Faith 2009

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrew 11:1

Nicholas Wade, a New York Times reporter, has recently published a book entitled
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures.  Wade uses evidence from biology, archaeology and anthropology to defend the provocative thesis that belief in a higher power has helped humanity advance for millennia.

Humans may be innately selfish, he argues, but early hunter-gatherers needed to subordinate self-interest to the will of the group in order to survive.  Religious behavior, with ritual chants and dances, fostered kinship and inspired tribes to battle outside threats. As language developed, people ascribed their good fortune to the supernatural, and efforts to please a deity kept order in civil society. 

This Darwinian perspective reminds us that faith is not only a divine gift but also a human necessity.  Tolstoy once defined faith is that by which a person does not commit suicide. 

But Christian faith, of course, is much more than this, for Christian faith rests on Christ.  Paul tells this Galatians, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ (3:26).” 

Paul’s own faith was based on the inner Christ whom he experienced on the Damascus road.  It was this inner reality which prompted him to engage in a world-wide mission, to convert the Gentile world. 

This same inner reality is the basis for the faith of religious mystics who, like Paul, have no need for historical proofs or written assurances.  (Paul himself rarely refers to the earthly Jesus.) 

For those of us who are not mystics it is the story of Jesus of Nazareth, as preserved in the four gospels, which grounds our faith.  God’s vindication of his Servant Jesus refutes an interpretation of the crucifixion as the execution of a condemned criminal or the fulfillment of the curse in Deuteronomy  (21:23).  Nor was the crucifixion simply the bad luck of a religious zealot who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rather, for Christians the cross is the awesome sign of God’s paradoxical love for the human race in all its striving and suffering.  Both of these Christs (the inner Christ of the mystic and Christ vindicated on the cross) are “things not seen.”  That is why faith is always subject to the ridicule of those for whom “seeing is believing,” and that is why literalism and fanaticism are the enemies of every religious faith. 

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November 22, 2009