Jesus and The Spectacle of Faith: A Three Part Series
Understanding The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ requires an understanding of what happen at the creation of the world, and how it affects what it means to believe in our time.
Introduction
In December 2022, I wrote a post entitled Jesus and The Spectacle of Christmas. I opened that post with these words.
I rarely write about religion, faith, God, Christianity, or the church. The principal reason is that people prefer to debate the institutional and cultural forms of Christianity rather than reflect on the personal and spiritual aspects of faith. Before Christianity was a church, before it was institutionalized as the state religion of the Holy Roman Empire, before it became a political power center in the West and the East, it was a community of faith of people living common lives. It is still, for the majority of Christians worldwide, a community of faith.
No one is a perfect example of what a Christian or person of faith is. The argument that we are all hypocrites and not perfect representations of what we believe is true. No one is perfect. The fact that the church in all its temporal forms doesn’t match the expectations that people both within and outside the church have for it simply shows that it is a human institution seeking spiritual fulfillment. In fact, people still believe it in spite of rationalistic claims against it and political repression which seeks to destroy it. It is simply a testimony to the human character of religion as a phenomenon that, as an act of fact, transcends time and space as we know it.
Here I begin a three-part series exploring aspects of the story of the Christian faith from my perspective. I was raised in the church. I was trained to be a minister. I have been an ordained minister for 42 years. Most of what constitutes ministry has been in the world of organizational leadership. In effect, I have lived straddling the line that separates the secular and the sacred.
It is impossible to understand my perspective without having read The Spectacle of the Real. My basic understanding of "spectacle” comes from Guy Debord, who says,
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
It is impossible to understand Christianity without an appreciation for the place that images have in interpreting what the faith means.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Colossae a clarification of who Jesus is.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
In the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the book of Genesis we read,
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
I believe that Guy Debord’s characterization of spectacles defined by images having a socially mediating function applies to how Christians, for two millennia, have understood the Christian faith. Jesus is the image of God or, more specifically, God in the flesh. Human beings are created in the image of God. It was our desire to be God that led to the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The social relation of images, whether religious or not, define who we are as individuals and our relationship to one another as a global society.
In the essay that follows, I will look at the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Creation stories in Genesis, and finally, faith as a human experience in the context of the divide between the secular and the sacred. I will post each part separately and then will combine them together into one very long post. I promise that I am writing on behalf of myself alone. My interest is simply to look at this aspect of my own life in a manner that others who know me in a different context may understand. And in so doing, I come to understand my own faith journey better.
Part 1: A Spectacle for Believing
We just passed through the holy season of the Resurrection, commonly known as Easter. In the Christian tradition, it is a holy day greater than Christmas. It represents the culmination of a series of events that began with a dinner among a small group of friends and ends with an empty tomb and a surprise visitation of the Resurrected Christ. It is the perfect story for dramatization as a spectacle of faith and religion.
Throughout the world on Easter Sunday, people rise in the dark, before dawn, bundling up against the cold of a Spring morning. They meet in a garden or a cemetery to celebrate what Christians believe is the overcoming of death. As the sun rises, the imagery of light coming into the world after the death of Jesus points to what has been the enduring belief of the church for two millennia — the restoration of all creation in relationship to its creator.
The Meaning of Jesus’ Death
A central theme of Christian belief is that Jesus came to save sinners. His death on the cross was a sacrificial death for humankind. The theological term is “substitutionary atonement.” As a Protestant, the method of accepting the atonement for our sins is called “being justified by faith alone.”
This is the traditional belief of the church. It is the antithesis of modern scientific fact. And yet, the Christian church is as modern as any scientific laboratory. In the modern world, The Spectacle of the Real represents a type of salvation by submission to public opinion and political allegiance.
Modern church discourse increasingly treats the death of Christ like a favor God has done for us. Sort of like, he picked up the check for dinner. The idea of substitutionary atonement has been replaced by something more like “forensic psychology.” God forgives us so that we won’t have to feel guilty anymore.
This idea of “forensic psychology” reduces the events of Holy Week to God having empathy for us. This reductivist theology has led to the modern assumption that if God loves everyone, everyone must be saved. Of course, this would mean that Hitler must be saved, school shooters must be saved, and, worst of all, Donald Trump must be saved. Universalism breaks down when particular examples of people make it difficult to accept.
