I Can Argue Every Side

Somebody asked you in the spring what you actually thought, and you gave them a survey.

Not evasively. You set out the three main positions, fairly, and you noted where each one is strongest and where each has a difficulty it has never satisfactorily answered. It was a good answer and the person said so.

And on the way home you realized you had not been able to say what you thought, and that you were not sure you had a view, and that you had not had one for some time.

You can steelman anything. Give you a position you find personally unattractive and you will state it better than most of the people who hold it, and you will do it without sneering, which is rarer than it should be.

That skill was hard won. It took years and it is a genuine virtue, and the alternative, which is arguing with the worst version of everybody, is a plague.

But it has done something.

Somewhere in the last few years, standing above every position stopped being a discipline you adopt for the purposes of an argument and became where you live. You are permanently in the chair of the fair-minded observer, and observers do not have views, and you cannot get out of the chair.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you what to believe about anything. That would be absurd and you would dismantle it before I finished.

I am not going to tell you the fairness was a mistake. It is one of the better things about you and there are people who trust you with hard questions precisely because you will not caricature anybody.

And I am not going to prescribe conviction as a virtue in itself. Certainty is not a fruit of the Spirit and there are a great many confident people who are confidently wrong, and you have watched them. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 25:14, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

What I am going to name is the chair, and the fact that you cannot get out of it, and that being unable to get out of a chair is different from choosing to sit in it.

You are not defective for finding this hard. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness has never depended on anybody's ability to state a position, and the Holy Spirit is in that study with a man who came home from a conversation in the spring and has not settled since.

The verse is about something confided

There is a line in Psalm 25 with a very particular word in it.

The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.Psalm 25:14

The secret. The word underneath it carries the sense of a close circle, a confidence, the sort of thing that gets said between people who trust each other rather than announced to a room.

That is a different category from a conclusion.

Everything you know, you know by having weighed it. You surveyed the positions, tested them, and arrived at an assessment, and where the evidence is balanced you hold no view, which is exactly what an honest weigher should do.

This verse is describing knowledge that arrives by being told something. Not argued into you; confided. And the condition attached is not intelligence or fairness, it is them that fear him, which is a posture rather than a faculty.

You have been trying to reach conviction by the only route you know, which is adjudication, and adjudication cannot produce it, because a survey of three positions never generates a fourth thing that is yours.

You are not shut out of knowing anything for yourself. Scripture says the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant, Psalm 25:14, and the showing is described as confided rather than concluded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells somebody something rather than helping them weigh it.

What the chair has cost

Say the cost plainly, because you have been counting only the benefits. Scripture already said it in Psalm 25:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

You cannot be wrong. That sounds like an achievement and it is the problem. A person with no stated position never has to revise one, never has to be corrected in public, and never has to find out that they were mistaken in front of somebody who liked them.

That is the hidden comfort in the chair, and it is worth admitting because it explains why getting out is harder than it should be for a man of your ability.

And there is a second cost, which is other people. Somebody comes to you with something they are struggling with and they get a survey, and a survey is not what a struggling person needs. They need to know what somebody they trust actually thinks, and you have not been able to give that to anybody in about three years.

You are not obliged to be permanently unassailable. Scripture says the fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe, Proverbs 29:25, and being unable to be caught out is one of the more sophisticated forms that snare takes, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who put you in a chair where nothing can go wrong.

One sentence with no qualification

Here is the practical thing and it will be genuinely difficult.

Write down one thing you actually believe. One sentence. No qualification, no although, no acknowledgement of the strongest counter-argument.

You will want to add a clause. Every instinct you have will produce one within about four seconds, and the clause will be true and it will be fair and it will dissolve the sentence. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 25:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Do not add it.

Start with something you are not going to be examined on: something about God rather than about a contested question. God is good to me. He has not left. Whatever is actually there. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 25:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

Then say it out loud, once, and do not immediately survey it.

That is not intellectual regression. It is a man practicing the thing he can no longer do, in a safe place, with something that does not need adjudicating.

You are not required to hold everything in suspension. Scripture says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, Romans 14:5, and fully persuaded is described as a legitimate resting place rather than as a failure of rigour, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to be less honest, only to be somewhere.