The Spirit or the Kick Drum?

Christian Authenticity and the Mystery of "Mixed Agency"

I wrote this essay for one reason: to share my “Parable of the Fender Bender,” which many of my students have said is one of the most helpful images they’ve heard for understanding agency and causality from a Christian perspective. I hope you’ll find it so as well. Feel free to skip straight to the parable if you like, but first, a bit of setup…Here’s a question I hear a lot:

“How do I know what is God and what is not? Sometimes it can feel like God might be speaking, but I don’t want to be misled if it’s just my own thoughts or desires or some other outside influence manipulating my thoughts and desires. How do I discern which is which?”

It’s a tricky question. We are trying to authenticate our experience of God, which is understandable. But the trouble is, we have all unknowingly made certain assumptions about “authenticity” and “God” which color the question. For starters, we are swimming in a very particular kind of cultural waters, which have led us to presume: (1) that our truest thoughts and feelings originate almost entirely from within us and/or from our own direct, private experiences of the divine, and (2) that authenticity means primarily being true to those internal experiences and ideas. But things are not quite as they appear. I’m going to deal mostly with the second point in this introduction, but that should lay the groundwork for the parable, which will somewhat address the first point, and will definitely give an answer to the above question. So here goes!

What Do We Mean By “Authentic”?

Philosopher Charles Taylor has famously summed up our cultural moment with the term “The Age of Authenticity.”

[By ‘age of authenticity’] I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late 18th Century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.  (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age)

In other words, modern people in the West tend to define “authenticity” as “non-conformity.” (Think: every Disney movie ever.) But this has not always been the case, and indeed it is not even the case in all present day cultures. Our differing views on what is “authentic” can, to a degree, be traced back to differing assumptions about where truth comes from. Where do meaning, value, and beauty originate? Do we impose meaning on the world…or…do we extract meaning from the world? If truth comes from within, if “I think, therefore I am,”¹ then of course authenticity would say, “To thine own self be true.”² But, if our notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful come from outside ourselves, that is, from “the Tao” as C.S. Lewis calls it, then authenticity actually requires—wait for it—conformity to external norms. So which is it?

In many ways, the modern West has gone the way of Descartes and Shakespeare’s Polonius. That is, authenticity has to do mostly with an individual’s own inner integrity, with whether or not a person is being “true to himself or herself.”

Definition 1: Authenticity = allegiance to one’s internal self, regardless of external forces.

Whereas, in most Eastern & ancient cultures, authenticity has traditionally had more to do with conforming to an authoritative standard outside the self (e.g. traditional/religious/cultural norms).

Definition 2: Authenticity = allegiance to external realities beyond one’s self.

If you have trouble understanding definition #2, that is, how authenticity could possibly require “conformity” (because, let’s be honest, you’re a modern Westerner like me), here’s one way to think about it: By what standard do we judge whether or not a dollar bill is “authentic?” Is it because it is true to itself? No, it’s because it conforms to the standard, authoritative pattern of dollar bills. Likewise, how do we judge that a Mexican meal is authentic? Is it because the person who prepared it “felt in their heart” that it was truly a Mexican meal? Of course not. That would be stupid and offensive. No, for a Mexican meal to be deemed “authentic,” it must at the very least comport with and conform to the specific qualities, ingredients, and traditions (we might even add…spirit) held in common by the people of Mexico, past and present.

Christian Authenticity

Now let’s try to apply our two definitions of authenticity to the Christian faith. Can a person be said to have authentic Christian faith if they simply “feel in their heart” that they are a Christian? Some would say yes. But most traditional believers would say, “No. More is required.” Okay then, can a person be said to have authentic faith if they conform to the traditions and beliefs of Christianity? Again, some would say yes. But others might be concerned. What if they merely conform outwardly but do not truly believe inwardly? Then they would only be like the Pharisees whom Jesus called, “whitewashed tombs.”

Indeed. Good points on both sides.