Sociologist Christian Smith, in his book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. described this approach to modern religion as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The specifics of this view of religion are described this way.
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
Forensic psychology is a version of this secularized version of historic Christian belief.
The Reimagining of Sacrifice
The historical view of Jesus’ death on the cross is that it was a sacrificial death for our sins. René Girard challenged this view. He doesn’t discard the idea of substitutionary atonement. Neither do I because the biblical narrative is consistent in its depiction of human beings living in an alienated state with God, their creator. The theology of the church, since its early days as the Christian faith community, has interpreted Jesus’ death in this way. Girard adds another dimension to this historical belief.
Girard wants us to understand the events that led up to Jesus’ crucifixion from the perspective of the Scapegoat mechanism. The practice of designating someone as the scapegoat is a function of mimetic conflict. Simply described, in normal human relationships, we tend to identify aspects of other people that we seek to imitate. This is how children learn to behave well or poorly. In institutional and social environments, when the imitator begins to become too much like the one they are imitating, conflict arises. Girard sees this as the source of violence in society.
In the story of Jesus’ life, Girard sees that the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem recognize that the public was beginning to see this itinerant teacher as the long-awaited King of the Jews. If he is The King of the Jews, then his position within the Jewish religion usurps the Temple leadership of their positions of privilege and power.
The Gospel of Mark tells the story.
As soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate. Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ He answered him, ‘You say so.’ Then the chief priests accused him of many things. Pilate asked him again, ‘Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring against you.’ But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed.
Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. Then he answered them, ‘Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?’ For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate spoke to them again, ‘Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’ They shouted back, ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.
As Girard points out, this mimetic threat is treated with violence. Jesus is sentenced for a false claim. The Temple leaders, with the Roman authorities playing their part, sentence Jesus to death by crucifixion. It is a particularly brutal, torturous form of execution. The image of seeing Jesus hanging from a Roman cross reminds the public who really is in charge of Jerusalem and Palestine. Jesus’ death as the scapegoat serves to restore order to society and reaffirm the power and prestige of the Elders of the Temple and the political rule of Rome. The Roman government’s complicity shows that this was not only a religious or even a tribal controversy but rather the ongoing management of political relationships within the region.
The death of Jesus would have been just another death by crucifixion if it were not for the Spectacle of Easter morning. Without it, there would be no satisfaction for forensic guilt against the God of creation. Jesus’ death would just be another story of an itinerant rabbi caught up in a power struggle between Jewish and Roman authorities in the first century AD Jerusalem.
The Non-Spectacle of a Dead Man Resurrected
The spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Guy Debord
Turn on your television or go to YouTube on Easter morning, and you find Easter Sunrise Services from all over the world. There is a Spectacle character to these ceremonies, especially the one that takes place in Jerusalem at the site of the empty tomb. The imagery of dawn breaking on the horizon is unmistakably an image metaphor of the light of God casting out the darkness of the world. As the services commence, someone will shout, “Christ is Risen!” echoed in return by those gathered, “He is Risen indeed.” This is the narrative moment of Resurrection Sunday two thousand years ago, being relived contemporaneously.
Within the Christian tradition, this is a spectacle at its most sublime. And like Christmas, these two moments on the church calendars are the most spectacular in the sense that Guy Debord describes. These two moments, attract individuals and families, who never darken the door of the church on any other Sunday, to ascent to something meaningful having taken place. At least for my generation, it is an act of nostalgia for a once-dominant culture. While many still believe America to be a Christian nation, in reality, our religion is The Spectacle of Sacred or Secular Religion. Whether it is two Sundays a year in church, a Sunday tee-off time at the golf club, the Sunday afternoon NFL game or NASCAR race, or the daily meditation ritual on the “Breaking News” of the latest global political crisis. The spectacle of images draws us toward the feeling of participation in something meaningful and real.
Distance in time makes it easier to turn this moment into a shared remembrance that transcends socio-political boundaries. This is how Christian Smith’s “moralistic therapeutic deism.” becomes the modern world’s reverse accommodation of the Christian faith for modern times. This is described by a Harvard graduate student during commencement in the 1990's.
