Faith apart from God is faith that, however strong and passionate it may be, is ultimately going nowhere. It will never see everything because it has decided that "everything" is already there. It has no room left for questions, for it thinks that there are no more answers to be found.
We can't place limits on what we see. As finite being, we have no business doing so. We must admit that there may be more than meets the ear and eye, and perhaps the mind, too. We must acknowledge that, as both Socrates and Confucius observed, when we think we know everything, we really know nothing, for we are saying that we know everything that we can possibly know.
And this we cannot possibly do: there is always more to know.
Meaningful faith must therefore believe in something more. It must assert the fact of a beyondedness, must invoke the idea of God. It must agree with the reality of the living transcendent. It has to. Otherwise, it is a faith that is constantly devolving back to itself. It’s going nowhere.
In contrast, our call to faith is that of Abraham: to believe in and trust God implicitly, to believe that he is always there, and to be continually confident that he is entirely trustworthy and deserving of our affection. It is to believe that God is the ultimate “more.”
Did he not send his only son to redeem and forgive us?
Faith is the essential grounding of our experience. Everything we do revolves upon it, and everything we have discussed in this book finds its beginning in it. We base our perceptions of holiness on how we see, as we do the way we think about redemption. Humility is beholden to how we see, as are love and resurrection. How we see frames our world, and how we perceive holiness, humility, love, redemption, and resurrection flows out of our picture of the world. Faith is the beginning and end of spirituality and all that comprises it. It's the color of our desire, the painting of our perceptions and longings. Faith aligns wish and truth. It is central to how we grow, intrinsic to how we live.
Faith eschews knowledge for trust, and rejects control to embrace dependency. The openendedness of faith is its challenge and its strength. And this challenge is great. Although we find freedom in letting go, we often must steel ourselves at the prospect of giving up direction and security. Similarly, while we may gain comfort from being able to trust, we do not consistently enjoy not always knowing or being able to dictate what will happen next. Yet we must; we must give up what we think we can do for what we believe someone else can do better.
Faith as it should be, that is, faith in a God who is living and active in the world, is faith born in relationship, a relationship with the creator of the universe. It is a faith that grows in a way that is consistent with reality, a faith that recognizes the caprice of the finite and the loving necessity of the infinite. It is a faith in which we grow into a fuller knowledge of who we are.
Faith in God is an experience in which we participate not knowing, in this life, how it will turn out. We cannot always see the end. It's a walk into the darkness, yes, but one in which we know light, a greater light of purpose, is always present. Although we cannot see, we believe that God can. We choose to accept that God knows best, regardless of how things look or feel, either now or later, and move forward, confident and secure in his loving intentions and plans.
In the end, we have two choices. Either we spend our days striving for security, madly chasing every physical and financial dream of unity and happiness evermore, desperately trying to carve out a piece of paradise on earth, or we bravely step out and choose to recognize that we will never find these things, permanently, and instead give ourselves up to the oddly paradoxical insecurity of God. It is insecurity because we don’t know all that will happen next (but, God or not, we wouldn’t anyway; after all, we are pitifully finite); yet it is also security, a security that amidst insecurity we experience a security greater still. In letting go of supercilious hopes of brief and worldly security, we in fact embrace a security far more secure, a security not of the moment, but of eternity.
As we still walk in temporality, however, such security seems as if it’s not. But this is only the insecurity of our finitude perceptions. If we extend ourselves beyond it, we see that it is the richest security of all. We know that underneath it all is God.
But isn't that how life is? We never really know what lies ahead. And we never will. Faith is therefore the only logical way of life, the way that we sinful and dependent human beings must tread. Either we can believe we know, or we can accept that we cannot, even as we believe that that one day we will. Faith affirms that we are always and forever indebted to God.
And without faith in God, we can't really live.
(Thinking About God, 2007, William E. Marsh)
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