayed enough. Maybe, that I have not understood right doctrine, or that I must confess. And there is no doubt, in my mind, that surely there are times when all of these explanations may be true.

Yet I am often unsettled from my own tendency to explain dissonance away, when I look at the doubts of John the Baptist. The gospels portray John with the intensity of moral outrage, zeal and tenacity. The courageous cousin of Jesus preached repentance resolutely. In preparation for Jesus's earthly ministry, he baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. He stood against the immorality and hypocrisy of those who were religious and political leaders. John was resolute in his ministry as the forerunner to the Messiah. Even as his own disciples came undone and complained that the crowds who once clamored to see him were now flocking to Jesus, John stood clear in his calling:

"You yourselves bear me witness, that I have said, 'I am not the Messiah,' but 'I have been sent before him'" (John 3:26-28).

Yet all of this background creates a dramatic contrast once John was imprisoned. His resolve was shaken. Both Matthew and Luke's gospels record his dissonance: "Now when John in prison heard of the works of Jesus, he sent word by his disciples, and said to him, 'Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?'" (Matthew 11:3; Luke 7:20) Here was John experiencing a void between what he believed about Jesus and his own life's reality. If Jesus is the Messiah, John must have wondered, why am I sitting in this jail? The Messiah John proclaimed would "thoroughly clear his threshing floor" and "burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:12). The Messiah was coming to rid Israel—and indeed the world—of evil. Yet in John's day to day existence in his cold prison cell, evil had won the day. "Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?"

John's dissonance is not unlike my own voids between what I believe and what I experience. Yet the suffering that results from the gaps, according to author Scott Cairns, writes in THE END OF SUFFERING, "[These also] can become illuminating moments in which we see our lives in the context of a terrifying, abysmal emptiness, moments when all of our comfortable assumptions are shown to be false, or misleading, or at least incomplete." The gap between what I, like John, believe about the nature and ministry of the Messiah and the reality of a Jesus who is free from my comfortable assumptions often creates unbearable dissonance.

Jesus acknowledged that his ministry would be disruptive, and even be misunderstood. In responding to John's doubts, Jesus said, "Blessed is the one who keeps from stumbling over me" (Matthew 11:6). Surely, the space between what I believe and what I experience often cause me to stumble and fall. Yet, as Cairns suggests, might exploring those spaces also illuminate new paths of discovery from Jesus's own life and ministry? The spaces I research and experience often hold the treasure of new insight and the beauty of a more faithful devotion if I am willing to let go of my "comfortable assumptions" and dig deep, where what is precious and most valuable is often found in the deepest places of dissonance.