Our topic is faith. For some, faith is a kind of test. Thinking about faith as a test goes something like this: the church proposes certain teachings that are difficult to believe or understand, and the whole point of faith is that we accept these teachings as a way of showing our loyalty. This kind of faith is what authors like Dan Brown and Philip Pullman find easy fodder for novels and diatribes, and writings which purport to be a novel or a diatribe but which are often neither. The religious beliefs which we are asked to take on faith come from secretly corrupt authorities who use faith as a smokescreen to disable independent thinking. In the 21st century, this just won’t do, so Brown and Pullman write about faith like it’s a kind of suspended childishness. If only we would grow up.
Another way of thinking about faith is that of wishful thinking. Thinking of faith in this way goes like this: the church proposes certain teachings that are difficult to believe or understand, and the whole point of faith is to embrace the absurd, otherworldly character of this teaching and rely on this as a kind of reason why the teachings are to be followed. Having faith, in this instance, is like a test, but is more closely related to a kind of protest that requires courage. Writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett find this approach to faith very lucrative. As unofficial representatives of the fashionable locution, the “New Atheists” (what’s wrong with the “old” atheists like Bertrand Russell?), Dawkins and Dennett seek to dismantle faith as courage by pointing out that faith, in this sense, is based on nothing solid at all. It is wishful thinking that has led to a great many atrocities. One does not need courage to accept the teaching of the church, one needs therapy and, like faith as a test, a great deal of growing up. What is seen and studied in the lab is what’s really real; everything else is a meme gone mad.
Faith as a test and faith as wishful thinking are both ways at looking at the subject. Neither are particular good ways of speaking of faith, but sometimes something is better than nothing. This morning, I wish to speak of faith as the author of the book of Hebrews talks about faith. This approach is very different to what I’ve recalled thus far, because according to Hebrews, faith is about trusting and trying to understand. It has to be with what we do not yet see; yet which draws us to seek after what is over the horizon. Faith is about not being content to understand the things that are obvious, the things we can already see. It is a journey of exploration. I am aware that this sounds remarkably like faith as wishful thinking. The writer of Hebrews counters this charge through recalling the story of Abraham.
Abraham’s is not a tale of accepting the absurd or getting caught up in a series of trials; it is a tale of discovery: a discovery of who it is that summoned him, and a discovery of the promises that God gives. The first thing we hear of Abraham is not that he accepted a series of propositions about God and then journeyed on with all these propositions tucked securely away just in case he ran into a skeptic along the way. Instead, he made a journey into the unknown based on a promise. The promise of a people and a land would take countless generations to receive a noticeable shape and form, but Abraham believed, he had confidence, that his journey would reveal the One who sought to secure the joy and fulfillment of a chosen nation. Abrahams’ is a story about families, arguments, property and even a miracle. In other words, it is a human story; but a human story interpreted to reveal God’s plans. This is why I suggest faith is a kind of trusting and understanding, for it involves the faculty of reason and the benefit of memory to take the history before us and see the workings of God.
It is important to pause here for a moment in order to say something about the relationship of faith and reason. Notably, faith is not additional reason nor is faith in opposition to reason. It is not as though Abraham got so far with his reason and then had to wait until faith kicked in and carried him that extra bit to the end of his journey. As I mentioned earlier, faith is a seeking of understanding, a yearning for what’s over the horizon. We can do a great deal of thinking and planning using all our human faculties. When we starting speaking of faith, what we saying is that the life that awaits over the horizon, the understanding that we hope for, yearn for, can only come through a gift from God, because God is the source of the divine life of joy and fulfillment that complete us as humans. We yearn for many things, some very good things, but as St. Augustine opined, our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. Human reason means that we can speak, pray and sing of what we desire; faith means that we can see in the darkness before us the promise of human wellbeing in the light of God.
‘It is not reason that is against us’ said Cardinal Newman more than a century ago, ‘but imagination.’ “The ways in which we ‘see’ the world, theologian Nicholas Lash has written, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what human beings are, and what they’re for, and how they are related to each other and the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live and work and play; by how we handle — through drama, art and song — the things that give us pain and bring us joy.” What God gives us in giving us faith is imagination capable of trusting, to have confidence in, the God who has made everything; a God who has no selfish purposes (for what would could the source of everything want?); a God who has made visible through human history his goodness in the story of Abraham and the chosen people of Israel, and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. To begin to understand how this changes everything - how it is a kind of revolution to the selfish and violent ways of our world - is to grasp the significance of faith.
One last thought on the matter. I have said nothing of faith as the acceptance of certain beliefs that we find, say, in the Creed. What are we to think about the Trinity, the virgin birth and the life to come? Learning requires good teaching as trusting requires the security of loving people. We get pretty far in matters of belief when the church strives to be a good teacher and a loving community. But something else is required of us in order not to fall into the critique of skeptics who claim religious people are in a perpetual state of arrested development. There lies before us the realm of imagination that shapes the way we see the world. As long as we see, as the early Christians saw, a decisive moment of divine revelation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus - God saying who he is - and as long as there are those who journey confidently under the promises of God, then our own journey can be defined by the choice to trust the voice of God as revealed in scripture, in the creed and ultimately, in the breaking of bread. Perhaps this sounds like wishful thinking, but I would want to add it is a variety of wishful thinking that shuns not debate or argument, but rather understands that we have faith within reason and we can therefore give an account of what we believe to those who don’t.
Faith, Fr. Herbert McCabe, OP, once said, “is exploring into what people could never achieve by themselves. Faith is the mysterious need in us to get to where we could surely never go. Faith, in fact, is about what we call God." We begin in faith with trusting the promises of God, most importantly, the promise that we are loved and that there is nothing God will not do or face to secure our joy and friendship. What we discover along the way is that the first moments of faith reveal a glimpse of faith’s end: the vision of God, the life of beatitude, the culmination of human history. Jesus called this the kingdom. We were made for this kingdom, and it is God’s good pleasure to make it our home.
This post reminds me of the opportunity for the Church to be a place for folks to rediscover the gift of a holy imagination. I appreciate being reminded about Abraham. Whatever else may be said of the story of this Patriarch, more is going on in his journey with God than simply naive passivity or rigid, unreflective obedience. He "believed God" and it was "reckoned to him as righteousness", says the Apostle Paul. But that believing (faith) was lived out in the crucible of experiences -- the times Abraham acted consistently with the call he had received and the other times when he woefully failed.
ReplyDeletePerhaps this is what the "new atheists" and the "old fideists" forget in their arguments about "faith" -- that it's not a set of propositions intellectually appropriated. Rather, it's a life lived in the context of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and lived toward the horizon of hopefulness. But then, come to think of it, robust hopefulness (of the Abrahamic sort) is irrelevant for the atheists and unnecessary for the fideists. Perhaps they have more in common with each other than either will allow!
Augustine puts it this way, "God is to the soul what the sun is to the eye. God in nor only the truth in, and through whom all truths are true. He is not only the wisdom in, by and through whom all humans are made wise. He is also the light in, by and through whom all intelligible things are illumined." (Soliloquies). The New Atheists and the old fidiests seem to operate out of the assumption that they are free to dictate the conditions of their (non)belief. What Augustine (and Aquinas for that matter) remind us is how the intelligibility of the world is itself a gift from God. The bold assertions of those committed to "imagining" the world as they please only heightens their own confusion about what world they are referring to: the world in front of them, or some fictional world on which they can project their intellectual projects upon.
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