A
PLAIN GUIDE TO ...
Faith
(Continued)
[3] One consequence of equating faith with belief is to deny
that some important religious truths are accessible to the
human intellect. This has profound consequences.
If a person with otherwise strong and steady belief in
traditional doctrines is beset by uncertainty, it's usual to speak of the
person's faith being tested. That is, the opposite of faith is
thought to be doubt. The less the doubt, the stronger the faith; the
stronger the faith then (obviously) the less the doubt - because belief
and faith are equated.
To grasp how reason tends to be ultimately devalued by this position requires some
understanding of reason's place in pre-modern Christianity.
To state the matter with extreme brevity, the ordinary person's way of
thinking about truth today differs radically from all of previous
Christian history. Never before have humans thought about truth as we now
do.
We look to consensus about evidence when we seek truth. Do you want to know
"the truth" about how humans think? Ask what most experts have
concluded about how the
brain works. Do you want to know "the truth" about good poetry?
Ask what the criteria are and what most critics say about a poem in the
light of those criteria. Do you want to know "the truth" about
the solar system? Find out what the consensus is amongst astronomers. Do
you want to know if Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead? Ask what
reputable Bible
scholars have to say.
These are our authorities for truth. But there is an important caveat.
All of these authorities must, if called upon, demonstrate that their
conclusions have been derived through reason from the available data.
That is, their conclusions and therefore any authority they have are
always, without exception, over-ridden by anyone who can show that the
data upon which their conclusions are based is incorrect in some
way. It is also invalidated by anyone who can show that their logic (in
which I include mathematics) is incorrect. Their authority is
substantially destroyed if others in their discipline can show that the
chain of reasoning by which they reached their conclusions is faulty.
Thus we have faith in the authority of others with a tacit understanding that their
conclusions have been subjected to the most rigorous tests by their peers,
preferably those who are acknowledged as expert in a particular field.
This summary may seem banal. But now compare it with how most people thought about the truth before our times -
that is before the advent of analytical and scientific thought.
They also looked to authority for the truth. Do you want to know
"the truth" about how we think? Search the great masters of
philosophy in the past for answers. Do you want to know the rules of good poetry?
Consult Aristotle's Poetics and other past masters for the right answers. Do
you want to know about the heavens? Consult what the ancients have written
down. They know the place of this earth
in the created universe better than anyone else.
Thus you are to be commended if you search the New Testament for right
teachings.
Exercise your reason on its material by all means. But you know deep inside, without even
thinking about it, as an unquestioned given, that the Pope or your bishop
has the greater truth because they are in authority.
Your reason is therefore unquestionably subordinate to that authority. You regard something
as true, not because you have thought it through for yourself (though
that counts for something), but because it comes from a greater and higher authority. Not only don't you
have the right to question such authority, but it probably wouldn't
occur to you to do so. It goes without saying, therefore, that
to doubt something is to doubt authority itself. And, as all know -
because the authorities say so - to doubt authority is to sin.
That either the modern or pre-modern is right or wrong isn't the
point. They are simply different from each other. To say that we
are right and pre-moderns are wrong is rather like saying giraffes are
right because they don't eat meat, and lions are wrong because they
do.
The upshot is that reason has in our age supplanted authority as the primary means to
truth.
It is now widely understood that certain doctrines of
Christianity are beyond reason. Where that is acknowledged, large
numbers of "believers" proclaim that faith grasps
those truths which are clearly beyond reason's reach. That is, faith is
redefined as that which comes into
play when a proposition is not, or cannot be, supported by reason.
To illustrate: a teaching common to almost all parties of
Christianity is that there is life after death. The human personality,
it is commonly taught, is such that it can survive the complete dissolution of
the physical body. This belief appears incontestable by the usual means
we today arrive at truth - because it is of such a nature that no evidence can be
gathered about it. The only experts who might be able to test the
teaching and go on to reach authoritative consensus about it are
dead.
I am nearly certain that nine out of ten Christians would counsel me
to "have faith" about the possibility of living after I die.
That is, my faith swings into operation precisely because the
issue is something I cannot think through, cannot gather evidence about,
and about which no experts can be consulted.
To illustrate further: I'm almost certain that very few of the best
critical scholars of the New Testament would today claim unequivocally
that the
resurrection from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth is good history. The four Gospels
contain some evidence. But it all comes from sources which [a] have a
vested interest in the matter; [b] who did not think in modern
historical terms at all, and [c] which are not confirmed by evidence
external to the Bible.
So although the Resurrection may have happened, there isn't enough
good evidence to create even a tiny minority consensus about its
historicity amongst those acknowledged even by
Christians as historians of repute. Those who nevertheless
"believe" in the Resurrection as an historical event are
thought to have greater faith than those who don't.
A final
brief illustration may suffice. Father J P Meier is the Roman Catholic author of a
three-volume series entitled A Marginal Jew. As such, it should
be noted, he is subject to the discipline of the Church, particularly
regarding what he publishes. He has conducted
over many years an exhaustive
survey of all the important output about the historicity of the Gospels since
work on the subject began some 250 years ago.