As it turns out, in Scripture, we find that true faith requires a kind of marriage of these two definitions of authenticity: a bringing together of inside and outside, of faith and faithfulness (a phenomenon I have elsewhere referred to as “participation”).

I have seen many young people struggle with the question, “Is my faith truly my own or is it just the faith my father, mother, and community passed down to me?” And I get it. There is such a thing as mindless, even hypocritical, conformity. But Scripture does not force you to choose between these options. Of course you, yourself, must believe. This much is perfectly clear. But it does not make it any less “authentic” if you came first to believe through conformity and obedience to those who are older and wiser than you. How else does anyone learn anything? Just because you had to be taught that 2 + 2 = 4 does not make it any less self-evidently true. What we learn first by authority, trust, and conformity, if it be true, will prove itself all the more true over time by experience. C.S. Lewis puts it this way:

Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine percent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority–because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.  (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Consider the way Jesus answers the rich young ruler’s question about how to inherit eternal life in Luke 18. First he tells him to obey the commandments (outer conformity). “This I have done,” the young man says. “Okay then,” Jesus replies, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” What has Jesus done? He has employed a new command, which, much like the aforementioned commandments, requires external conformity, but he has radicalized and, therefore, internalized it. The man is now stuck in Jesus’s trap.³ He cannot merely conform as the Pharisees might, because this command would cost him too much. It can only conceivably be followed by the person who loves and trusts Jesus enough to die to himself and follow. But neither can he fall back on a claim of mere inner feelings of faith and devotion (which, by the way, Jesus called into question in the very first moment of the conversation: “Why do you call me good?”). It’s the perfect answer. Thus, we reach a third definition of authenticity:

Definition 3: Authenticity = Conformity + Integrity

From a Christian perspective, authenticity requires a kind of inward integrity (truly acknowledging ones’s personal needs, sins, desires, beliefs, and values) and outward conformity (humbly shaping one’s life according to a standard beyond and bigger than one’s self). This is what is required of the Christian disciple. Faith and faithfulness. Trust and trustworthiness. Comparatively, the modern individualist tends to value integrity (true-to-self-ness), while denigrating conformity to a higher standard, whereas the stereotypical Pharisee tends to be high in conformity, low in integrity. (See diagram.)

(thanks Sam Kittrell for the diagram design)

The Spirit vs. The Kick Drum

Now, returning to our initial question…A number of years ago, probably in the very beginning of his own deconstruction/deconversion, former Christian musician Derek Webb came out with a provocative song called, “The Spirit vs. The Kick Drum.” The song is a bit blunt-force, which was kind of his style, and it deals, albeit cynically, with this problem of authenticity, of a disjointed inside and outside. “I don’t want the Spirit; I want the kick drum,” he sings, perhaps more honestly than he intended at the time. But many in the modern-rock-band Evangelical world are familiar with this anxiety. When I’m worshipping on Sunday morning—the lights are down and the music is reverberating through my body—and I get goosebumps as I sing passionately about my Savior…is that…real? Do I truly love him as much as I feel like I love him in that moment? Do I feel his presence or am I being psychologically manipulated by the atmosphere? Is it the Spirit or the kick drum?

Unlike Webb’s lyrics, most people who ask me this question, truly seem to want the Spirit. But they also fear they’re being duped. And their fear is not unwarranted. Many in the rock-music-church scene are wisely hesitant to ascribe too much power to a certain form—say, the Bethel/Hillsong repeat-the-bridge-and-build-to-crescendo method—as though it were some fool-proof technique for summoning the presence of the living God. Certainly, where two or three are gathered, etc. But also, the wind blows where it pleases.

So which is it: the Spirit or the kick drum? I have known many who never seem to doubt that it is the former. I have known many others (surely Webb himself would now be in this lot) who believe it is almost always the latter. Perhaps the wise man would simply say, ‘Well, sometimes it’s the one and sometimes the other.” Fair enough. But not me. Nope. I say...well…let me tell you a parable.