“They tell us that it is heresy to suggest the superiority of some value, fantasy to believe in moral argument, slavery to submit to a judgment sounder than your own. The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the condition that we do not believe them to be true.”
While the Spectacle of Easter is celebrated, one wonders whether the participants at the sunrise service understand the claim being made. In fact, at Christmas and Easter, two claims are made that violate the logic of modern-day scientific reasoning. A child is born to a virgin, and a man dead and buried in a tomb rises from the grave. Two millennia of claims to these being made-up stories to promote religion does not seem to have been very convincing.
As the Easter story is told, at the moment of resurrection, there was no one there. No one can say, “I was there the moment he rose up and stood.” There was no fanfare. There was no expectation that something would happen. Those closest to Jesus were in mourning, wondering what was going to happen to them. Would they be targeted by the same people that crucified their Lord?
Initially, the risen Jesus was not even noticed. No one was looking for him. Think about what happens after a memorial service of a loved one who has passed in your family. No one goes out to the grave, waiting for them to rise up out of the ground. Only the closest ones will go to the graveside a few days later, to say a prayer, quietly speak to their departed loved one, and remove the symbolically-meaningful dead flowers.
The Gospel writer Luke tells this story of what happened.
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they (the women) came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
This is not a Spectacle of the Real. There are no experts declaring their opinion about what happened to the body. None of the authorities were there to deflect attention away from some nefarious act of grave robbery. Even Jesus doesn’t show up, jumping through the door, shouting, “TaDa!”
Jesus leaves the tomb and takes a walk. He meets a couple of guys on the road to Emmaus. Even they don’t recognize him. They had already heard about the empty gravesite. They tell him what they had heard. The gossip of an empty tomb was spreading fast. Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge what has happened. They walk with this stranger, then invited him to their home for a meal. Then, Jesus revealed himself to them. They spoke to one another of this encounter, saying, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road ...” Then the two men left and went to find Jesus’ disciples and tell them what had happened.
This is a very strange occurrence in the context of our contemporary obsession with public spectacles. Jesus has been resurrected from death. He is taking his time to go see his closest friends. Why is this?
Again, Luke tells the story of Jesus’ reuniting with his disciples.
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
I have thought a lot about this story over the years. During my seminary training, we explored every facet of this story. The focal point has always been the power of God to give life, and in this act of resurrection, the power of life over death. Even with this perspective resonating with Christians through two millennia, I always felt that there was something more to this story.
The Spectacle Nature of Reality
The Spectacle nature of reality treats events as singular in nature. They are one-off events that only have meaning, as commentators tell us they have. Maybe you are a Springsteen or Taylor Swift fan, and you want to immerse yourself in as many of their concerts as possible, and with others like you, tell stories about the night in Omaha or Austin when their moment of genius was felt. Or maybe you are a sports fan, who cannot afford to miss a single game of your team, as you and other fans relive your team’s former glory. Or, you are faithful in attending your church every Sunday because the music and sermons remind you of that moment when your faith was born. Our purpose is to experience the Spectacle and relive it. We don’t even have to believe the whole to find the experience fulfilling. This is why the pull of Christmas and Easter remain THE Spectacle moments for the Christian church.
These Spectacle events are particular moments. They point to a more comprehensive story that defines why those particular moments have meaning. In the context of the Christian faith, it is God’s purpose in creation that establishes this larger story of meaning. In Part Two of this series, I will explore The Spectacle of Creation.
Part 2: The Origin of the Tradition
In the very beginning of the Bible, in the early chapters of Genesis, we find two creation stories. One is a story where the world is created over the course of six days, with God resting on the seventh. The other story is about the creation of Adam and Eve, the first man and first woman. In the first of these stories, we read,
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
In the second story, we are told how Adam and Eve, who were born into the perfect world of the Garden of Eden, violated God’s instruction to not eat from The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil. They are banished from the Garden with the sentence of toil in work and pain in childbearing.
Here we find the origin of forensic psychology as I described in Part One of this series.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” ’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”
Ever since these stories were first told by the ancient Hebrews, there have been questions about why did God create a situation where Adam and Eve would fail. Why did God create a perfect world with a flaw that human choice could destroy it?
