Table of Contents | 8. What is faith?
One of the most destructive religious teachings is rooted in a particular notion of faith or belief. Faith, to some, means giving intellectual assent to the standard doctrines of one's religious tradition. History is crammed full of the excesses of this view. Even in those communions where faith, historically, has been perceived relationally, there is a substantial clamor for "believing the Bible" rather than relating to a person. According to Robert W. Funk in A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision, when faith is more narrowly defined, it is regarded as "a supernatural virtue that enables one to believe that God has revealed the divine will through Christ and the church." This is an utter distortion because "faith, understood as trust, involves seeing the world and other people for what they are when viewed through God's eyes." Thus, it is an avenue to the deepest dimensions of reality and to God. Faith, as intellectual assent, becomes legalism, fundamentalism and judgmental. Faith must be reinterpreted to mean trust. Funk writes, "The contrast between endorsing traditional religious doctrines and trusting that the world is so constructed as to provide for the basic needs of birds and lilies becomes evident when we observe the consequences of that trust." Even in congregations that stress relational religion, the view that dominates is that one begins the Christian life by believing in Jesus as your savior or by having faith. But it is propositional assent or creedal commitment, not relational religion, for the most part. Intellectual assent to the standard doctrines of one's religious tradition is important but not definitive. Faith is to be understood as an avenue to religious experience. It is a way to the deepest dimensions of reality and to God. Faith is our perceiving mechanism that corresponds to the God dimension of reality and is the means for acquiring religious experience. What the eye is to color and what the nose is to odor and what the ear is to sound, faith is to God and to religious experience. It is our way of interacting with the ultimate depth of reality. The difference between knowing and trusting isn't that there is external evidence for one and only internal desire for the other. Rightly understood, faith is response to that which is beyond self and the only adequate basis for "faith conclusions" is the direct reality of God. A provocative and helpful discussion of faith is that of Marcus J. Borg in his The Heart of Christianity. It is called "the way of the heart." He claims that "faith is at the heart of Christianity" and has four primary meanings that he identifies with Latin terms to demonstrate their antiquity. Faith as assensus is described as giving one's mental assent to a proposition. I give assent to that statement. However, its original intent was changed in the aftermath of the Reformation and the Enlightenment when truth became identified with factuality. Faith was interpreted to mean "right belief" or "correct belief." But, Borg asserts, "Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power." The second meaning is faith as fiducia and is "radical trust in God." Three, faith as fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God and means "loving God and loving your neighbor and being faithful, above all, to these two great relationships." I am bound in a relationship of fidelity to my spouse. His fourth primary meaning is of faith as visio. He interprets this perception of faith as "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing what is" and as "seeing reality as gracious." He concludes that faith, understood from the perspective of these primary meanings, "is a matter of the heart and not primarilly the head." It means "trusting in the buoyancy of God" and is "about beloving God and all that God beloves." It is a profoundly relational characteristic, not cerebral activity. In concluding his discussion Borg seeks to deemonstrate how these four primary meanings are subsumed under the original meaning of "believing." He writes, "In the modern period, we have suffered an extraordinary reduction in the meaning of 'believing.' We have reduced it and turned it into 'propositional believing' -- believing a particular set of statements or claims to be true. But, originally, believing included all of the dimensions of faith that I have described. The pre-modern meanings of 'faith' generate a relational understanding of the Christian life." Faith, then, is our love for God and the way of the heart. What Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer sums it up for me. "The heart of Bonhoeffer's legacy to us is not to be found in his words, his books, but in the way he spent his time on this earth, in his decision to live as if the Lord were a neighbor and friend, a constant source of courage and inspiration, a presence amid travail and joy alike, a reminder of love's obligations and affirmations and also of death's decisive meaning....The principles he avowed...gain their authority from the manner in which he conducted his life." That's faith understood as "the way of the heart!" What's your response? BobSueSand@aol.com |