What is his response to the Resurrection as good history? He asserts [9]
that
the resurrection is a type of truth which can be understood only by
"faith." He says it "... stands outside of the sort of questing by way of historical,
critical research that is done for the life of the historical Jesus,
because of the nature of the Resurrection ... The resurrection of Jesus is
certainly supremely real. However, not everything that is real either
exists in time and space or is empirically verifiable by historical means
... [it] is not essential for simple, authentic Christian
faith."
Meier
essentially follows the guidance of Thomas Aquinas who wrote that,
"... the object of knowledge is something seen, whereas the object
of faith is the unseen." In other words, knowledge excludes faith.
Faith, says Aquinas, is belief in revealed truths, authoritatively
presented by the creeds. To have faith, then, is to believe the
propositions summarised in the Church's creeds. The Christian faith is
for him consistent with human reason, but also beyond it.
A tragic
consequence when faith is split off from reason in this way, is a loss
of integration. To follow Meier's route is to become, as it were, two people. The one discards
reason in order to believe what reason cannot uphold. The second
continues to arbitrate truth by reason in the way described above. The two parts
living in one person cannot meet, cannot dialogue one with the other.
They live together in a sort of psychological Apartheid. The one half trumpets truths
based on authority, as though it lived in Medieval times. The other adopts the integrated knowledge-system of our age. It talks science with
scientists, philosophy with philosophers and history with historians.
But it cannot ultimately talk theology with theologians unless it abandons
reason. The outcome is a personality tragically split in order to have
"faith".
In summary, belief is that which
seeks to extinguish doubt when
revealed
doctrine is not supported by reason.
We are, according to current opinion, at our best as religious people when we
"believe" what is beyond reason. This position is invulnerable
to debate. It is impossible to either
attack or even to investigate faith claims which are placed beyond
reason as a matter of principle.
I venture to
suggest that faith as trust both preserves reason and also cultivates
hope.
To use an
example already mentioned - life after death. Many people find it hard
to envisage that they and their loved ones will come to a full-stop when they die. This is only natural.
I doubt if any experts, religious or not, would deny that hope in something after death
is as old as civilisation and probably older.
It's hardly surprising that we are urged to believe in life after
death. Even though we have no evidence to support that belief, there may
be some comfort in supposing that it's possible. This sort of belief is
natural in the face of a void - but if that's "faith" then I
for one have none.
I may not be
able to sustain an unreasoned belief in life after death. But I can trust in a God who loves us to the end, however bitter and painful
that end might be (to use a metaphor derived from human suffering). I can hope in
some eventual outcome which will (to use a metaphor from warfare) defeat
death.
To trust in
this way may be foolish. But I think it is much more foolish to accept truth only on the say-so of an authority which claims direct
access to God - be the authority the Bible or the Pope or some other
so-called protector of "The Faith.". To abandon reason is to abandon our humanity.
The opposite of
faith is not doubt, but distrust.
To summarise the argument so far:
A translation error has helped the growth of faith as belief. More
accurate is to regard faith as trust,
not as belief in this or that proposition. Trust is an identifiable
set of behaviours. To have faith in Christian tradition is not to "believe six
impossible things before breakfast" but to respect pioneers of Christian tradition while recognising that we have moved
away from their worldview. Faith as
belief discards reason to preserve doctrine.
Faith as trust is nurtured by reason and issues in hope.
Faith as trust may include belief that certain propositions are true.
But it seems to me that there is a great difference between abstractions
("God is three-in-one") and statements of experience ("God
loves me").
Abstractions may or may not stand the test of reason. I may end up
thinking that Trinitarian theology means little to me. It may seem just a
clever form of words. That God can't be defined but only described may, on
the other hand, be easier to sustain rationally. Right belief is assessed
by reason.
In contrast, we trust or don't trust each other on the basis of
behaviours. We observe others and judge whether what they do indicates
that we can trust them. Are they open and straight about the facts which
matter? Are they accepting of human difference and frailty? Are they
consistent and reliable? We automatically ask such questions before we trust anyone.
To put trust (faith) in a larger context: The very substance of modern
knowledge depends upon trust. Van Austin Harvey, reviewing the Protestant
revolution, writes that
The point is that ... the virtues of autonomy and intellectual
responsibility are related in an intimate fashion to faith, where faith
is understood not as belief in doctrine but as trust in being itself ...
Radical faith and enlightenment [can be viewed] as correlates, and the
two elements of the morality of knowledge, autonomy and assessment, are
but secularized versions of the ethic of faith [11]
In previous eras, the world was thought of as essentially eternal. That
is, it was underpinned and sustained by static characteristics. In that
world, humans beings conformed to God's will insofar as they also
conformed to the unchangeable and eternal structures of the Creation. To
have faith, therefore, was to trust in authorities who could elucidate
these eternal structures, who could open out the foundational truths
masked by human evil and error. The opposite of faith in the eternal order
is to doubt its integrity.