The psychopathology of this moment is the first great turning point in human history.
“Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ “
I have concluded that two human truths are presented in this account.
God created humanity with human agency
The first creation story says that God created a perfect world. Our modern utopian tendencies automatically think that this means a perfect world without variance or difference. We could call it the First Singularity. In effect, God was the first totalitarian, and the sin of Adam and Eve reveals that human free will is evil and must be restricted.
You can see how this particular of view of God principally turns God into a moral authoritarian dictator of divine judgment. The perfect world of the Garden of Eden, in effect, is a prison. From this perspective, a perfect world is an environment that is complete, unchanging, and without variety or creative difference. This view matches the notion of the utopian perfection that is common today. The contemporary transhumanist utopian perspective also believes that human agency is evil and should be restricted, or eliminated.
This perspective of the origin of humankind misunderstands the biblical story of creation. The Genesis account says that humankind was made in God’s image. The Spectacle of Creation is the spectacle of a dynamic God of three persons in relationship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This perspective, known as The Trinity, is the traditional understanding of these creation texts. We can think of it as a perfect unity of three persons in relationship as one.
The meaning of this image of the Trinity in relation to humanity in the perfect world of the Garden is suggested in Guy Debord’s description of the phenomenon of the Spectacle.
The spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Think about the world that Adam and Eve lived in before their sin. They lived in a world fully present with The One God in Perfect Unity of Three Persons. Not only was this a dynamic world of variation and difference, but a world created for relationships.
The perception that some theologians have often presented about the distinction between that perfect world and our world is that they are impossible to compare. I don’t find that plausible. Instead, I think all aspects of that perfect world are present now. The difference is that our capacity to access that knowledge was severely inhibited by God’s punishment of Adam and Eve.
Of course, I am only speculating. I really don’t know, but logically speaking, it has always seemed to me that the difference between pre and post Adam and Eve’s sin, is the difference between the relationship between complete knowledge and uncertain knowledge. This diminishment of our capacity to know and understand the world is primarily relational. In other words, our understanding of God and the world has a deep level of inscrutability factored into it. It is far easier to see the particulars of the world than the comprehensive whole of it.
We have to grasp glimpses of this knowledge of the world as Iain McGilchrist describes in his book The Matter with Things. He writes in Chapter 20 about The Coincidence of Opposites. See McGilchrist’s presentation on this perspective in this Ralston College presentation.
He quotes physicist Niels Bohr,
“It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negative is also a deep truth. … Bohr’s greatest insight into the deep nature of the universe was that contraria sunt complementa: contraries fulfill one another. “
Later in Chapter 28, The sense of the sacred, McGilchrist writes,
“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy - both the most important, and the hardest to answer - is why there should be something rather than nothing.
And close on its heels comes the question why that ‘something’ turns out to be complex and orderly, beautiful and creative, capable of life, feeling and consciousness, rather than merely chaotic, sterile, and dead. It is not a matter of opinion, but a fact if ever there was one, that, somehow or other, this ‘something’ has within it the capacity to give rise to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Any attempt at understanding the cosmos needs to take that stark fact into account. There is a parallel between the false view that we are separate from and over against Nature (encapsulated in the disastrous idea of Nature as the ‘environment’) and the idea that we are separate from and over against the cosmos. This cannot be true, for the same reason in either case. We were born out of, and return to, the one and the other. It therefore makes no sense to set us up as proud, lonely, tragic figures, struggling against Nature, trying to subdue her, or struggling defiantly to bring love, goodness and beauty into a hostile cosmos. Any love, goodness and beauty we can bring come out of Nature and out of the cosmos in the first place: where else can they possibly come from?”
If this is a deep truth, it may well be a deep hint to the world that transcends the moment of Adam and Eve’s sin. It may be a remnant of a time of perfection that was not static but dynamic. That God would create a perfect world of opposites boggles the mind. The reductivist thinking of our scientific age has little tolerance for anything other than the particulars of scientific proof. But we do not live this way. We live embodied in the world that surrounds us. Just as Adam and Even lived embodied in a perfect and changing world that surrounded them.
