The Ground of Faith
When Jesus appeared to his disciples after the Resurrection, he tells them to look at his hands and his body. He didn’t say, “Take my word for it.” He said, ”Look. What do you see?” He trusted their capacity to discern reality. From their testimony, the story of Jesus spread throughout the world.
In this encounter of the risen Jesus with his disciples comes the story of “Doubting Thomas” from John 20.
“But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’”
As a child, I was told this story as an illustration of the lack of faith on Thomas’ part. My Sunday school teacher was sort of right. Today, proof positive, as Thomas experienced, is impossible to have. Faith, as a result, is a process of awareness and discovery.
Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ Augustine characterized this way of believing as “faith seeking understanding.”
We see these two types of faith in the interaction between Jesus and Thomas.
One is faith validated by physical reality. This pattern of awareness confirms a perception of what is real. Something changes, and our perception of what is real changes. We perceive this as proof of what we previously believed to be true. It either validates faith or discounts it. While we know something real has taken place. We see it in the behavior of a person or a group. We then, begin to live according to what we now believe to be true.
If we look at these situations through a scientific lens, we realize that nothing is ever final or complete. Our faith has been confirmed for this moment. If the objective moment that validated our belief proved to be more complicated, then we come to the realization that often our faith is in our believing in something, not in the something that took place. This is how seeking final proof of faith leads us down a path to certain disappointment.
The other is faith is unseen, and yet believed. This kind of faith is prevalent throughout the Old and New Testaments. People place their faith in Jesus as a gift of hope in God. There is some inner assurance that one’s faith rests on something real and yet beyond what is physically demonstrable. It is similar to the tacit knowledge that Michael Polanyi describes as something that we know but cannot tell how we know. We may believe but do not know why we believe. Faith, in this sense, is clearly a mystery.
Skeptics, who demand proof, do not realize that they also practice this kind of faith in other areas of their life. Every time we fly on a plane, have surgery or pay upfront for an item that has yet to be made, we are exercising faith. We trust the system or the people.
Faith of this kind is a human-defining phenomenon. Religious faith is one application of this faith. We also apply faith in all aspects of our life where we can never be totally and absolutely certain about the faith and trust that we are making in someone or an organization. The fact that it is so strongly connected to religious faith suggests that faith is not some alien experience, but rather a central aspect of what it means to be a human being.
Faith as Knowing and Being
To understand our relationship to the world, we need to understand how our perception of ourselves is reflective of reality. Think of knowing as an active form of being. Being is the comprehensive whole of living in the full existence of reality. Our experience of knowing and being is an exercise in believing that we can know ourselves in the context of the real world.
Part of that reality is that we are presented with Spectacles of the Real intended to entertain and distract us from reality. The impact is the overwhelming need to stay connected, to stay informed, and to reflect the socially constructed perception of the world that is fed to us. This hyperreal experience never allows us the mental, emotional, or spiritual space to catch our breath and reflect on who we truly are.
Within the Christian tradition, knowing and being are tied into a relationship with God, the natural world, and people. Knowing and being are not reduced to various fragments of socially constructed meanings. Rather, knowing and being is fulfilled in the full context of reality as the context of our lives.
The transcendent reality of faith that I experienced as a child was more traditional and family-oriented. But, this isn’t my orientation to faith. It isn’t a social construct, whether a small, traditional local congregation or a massive multi-site megachurch. Neither represents my experience of faith. For both are institutional church forms that are accommodations to dominant local cultures. As a result, in our day and time in Western society, the church reflects its divided nature.
What effect does this have on the nature of faith in the world? If you were to take the time to read through the New Testament with a focus on the word faith, you’d see faith is not primarily about joining a religious institution but rather how one connects to God and the world.
When Jesus encountered Thomas, he told him, in effect, trust your capacity to discover what is true. Here we find a simple blend of Augustinian ‘faith seeking understanding,.’ One of the stories in the Gospels is of a man who asked Jesus to heal him. He said, I believe, help my unbelief. When faith becomes commodified as the thing the church offers in exchange for membership participation and contribution, it becomes marginalized as one product among a host of products that are marketed for personal faith and spiritual development.
Consumerism uses social status to control the inherent freedom of individuals. The result is that religion, spirituality, belief, faith, and personal calling all get dumbed down as commodities that we expect to receive as mostly feelings of happiness and security. The evidence of a dumbed-down culture is that everyone within it says the same things, with the same words, the same cadence, and with the same belief in the righteousness of their belief system. We all receive this consumerist hyperreality the same way, through the media.
From this perspective, traditional religion has been replaced by consumer politics. Status is now found in the ideological object of faith. For many people, politics has become a type of secular religion. Righteous political ideology is a hyperreal form of faith. The effect is that consumerism is a vehicle for social control. Hyperreal religion, whether secular or sacred, ends up reflecting Karl Marx’s belief that religion is the opiate of the masses. The religious experience is what defines faith. Go to a stadium concert of your generational star, and you leave having had sermons and hymn singing, just like church, but of so much more real. As I write in The Spectacle of the Real, this hyperreal experience is meant to replace reality. As a result, the rejection of traditional religion is easy because it doesn’t provide that exhilarating, exotic, even erotic experience. When politics becomes the core belief of hyperreal faith, we have a return to the hyperreality of Nuremberg of 1933.