The modern era recognises that the universe is in constant change. Not
only that, but so are human perceptions. We can never be certain that what
we perceive is what is "really there". The best we can do is
explore shifting truths. Not even so-called scientific "facts"
are either absolute or eternal. Rather, they are always open to revision
and replacement by new perceptions and observations. This requires not
belief but scepticism, not obedience but autonomous reason. We trust not
in God's immutable law, but in life itself.
Indeed, in the modern world, trust (faith) in reason is a precondition
of knowledge. In the ancient world, acceptance of knowledge was a
precondition of trust (faith).
But can we observe the behaviour of God in the same way as we can
observe the world and trust in what reason reveals, especially when it is
by nature always provisional? In what sense
can I say that I observe God's behaviour and therefore conclude that God
can be trusted, that God is a worthy object of my "faith as
trust"?
Never having experienced the supernatural (as some others claim they
have) I must suppose that my life experience is the only evidence I have of God's
trustworthiness. I can talk relatively easily about "believing in God". It's much
harder to point out events which demonstrate God's trustworthiness.
Belief is relatively easy. A faith prepared to take risks on the basis of
reasoned trust alone is, to say the least, somewhat more testing. It's not
surprising that so many prefer to trust the certainties of revelation
rather than the uncertainties of reason.
Because a "God" divorced from my experience is an
abstraction, it seems to me to be reasonable to claim that
"life" (as in "life experience") can be trusted. But
can I tell a starving person, for example, that life is good? (Maybe
that's why some Christians fall back on proclaiming that "God"
is good.) How does anyone know what are the indications of God's
trustworthiness? What exactly should I have faith in?
Anyone who's tried to talk to a person in deep depression will know how
hard it is to convey a sense of life's goodness. For every positive, the
depressive will find a counterbalancing negative. How hard it is to
convince a disillusioned person who has suffered many reverses in life
that what has happened is good.
Such examples could be multiplied over and over again. In the end faith
as trust seems to come down to individual choice, to a personal interpretation of
one's experience, to a way of perceiving the world.
Is God (life) good? That is, what do I think is the balance between the
positive and negative experiences I undergo? If the balance comes down on
the positive side, perhaps the choice is easy. If it comes down on the
negative side, is God to be trusted? Is my faith then of no account? Have
I trusted in vain? Should I cease to trust? Or should I re-evaluate what's
positive and what's negative?
The questions pile up, one upon the other. I suspect that when there
are more questions than immediate answers, the idea of faith as something
founded on rationality begins to break down. There are, apparently, no
final answers. All responses tend to be not only personal, but also
temporary.
Faith as trust is by its very nature provisional. Faith's opposite in this context
is not doubt, but certainty.
A Christian may be thought of as one who trusts in Jesus of Nazareth.
Just as interpersonal trust is based on behaviours rather than
abstract theory, so also is trust in Jesus based on a real person who once
lived just as we do. This person is commonly known as the Jesus of
history. He is nevertheless always a construct, the product of how each of
us interprets historical details. That is, all you or I can ever have is
"a" Jesus of history. There is no "the" Jesus of
history.
Faith in Jesus inevitably extends beyond the interpreted facts of
history into living out what Jesus means to me. All history is limited. It
is never a final statement of truth.
So, for example, I may know much in theory about how organisations work
- how they start, grow, mature and die. And I may have many strong
convictions about the highly complex processes governing organisations at
large. But until I express those convictions in actually running, or
participating in, an organisation, I should not talk about having "faith" in the truth of my convictions.
Similarly, the Western theologian Paul Tillich thought that faith does
not ultimately depend upon what we know of historical events (that is,
upon a Jesus of history). Rather, living a life of faith as trust based on history
requires great risk-taking and therefore considerable courage. In this
sense, faith is not faith until it is lived. We can't truly be said to
trust Jesus until we live out lives trustfully based upon him.
Faith in God is, in a sense, also trust expanded to relate to the
ultimates of life while being all the while solidly anchored to the daily
events of our lives. Those daily concerns are faith in action, yet there
is also faith which looks broader and higher to the larger issues which we
can all either face up to or avoid. Perhaps everyone is called to ask
questions and try to answer them in his or her own way. Is the world we
live governed by chance or by choice - or both? Are we to seek for the
right and avoid the wrong - and how do we define either? Is life a quick
and meaningless shuffle along the mortal coil, or is each one of us
uniquely involved in a venture which is profoundly rooted in a meaning
bigger than ourselves?
To sum up finally: Faith is an attitude towards life which issues in trusting acts of
both will and intellect. It goes far beyond belief into active
commitment. If belief seeks security, then faith accepts risk. Faith
issues from hope for fullness of life while being rooted in acceptance
of the creation as it is. As reason
limits, so faith transcends. Faith is never final or certain, but always
asking and seeking.
________________________________________________
[9] See an interview recorded by The Messenger at
http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Dec1997/feature3.asp
It appears that this argument has been fully elaborated by Heinz Zahrnt
in The Historical Jesus, Harper & Row, 1963
[10] Essay Concerning Human Understanding
[11] Op. Cit.
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