If the recognition of the comprehensive whole of the world is possible, we can then see that humanity’s purpose is to function as God’s opposite, not his copy. With this line of thought, I see that the forensic psychology perspective touches only a particular part of human nature and our relationship to the divine.
If this perspective carries enough validity to continue this train of thought, then the implication is that our human agency is purposeful and filled with meaning. Our lives are discovered meaningful in the acts of agency that we make. This is why I came to see that “all leadership begins with personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.” I believe this is true whether you are a theist or an atheist. Observation points to the capacity of human beings to look beyond themselves to create ways to benefit people and the world.
What this explains is what happened through Adam and Eve’s act of rebellious human agency. It really doesn’t explain why they did it. Particularly, if this was a perfect world where they had everything that they needed.
Our agency as human beings is not simply that we can choose between different options, or that we can evaluate situations. It is that by our choosing, we learn about the world. I have no idea what learning was like in that perfect world, except that there was no independent awareness of good and evil. Maybe the perfection of human agency in the Garden of Eden was a growing, deepening appreciation or love for the world that God had created. I don’t know, but it seems logical that the whole break caused by Adam and Even is principally relational, and their act of rebellion was a means of replacing their love for the Creator and his creation, with a love for themselves as preeminent expression - image - of that creation. As a result, the social relations between God and humanity, once mediated by the Image of God found in the Trinitarian relationship was lost. This, therefore, means that we cannot live by the reality of God’s certain presence in a direct relationship, but rather by faith in believing that there is something rather than nothing to this world’s connect to the divine.
This world of God’s creation is a relational one
Our world is not principally governed by forensic psychology. Our modern rationalistic culture perceives society as a process of transactional exchange. Quid pro quo. Adam and Eve, in this respect, made a bad deal. They simply violated their social contract with God. This is how their story has been understood. It is how forensic psychology came to define what being a sinner means.
This forensic view of sin ends up missing the larger point of God’s purpose in creation and of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The biblical meaning of sin is to miss the mark. As an archer missing the target. What is that target? It is that of human purpose.
The penalty for Adam and Eve’s sin was separation, alienation, and isolation from the relationship that humanity had known with God before their act of rebellion. As a result, we find hardship, suffering, and insecurity in life.
When I first read Iain McGilchrist’s chapter on opposites, it reminded me of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. From chapter 3.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”
The relational character of creation remains even after Adam and Eve’s sin. It reminds us of a larger, more comprehensive whole. These hints to a reality behind a screen are told all throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. He closes with this.
“Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all. …
The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded
than the shouting of a ruler among fools.
Wisdom is better than weapons of war,
but one bungler destroys much good.”
The Unifying Principle is Love
For a person who has been enveloped by the Christian religion his whole life, I am actually not a very religious person. The reason is that I see religion as a cultural institution intended to take historic and transcendent beliefs and accommodate them to the contemporary world. This is why conservative churches will have Fourth of July patriotic services to celebrate the Christian founding of the US and why liberal churches promote social justice as a revolutionary orientation to the Bible. Churches reflect the current narratives of society. We are no different from Adam and Eve.
In every situation, a transactional understanding of God and the human community dominates. Frankly, it is easier to see God as a judge than as a God of love. If God is love in an absolute sense, then he loves the very people that I hate. It is easier to draw lines and choose opponents. Then, we have to figure out how to transact an agreement with the judge through good deeds and pious participation in church and society. The result is that I remain not only immune from judgment but can hold an obligation for personal change at an arm’s distance. As Christian Smith described above, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. And may I add, I want to decide what good, nice, and fair mean.
We are no different than Adam and Eve. We are also no different from the men on the road to Emmaus, the women who first went to the empty tomb, and the disciples in hiding after the catastrophe of Jesus’ death. We are both seeking hope for our futures and are uncertain that any genuine hope exists. What, then, do we do when hope is lost, and cynicism or nihilism reigns supreme in the land?
The most difficult and revolutionary thing to do is love as if we are living before the time of Adam and Eve’s sin. Imagine a perfect world of opposites in relationship with one another, requiring us to see ourselves differently than we do now. We are neither the center nor the opposite other. We are persons with human agency seeking meaning and reconciliation. Ultimately, meaning finds its substance in love. Not the sweet love of a Hallmark card. But rather the hard love of sacrificing ourselves for what we seek to understand as the greater good.
