Last night we continued in our Nuances of the Faith series with discussing the title subject: faith. The key question we struggled with was: Is faith supposed to be believing something in spite of the evidence? As you can guess from the title, my short answer is no. But then we're left with the question, what is faith?
This is an edited version of the notes that I used to give the talk. I didn't repeat everything from them exactly, and there was dialogue throughout, but I hope this captures the gist of it.
“You just gotta believe!” This is a phrase I simply despise. It represents precisely the style of Christianity that intellectuals like me cringe from. But even more so, I’d like to argue today that it’s unbiblical, that no one in the Bible is taught to believe despite the evidence.
We're talking about faith, so let’s start with a definition. Turn to Hebrews 11:1 and 2 Corinthians 5:7. So faith is belief in something without tangible, physical evidence, the opposite of sight, or more generally, our senses.
I honestly can’t say it much better than CS Lewis, so we’re going to start by reading a passage from Mere Christianity (the first six paragraphs). We have a lot of examples of this type of faith. You trust your doctors, you trust your parents, you trust the people who say that though Caltech might be hard, if you get through it you’ll be rewarded. Faith in this sense is not about believing in spite of evidence, it’s believing the evidence despite what’s right in front of you, that you can see with your eyes.
Is this really how it always works, biblically though? People struggle all over the place with unbelief. Let’s take one of my favorite examples: Doubting Thomas. Turn to John 20:19-31. Jesus has just risen from the dead, and he appears to 10 of Thomas’ closest friends and companions for the last three years. Should Thomas, logically, have believed? Yes, he should have. You can’t get much better than the eyewitness testimony of 10 of your closest friends. This is why Jesus rebukes him -- it’s not that Thomas should irrationally believe, but that he should stop irrationally doubting.
I think that this is something a lot of people do these days: Require that God speak individually to them or otherwise they won’t believe. Jesus rose from the dead no matter what experiences you have had personally.
I also want to say some words about doubt in general. There are two errors we make when thinking about doubt. First, we approach it with fear. We fear the power of doubt to break down our faith in Jesus’ redeeming power. Maybe someone we know has started to doubt, and then subsequently fell away from Christianity. So then we treat doubt like this alien monster that you need to stay away from in order to hold onto your faith. You make it into bigger than it is and flee from it with shortcuts like “You just gotta believe!”
The second type of error is to embrace doubt. It’s said that the Jesuits are told to doubt everything, and even doubt that they’ve succeeded in doubting everything. Such talk makes me doubt whether they really know what doubting is. Doubts only exist to destroy their target beliefs. If they do not destroy them, they die unfulfilled. Just like you should only believe something if you have reasons, you should only doubt something if you have reasons.
If I had been sharing this a year ago, I would have stopped there. Clearly rationality and Christianity are completely compatible and we should just do whatever is rational and faith will be that we override our emotions on occasion. But, it turns out, God doesn’t always work that way. We learned last week that he can actually break into our daily existence and speak to us. Pastor James gave us some examples of his actions that quite honestly seem quite irrational. To understand this, we actually need to tweak our understanding of faith a bit. I think this coincides with Lewis’s second notion of faith, but I’m going to deviate from his explanation a bit.
James tells us that faith without works is dead. So we can see that in the Bible, the things you have faith for are rarely intellectual propositions. Thomas’ was one example -- he had to have faith that Jesus had risen from the dead. He wouldn’t have to do anything with that belief. But the rest of the time in the Bible, we don’t see people struggling with the step of believing something but with the step of acting. When the Bible speaks of faith, it almost always speaks of actions, not of disembodied intellectual truths.
I’m going to repeat an argument from Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, but I won’t make you guys read it yourself. God calls people. Let’s turn to Mark 2:14 and Matthew 4:18-22. On the surface, these seem like pretty irrational decisions. Even if they had previously been followers of John the Baptist, it takes quite a step of faith to leave everything you've known. Jesus doesn’t bother to lay out a complete plan, because he desires simple, pure obedience to the call. Their call does not include a confessional statement, or a set of rules. Moreover, nothing is said about any of them; they are not praised for their faith; it is simply in response to the call of Jesus. This is what pure discipleship looks like, following Jesus.
The first step of discipleship is to leave your former life. It places the disciple in the position where faith is possible. You cannot learn what discipleship truly is, learn to really believe Christ’s calling on your life without moving to a position where faith is necessary. Let’s read Matthew 14:25-33. Peter must experience this whole ordeal to really understand what faith is. Also notice that Peter doesn’t just jump straight in the water, as if his calling was something of his own doing. Instead, he waits for Jesus to tell him to come first.
Let’s look at a negative example: Matthew 19:16-22. The rich young ruler is asking the right question, but in the wrong way. He reveals that he wants to treat Jesus as an equal, pondering a philosophical question with him. We must be careful not to come at God like this, but to simply ask him what he would like to do with us. And notice that Jesus does in fact call him, but he requires him to move into a position, voluntary poverty, where faith is necessary. Jesus is not calling everyone to poverty, but only those for whom it can be made a means to faith.
Last year, I experienced something that I identify as my moment of calling. In April of my sophomore year, I was contacted by my frosh year small group leader, John Liu, about a missions trip English camp that summer. He gave me all of two days to decide whether I could make it; they were a bit short on TAs. I’d never been to Asia before, and I don’t speak Mandarin. I was curious, but honestly I was making most of the decision blind. When I told John “yes,” I didn’t even know that three other small group members (David and Christina Lee and Peter Ngo) were going as well. It turned out to be an amazing and actually life-changing experience, and all the product of a step of faith. I ended up writing 54 pages about the experience and, at least others tell me, I did grow significantly in a lot of ways, most prominently compassion for frosh.
Discussion questions:
- What are the things in Christianity that you find the most difficult to believe?
- Which error regarding doubt are you more prone to: approaching it with fear or embracing it?
- Pick one or more of the Old Testament examples in Hebrews 11. Was their call rational?
- Have you experienced God’s call in your life, where you've been called to move from a situation where faith was impossible to one where it was possible? What happened?
Our discussion was mostly about stories people had to share, although we did have a bit of discussion along the way about the propositions I made. For instance, Yan Choi pointed out that "steps of faith" might very well be rational if we simply include things like God's calling in our list of reasons for doing things. Then there's also the question of how much weight to give to things like that.
Next week: Pastor Jeff Liou of Lake Avenue Church and I will talk about "Unity, Not Uniformity".
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