The Meaning of Faith
I believe what is missing is an understanding of how we can approach faith through the discovery of reality. If we seek faith through a discovery process, we are making assumptions that the things that we can believe in, trust in, and build our life around are already present. In this way, we are engaged with what I see as the spiritual realm. I define spirituality as a transcendent space beyond our perception of it where our relationship with reality takes place. If you want real, direct relationships with people, you need to enter into a Spiritual context. If we only want relationships characterized by hyperreality, we stick with our phones and social media.
Reality, as I am suggesting, exists apart from my actually knowing it in a complete and direct sense. It also surrounds us like the air we breathe. Reality is existence. It is where real knowing and being are found. This is difficult to see because the past three or four centuries, we have been led to believe that there is nothing apart of our capacity to know it. Cogito ergo sum. Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance spent much of his career focused on how to understand the human frame of knowledge. In describing Immanuel Kant’s treatment, he wrote,
“… Kant in his valiant attempt to establish the grounds of epistemic objectivity through a transcendental reduction of the conditions of knowledge … Kant’s argument took the form of a radical distinction between what things are in themselves, which is not open to our knowledge, and what they are as they appear to us, where only they may be known … What is unknowable … cannot be constructed and only what is constructable is knowable. Hence he was forced to conclude that the human intellect does not draw its laws from nature but on the contrary imposes its laws upon nature.’
The effect of this approach to knowing and being is that the world is beyond our ability to understand it. It is closed to us. We are in an isolated, closeted state, unable to see beyond our own perception of the world. At least, this is how the Enlightenment, as a result, framed how we become the center of all things, and, therefore the definer of the meaning of all things. Reality, therefore, has no separate existence from our conception of it.
I believe this is a huge error. Our culture of hyperreality and spectacle has become the coping mechanisms for living in a world that is closed to us. If, then, we don’t even know our own minds, then is it any wonder that mental illness is a feature of the modern world
When Thomas stuck his finger into Jesus’ side, he experienced a real encounter with the risen Jesus. This realm of reality presses in on him in a real sense. When we see a picture or a vista while traveling that evokes amazement and wonder, we feel this in a real sense, not a hyperreal sense. We experience this as a Spiritual reality. This experience is letting us know that there is more to this world than we know. It does not mean that we can’t know it. It means that we must believe - have faith - that we can access reality in ways that are meaningful and transformational. It is for this reason that my faith in God is not some mental apprehension or social construct. It is rather a relationship with the reality of the natural world in all its beauty and order.
As modern people, the problem that we face is that we have been taught to be good Cartesians. We accept as a fundamental, foundational principle that all reality begins with my perception of it. Cogito ergo Sum. I think, therefore, I am. I don’t believe this works for us. We can’t outthink reality. We can’t even think at the level that allows us to perform up to our potential. Faith as self-knowledge and being-in-the-world should not be reduced to a collection of aspirational anecdotes and quotes.
The initiation of an active faith has the effect of leading us to embrace reality as the context of life. I approach my life as a quest to understand what it means for God to be real. God is not a religious construct for me. God is that point on the horizon of this spiritual realm of reality that I am constantly moving toward. The challenge is that the barrier of knowing and being set in motion by Adam and Eve’s original sin obscures not only knowledge of the world but knowledge of myself. Faith cannot be rationally proved in any complete or absolute way. Instead, faith must be discovered by intuition as faith seeking understanding.
It is for this reason that reality is an important component of belief. If your life is disconnected from reality, it is difficult to know what is true. We believe in what we believe in because we believe it is true. It is a true reflection of reality. How ironic that the great idea of the Enlightenment, that all knowledge begins with self-knowledge, ends up not only obscuring reality but denying its very existence.
This trend line of thought has led to this moment where postmodern philosophy tells us that language is socially constructed and that words have no meaning apart from the one speaking them. All this ultimately does is lead us down a blind alley into a dark cul-de-sac of isolation and nihilistic belief. Is it any wonder that the rise of mental illness in your people has risen to crisis levels?
Embracing Faith
There are three aspects of faith that are worth embracing. There is Revelation, Belief, and Relationship.
Revelation
When faith is born in us, a truth or a reality is revealed to us. We see the world differently. Some describe this as an awareness awakened in them. Our perception of the world changes. It has become enlarged as we see connections that we did not see before.
It is similar to love at first sight. The other person may have always been there. Then, one day, she or he is seen in a totally different light. It was a momentary look on her face or a comment that he made revealing some deeper reality that we are now given to see. We do see. Maybe what we see is dim and indecipherable, and, yet, our lives are changed.
When I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, having grown up in the church, I was away on a weekend church youth retreat. During one of our conversation sessions, one of the guys was surprisingly honest with us. I don’t remember what he said, just that his transparency transformed my perception of reality.
