Karl Barth on the Fish and the Second Naïveté

A few months back our daughter Carissa heard the song “I Wanna Go Back” on the Fish and got hooked. She kept asking to hear it. And pretty soon Janet and I got hooked too. If you don’t know the song here’s the music video:

It’s one of those songs that gets stuck in your head, the kind you find yourself singing under your breath throughout the day. That’s what happend to me. I kept singing the chorus over and over: “I wanna go back to Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…”

So catchy.

Aside from its infectious melody, the song reminds me of a story about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. He was visiting the states as a guest lecturer at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago.

During his trip, a student asked him if he could boil down his life’s work as a pastor and theologian into one sentence. According to church lore, he looked at the student from behind his thick black rimmed glasses and said, “Yes, I can. In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

The story is often told to remind us not to miss the forest for the theological trees. There is an enormous depth to the Christian faith, and we can sometimes get lost in its limitless intracacies and complexities. But all our inquiries ought to lead us back to the simple truth at the core of our faith, which begins, “God so loved the world…”

But for many, we find that we cannot simply “go back.” Either because of things we have experienced or the questions that incessantly gnaw on us, we are pushed to a place where what used to work for us no longer does. To “go back” would be akin to what Jesus says about sewing a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. The new will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.

When what we grew up with no longer fits, it is important to hear in our questions and doubts a necessary voice pointing the way forward (if we will let it). We are not trying to go back so to speak, but as C.S. Lewis puts it, “to go further up and further in.” Biblically we might say, we are not trying to get back to Eden, but onward to the New Jerusalem.

Most Christians I look up to have gone through some kind of crisis of faith. And this crisis is often a scary thing because we find ourselves deconstructing all that we once believed good and true. But the critical distance that is created here is often bridged by what philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined, “the second naivete.”

In the second naivete we are able to engage faith in a different way than we did in the “first naivete.” We don’t simply accept everything at face value or on a surface level. In critically reflecting on our beliefs we are brought to a place of informed engagement. We are able to reengage our beliefs. And we find that there is now an imaginative depth added to what we once believed. The story we used to hear in a pre-critical way is now charged with a more dynamic and vivid range of meaning.

For those of us who find ourselves in a place of doubt and uncertainty, may those doubts and uncertainties be the place of struggle and growth that brings about a second naivete. And in so doing, may we find that what can be wholeheartedly sung by an eight year old girl is also deep enough to encapsulate a lifetime of theological investigation…

Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.

Amen.