True Confidence and Humility
By Theo Vander Velde
I rejoined the academic sphere several years ago now and it has been delightful working with such wonderfully talented and ambitious colleagues, each contributing to patient care in new ways. An environment of such achievement has heightened my reflections on the nature of confidence and humility. Many commentators point to Acts 17, and rightly so, as a master class in evangelism which Paul delivers to the Athenians. But I also see this event as a masterful combination of both humility and confidence.
In most of our worlds, certainly in academia, it seems that humility and confidence stand in opposition to one another. But do they really? And if there is a good or even perfect fusion of the two, what does that fusion look like? Where can it be found? And on what basis is it grounded?
The Athenians seem to possess a measure of humility. Their temple to an unknown god would suggest that they were aware of the limitations of their knowledge. They certainly had the teachings of the great philosophers. In Plato’s The Apology, Socrates teaches that true wisdom is found in realizing how little one really knows. We call that epistemic humility. Socrates exercises such humility. He comes to be considered wise because he does not believe himself to be wise.
That sort of humility, however, often leads to its own sense of pride. I suspect that by the time Paul rolls into Athens, many had taken the legacy of Socrates and made it a point of high distinction. It had become pseudo-humility, and epistemic humility based in pride. We can see this in the description of all the Athenians who did nothing all day but tell and hear about new things.
Paul comes with a different sort of humility and a different kind of confidence. His humility emerges in the way he meets Athenians at their level; in fact, it emerges even beforehand in his venturing to Greece at all. Paul subjugated his own desires for the gospel throughout his life. Such humility informs his later letter to the Corinthians: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7 NRSV). This gift of the gospel humbles us before our own pride and compels us forward and outward in confidence. It is with this confidence that Paul, having met the Greeks in humility, upends their own beliefs with the promise of fulfillment in Christ.
In his book The Whole Christ, Sinclair Ferguson takes on the time-old tension between legalism and no-rules antinomianism and shows that the moderation of one is not more of the other. Rather, the resolution of both can be found in Christ. Christianity is often considered a paradoxical religion, paradoxically resolved in the reality of a Jesus Christ, a human being who is the Son of God. And that insight and revelation applies as much to the perceived tension between confidence and humility. When grounded in Christ, a true confident humility becomes possible in our lives.
At the same time, it can be difficult to see how this plays out in our work today. The Academy, especially medicine, is full of distortions. The pressures to perform are immense and require commensurate confidence. Throughout the academic career arc, we pursue results, then recognition and advancement, and ultimately legacy. Humility, while an admirable quality, can be problematic. If it holds us back from achievement—or even just the need to make our achievement known—it can lead to our being passed over, unrecognized. So how is a Christ-centered confident humility manifested?
I’d like to suggest that key points of focus can keep us on track. One is presumedly why we all went into medicine in the first place: the patient. Caring for complex patients really does engender humility. Even more so for us who are called to see Christ in each of them, even the man with swastika tattoos who cursed at me for an hour straight. We must meet them at their level, as Paul did the prideful Athenians, and realize that there is so much more to each than our little area of expertise.
A second point of focus comes from our teaching. We focus on patients and we focus on students. As we teach the next generation, consider Augustine’s exhortation in De Doctrina Christiana that humility is a basic disposition of the expositor. “Both learner and teacher need to be humble, because they learn and teach what ultimately comes from God.” Embrace the patient, cherish the knowledge you have been gifted with, and look after those following your path. When they see your rejection of the relentless self-advancement paradigm, it will make an impression. It can create a way forward for them that differs from the general push.
Such lessons of humility and confidence might apply to any facet of our life: work, family, friendships, church. It remains true in every sphere. The confidence and humility we find in Acts 17 comes rooted, ultimately, in the reality of Christ. My prayer for each of us is that we rest in Christ and find in Him the source of our own confident humility. If this is what we express, it will be to His glory. Others will see this incongruence with worldly false confidence and be intrigued like the Athenians. Some may follow. Some may ask us more. But whatever the result, it will come if we root both our confidence and our humility in Christ.