The Parable of the Fender Bender

Imagine, on your way to wherever you were going this morning, driving in your car, you became the unfortunate victim of a car accident. No one is seriously injured, thankfully, but cars are non-trivially damaged, including your own. What follows is the unfolding liturgy of a thousand inconveniences. Add to that vague feelings of shame, anger, and anxiety, which tend to grow by the minute: Who’s fault? What consequences? Will insurance cover? How high will the premium rise? What am I missing because I’m dealing with this instead? And you slowly realize: I’m going to be haunted by the repercussions of this stupid momentary accident for months, if not longer. Later that day, you’re venting to a friend, and you wonder out loud, “Why did this happen to me?”

Why, indeed.

Now, if your friend is wise, he/she would know that your question is no more than an expression, not an invitation to philosophical inquiry, to which the proper response is simply, “I’m so sorry.”

But there are other types of friends. Let’s pretend your friends are the other types.

For starters, there’s the down-to-earth, possibly non-religious type who would answer, “It’s just bad luck. If you’d left the driveway a second earlier or later, you would have had a completely different day.” Hard to argue with that, let’s be honest. But something about it doesn’t fully sit right. And fair enough. When your ancestors have been connecting the little white dots in the night sky for thousands upon thousands of years, transforming seemingly random shapes into myth and meaning, into tales of love, tragedy, victory, destiny, perhaps you cannot be blamed for wanting a bit more explanation than, “It is what it is. Particles collide.”

Enter your other friend, the overly spiritual type, who sees the hand of God in everything, even when the mundane explanation would far more easily settle the matter. “I think God wanted you to get in this accident,” she says. “Maybe he was trying to get your attention, to interrupt you, so that you could see him in a new way.” Again, hard to argue with that. When does God not want to get our attention? But one can imagine this sort of philosophy—the “this is your destiny” explanation of everything—becoming a bit spiritually (and practically) exhausting. Not to mention the blindspots! If God is singlehandedly pulling all the levers, then what exactly are you doing? What’s your role in all this? You do have a role in your own life, don’t you?

Enter the tough-love friend (or dad). “I’ve been telling you for months to pay more careful attention when you drive. Were you on your phone? You know the other driver was. Everyone is checking their FaceTok all the time. That’s why you have to be extra attentive. Both hands on the wheel. No music. Honestly, you’re lucky. This could have been much worse. And how are you going to afford this new premium? Did you ask for that raise at work yet, like we talked about?” Okay, he might not have gotten all the details right, but you were kind of on your phone. Like, not irresponsibly so. But, if you’re honest, it might have made a difference in your response time. And no, you didn’t ask for that raise when you could have, and now the window has passed. He could be right. Maybe this was your fault.

But there are other friends. We can list them quickly. There’s the blamer who always takes your side: “I can’t believe that idiot. He should have known you couldn’t slow down that fast. He was probably on his phone.” The socio-cultural philosopher: “Dude, it all goes back to the industrial revolution. These machines have transformed our souls. We sacrifice everything just so we can be everywhere all at once. Is it even worth it?” Your semi-Pentecostal friend: “Satan wants to get you down!” Your aunt Sally: “You know, our family has a history of these types of accidents. Your grandfather was constantly distracted. I think it runs in the family.”

And here’s the point: you don’t actually have to choose between these explanations, between natural and supernatural, between your own sin and the sin of others, between physical, cultural, or theological explanations. All can be true…at the same time. Of course, some may be more true than others. But reality stacks.

Reality Stacks

Okay, so why did the car accident happen? The Christian response is not to disbelieve in physics, “because…God.” No there was a physical cause. It is obviously true that if you’d left your house a few seconds earlier or later, the accident may not have happened. Particles collide. Let’s make that the lowest level of our stack, that is, the closest to the ground, so to speak.