The thought that came to me was, “If he is this honest, then there must be a God.” Before that moment, I had never thought about God, even having been in church almost of every Sunday of my life. After that moment, I knew that the search for the reality of God in the world would have a central place in my life. Even then, I knew that the connection between honesty and the reality of God was meaningful. I just did not know how. I knew that they were both pointing to something larger, more expansive. As a result my life of faith seeking understanding had begun.
Revelation is about awareness. It is spiritual awareness, situational awareness, and personal awareness. We are not just aware of the reality of the world, but aware of our place in it. Something has been revealed to us when this happens that points us toward a path of discovery if we choose to accept it.
Belief
When faith grows in us, we begin to recognize how our faith applies to aspects of our life. We acknowledge the relevance of certain people, places, and ideas. We begin to see the values that had been latent in us, only now emerging to define how we are and how we live.
Faith, as a result, brings with it an intellectual and emotional character to it. When we have faith, we discover our purpose, and a mission develops from it. We find that this faith becomes an organizing principle for our life. We learn to state what we believe and how we feel. We tell others about it because we realize that the meaning of our life is tied to this belief that provides us a reason to believe.
My own experience with faith is one of constantly testing to first understand how what I believe interfaces with the world, and, second, how I am to trust God, in my experience, for the capacity to serve and change throughout my life. For me, I find the context of the sciences is a context for my faith. I am not a scientist. Yet, I see in how science is conducted, not in the political or corporate sense, but in the real sense of inquiry seeking understanding is how I approach my faith. In other words, faith seeking understanding and inquiry seeking understanding are two ways that we as human beings seek to understand the real world and what is beyond.
I am not trying to prove or disprove my faith. Rather, I want to expand my perception of the world and of the people in the world as a way to know how my faith integrates into the context of the world. If this seems complex, it is because genuine faith is not some brand marketing statement, but rather an approach to how we live. I am intentional in trusting God to guide me through life. My experience with God I accept by faith, not by some proof.
It is a difficult perspective to understand because, for many people, faith gets tied up with the institutional structures of religion. Is being religious a requirement for having faith? Not necessarily. What happens is that when faith flourishes in us, we seek rituals and experiences that elevate the importance of our faith. Politics, for example, is a type of religion or culture of belief where campaigns and protests are the rituals of faith to the faithful.
The freedom to try new things, to venture off into new directions, and to live in a constant state of transition is how I have live out faith seeking understanding. I choose to associate my faith with the church as a community of shared faith. In the context of shared belief, we find support and friendship in the practice of a calling to a faithful life.
Relationships
I find that many people see faith as a social or intellectual construct. To them, faith is an idea, a statement of belief. Faith is tied to purpose. But purpose without mission and shared relationships of faith increasingly become an abstraction and less real.
When faith grows in us, we are more intimately connected to the world. When our faith liberates us, it unites us with other people who share a similar faith. If there is no relational connection, we need to question whether this new faith has truly awakened in us a capacity for a new perspective on our life.
In other words, Faith is indelibly connected to our agency as people. The validity of our faith recognized by other people is not really in what we say, but, rather, in how we treat them. The Apostle Paul said, “faith without works is dead.” This means that faith is not an ideology that we use to bludgeon people with our righteousness. Many people do use their faith this way, regardless of what they believe in.
Faith, when directed outward as a system of belief, awakens in us meaning, and purpose for our lives. We live out our faith in relationships with people.
Even as an ordained minister, I have been publically quiet about my faith. I haven’t hidden from it. I just do not want to wear religiosity as a defining label. I don’t like labels. And I don’t like outward displays of faith that end up looking more like my own sense of self-importance.
A New Age of Discovery
I am writing this series on Jesus and The Spectacle of Faith as the result of seeing changes in what people are asking and discussing. In particular, I see a new desire to connect with reality, not as a perception, but rather some larger context that has meaning and is less prone to be manipulated by institutional influencers in society.
My faith has not changed. My practice has changed. A dozen years ago, I lived in a small, contained world of family, church, business, and community service. Over the past decade, my world has expanded globally. My family matters more to me than ever. My service is still to the church and through my business throughout the world. But my community is global.
I believe in the value and dignity of each person. But, that belief is more than some statement of transactional value. Rather, it is a belief in the potential for impact in each person. I take this from the Apostle Paul, who wrote,
In this sense, genuine faith envelops us in an environment beyond ourselves. We see the world as more whole and connected than we once did. It points us toward the importance of our development as persons with human agency. We are more than mechanized parts in a modernist machine. We are members together of the community of human persons who desire to discover and create through a relationship with reality. We each have within us the capacity to make a difference that brings peace, security, and goodness to the world.
Whether you believe in God, Jesus, or some other ancient or modern religion, or nothing at all, the reality of the value and dignity of human persons should be beyond discussion. But it is not. There is a growing belief that humanity is the problem and its eradication is the solution. My faith points me in the opposite direction.