Yet it is also obviously true that “physics” cannot be entirely to blame for the events of your morning. There are also conscious agents who bear responsibility. You, for example, and/or the other driver. But agency is not as simple as it might seem. It is rarely 100% your fault and 0% someone else’s. But let’s imagine that it were 100% your fault and the other person were just a victim of circumstance. Even then, it’s complicated. I mean, was it really just your fault? Your Aunt Sally had a point. Distractedness runs in the family. You can’t help the genes you inherited, not to mention the trauma of being raised in a distracted family. Is it even your grandfather’s fault? What about his father? What was he like? I’m sure you could keep tracing the sin back through the generations all the way to Adam and Eve. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

But your philosopher friend also has a point. You wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place if our culture hadn’t handed over the reins to the principalities and powers known as cars and phones, careerism and consumerism. The modern need to be everywhere at once. Surely cars and phones kill more people than wild beasts ever did, and we created them like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. We made them for ourselves, but now they tell us what to do. You didn’t choose this way of life; it chose you. Etc. There’s probably some truth in all that too.

And speaking of principalities and powers, what if it really was a demon who caused the whole thing? That subtle voice, which kept drawing you back, anxiously, to your phone screen when you should have been looking at the road. It’s possible. In fact, from a Christian perspective, it’s probable. So, if it was a demon, or Satan himself, who wanted you to get in this car accident, does that then rule out your other religious friend’s explanation that it was the will of God?

You would think so. After all, how could God and Satan possibly want the same thing?

I have written elsewhere about the wild case of David’s sinful census, but it’s worth touching on briefly here. Basically, census-taking is prohibited in the law of Moses, except in very specific circumstances, with specific stipulations. But in the story of David, there is an event (recorded both in 1 Chronicles 21 and in 2 Samuel 24) in which David sins against the Lord and takes a census anyway. The same exact event is recorded in both books. But, mysteriously, the two accounts present completely different causes for David’s hard-hearted decision. 1 Chronicles 21 says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census.” But in 2 Samuel, we’re told, “the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census…’”

Again, how could the same event be incited by both God and Satan? Either one of the accounts is gravely mistaken or…reality stacks. Satan wants to incite chaos. Sometimes God brings chaos as well. He is, after all, the maker of leviathan, the one who floods the earth, and the one who sends his people into exile, giving them over to foreign nations and foreign gods. In such cases, Satan may rejoice in the devastation of God’s people. But since God is the true Lord of spirits, Satan becomes an unknowing agent in God’s purposes. “What you meant for evil, God meant for good,” says Joseph to his brothers. But this climactic statement, spoken at the very end of the first book of the Bible, also serves as a kind of prophetic announcement of God’s whole strategy to defeat the powers of evil, which culminates in the cross of Christ, where Satan’s greatest victory becomes his greatest defeat.

What am I suggesting? Simply that God is Lord, even over those powers which seek to work against his purposes. But also, less simply, that he has made the world in such a way that reality stacks (with himself at the top).

Consider our final, stacking image of the car accident: physics, biology, ancestral curses and blessings, cultural forces, personal history, personal responsibility, and the unseen powers which seek to direct our attention and our worship for better and worse. These may all simultaneously play a role in your morning fender bender. You do not have to choose one at the expense of all others. Some will be more relevant than others, of course. But there is one factor, one agent above all others, who can give meaning to any seeming “accident,” if you have eyes to see what he is doing there. God Himself is at the top of every stack, if you can accept it.

Again, to be clear, this does not mean God is the only causal agent. Rather, he is the agent of agents. Like the composer of a grand symphony, he is the Lord of our song, even though it may often sound to us like a cacophony of unwanted noises. Indeed, it often will. Because, as Composer, our Lord does not play all the instruments, nor do the players exist as mere puppets at the end of his strings. They are real players, real agents, like him, but to a lesser degree, each playing one small part of his ascending song of creation/fall/redemption.

In the beginning, God did not create things. He created agents, that is, choosers/actors/governors. We may, of course, still speak of him as being “in control.” But, at the same time, we must admit that God is the only playwright whose characters are actually real. And I don’t just mean the people. The Bible is weird about this. There are no inanimate objects. There is no mere physics, mere biology, mere geography, mere meteorology, least of all, mere psychology. He is over all and in all. Everything and everyone is a player in his unfolding song.

In the Genesis creation account, it is not only the man and woman who are given roles, abilities, and responsibilities. The sun and moon, also, are commanded to govern (1:16). The fish and birds are commanded to be fruitful and multiply (1:22).⁴ Likewise, it is not mere “poetry” when the psalmist in Psalm 148 calls all creation to declare his praise, from the angels above to the great sea creatures in the depths to the snowstorms in between, and finally to men and women, the crowning singers in the great eternal song.

²Praise him, all his angels;
    praise him, all his heavenly hosts.
³ Praise him, sun and moon;
    praise him, all you shining stars.
⁴ Praise him, you highest heavens
    and you waters above the skies.

⁵ Let them praise the name of the Lord,
    for at his command they were created,
⁶ and he established them for ever and ever—
    he issued a decree that will never pass away.

⁷ Praise the Lord from the earth,
    you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
⁸ lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
    stormy winds that do his bidding,
⁹ you mountains and all hills,
    fruit trees and all cedars,
¹⁰ wild animals and all cattle,
    small creatures and flying birds,
¹¹ kings of the earth and all nations,
    you princes and all rulers on earth,
¹² young men and women,
    old men and children.

¹³ Let them praise the name of the Lord

Conclusion: Mixed Agency

I call this stacking principle “Mixed Agency,” and I think it can be a great help in understanding the Christian view of so-called “free will,” how it works and how it is constrained. I believe, to be frank, that we’re in desperate need of a different framework than the typical Calvinist or naive free-will approaches to agency, which many of us have inherited.

In short, God is not the only true agent. Perhaps he could have made a world in which that was the case, I do not know. But it is not this one. In Scripture, we find over and over again that he has staked very much on the agency of others. And I think this is for the sake of true relationship with his creation. That is, because he is love, and because love could not work any other way. The universe is made of relationships, of mixed agency. Water is neither one homogenous thing nor is it merely two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. Water exists as a true union of multiple parts so that the union is more real than the parts. It exists as a relationship. So do we.

But, unlike water, he made us in his image. He made us to choose, to act, to love as he does, to have some say in the relationship that makes (or unmakes) us. More specifically, he made us to choose him as he has chosen us, to love him as he has loved us. Indeed, he went even further still. He made us to be priests and governors over all other created agents—that everything in creation might praise the Lord. As the angels guide us, we will one day judge them. Yet our freedom is not a simple choice. Rather it consists in the degree to which we submit the whole stack to Christ, by whose Spirit we have learned and are learning to dance to his melody, though it may sometimes be hard to hear beneath the noise of wayward players (and our own wayward notes). Christ has saved and is saving the world, not by doing away with the stack, nor by neutralizing all agencies besides his own. Rather, he fulfills the stack top to bottom and bottom to top, like a master jazz musician, patiently resolving each wrong note with the chord that follows until the symphony of praise is complete. And, in a sense, we are those notes.

So, when you are praising God next Sunday morning and you feel his joy in your heart, which will it be: the Spirit or the kick drum? You don’t have to choose. The Spirit of God is in the kick drum, even redeeming the kick drum, if you have eyes to see Him there. Our Lord is not merely above the stack; he works through it. He is its composer.

1. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) takes quite a bit of blame for the mess of modern individualism, and perhaps rightly so, but he too was man of his time, diagnosing the modern turn as much as prescribing it. See the next footnote for evidence of this fact.

2. “To thine own self be true” is a line from Polonius’s speech to his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (circa 1599).

3. I call it Jesus’s “love-trap.”

4. Not to mention the talking serpent in the garden!