When I use the terms “particular” and “a comprehensive whole,” I use them in the way that Michael Polanyi spoke about science. What is science except as a search for an understanding of what the world is? To approach this task as a journey of unfolding love for the comprehensive whole of the world takes us back to that moment when Adam and Even made the bad decision to cross the threshold of the knowledge of good and evil.
All our efforts to create a perfect world are illusory. Instead, we can do no other than to seek to create a world without God, and with ourselves at the center. In the end, what we believe in, or, who we trust in, becomes a life-defining choice.
Part 3: Faith and the Spectacle of Reality
This is Part 3 of a series where I explore aspects of the story of the Christian faith from my perspective. My interest is simply to look at this aspect of my own life in a manner that others who know me in a different context may understand. And in so doing, I come to better understand my own faith journey.
Embracing Faith for Reality
An impetus for this series is a concern about how we understand reality in our day. I have had people tell me that they do not believe reality can be known. They see reality as a perception that is treated as a social construct. The problem with this perspective is that the logical endpoint is nihilistic narcissism. Beginning with the Cartesian notion of cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am, reality can only be known from a personalist point-of-view. Meaning that each individual person becomes the ultimate judge of their own truth. Essentially, everything that can be known can only be known for its value and utility to me. Nothing and no one can be known or appreciated for who they are or what it is in and of themselves. We live in an age of utility, and transactional exchange explains how we relate to reality. As a result, power, whether financial, political, or institutional, becomes the highest form of utility. Is it any wonder that our world is filled with conflict and war?
Faith in the ancient world carried two different connotations.
One conception treated faith as an understanding of who I believe in and why.
The other is faith is what I do in being faithful, trustworthy, and worthy of confidence.
Our modern sense of faith is more like a product or item. It has utilitarian value for some exchange or goal that I have. A business contract is a statement of trust that the parties will faithfully fulfill the agreement. It is a contract required to receive something in exchange.
People believe in God or Jesus in order to receive salvation. Hundreds of thousands of preachers will say this on Sunday morning, unaware that they are selling an economic exchange between the individual and the divine. God or Jesus are not valued in and of themselves, but rather as the agents of salvation. This is the transactional model of religion. This is why forensic psychopathology dominates how the church approaches people. The appeal is to the inherent selfishness of the individual.
I’m making this claim fully awaren that the vast majority of preachers and theologians will disagree with me. Based on my experience, this theological perspecive is an accommodation to Enlightenment rationalist thought. It is not that it is wrong, which it isn’t. Rather it is a reductivist perspective on the nature of God. It is a particular perspecive that does not represent the comprehensive whole of the Christian Gospel.
Every human being places their faith in something. It is a form of trust or dependence. It may be in God, a person, an institution, or an ideology. We also hear the term used in the form of having faith in oneself.
Faith provides meaning and identity for the world within our immediate grasp and beyond. As a result, faith carries with it both sacred and secular meanings.
Faith is how we access the world and the world beyond. We believe that there is something beyond rather than nothing. We trust that what transcends our awareness has substance enough to orient our lives. In effect, we believe because we need to believe to fill a hole or meet a need that has been revealed to us in the context of reality. Faith, then, is the utility that is needed to help our lives.
Faith is a way we measure our lives. Are we faithful or faithless? Are we faithful to the people we believe in, like our spouse, family, or team? Are we faithful in what we do? Are we faithful in meeting our obligations and responsibilities to my company or community? These questions define our lives as having meaning beyond some minimalistic, utilitarian purpose.
Faith, for some people, is a test or a bet. We’ve heard of people who bargain with God. In war, foxhole conversations are bargains with God. “If you save me from this battle, I’ll start going to church.” This isn’t genuine faith. It is a bribe, another transactional approach to an authority figure to get something that I want. Now, I know that there are many of these moments of crisis where a declaration of faith is true and life-transforming. Are they the exceptions or the norm? There is no way any of us can know. This is the nature of the broad comprehensive nature of reality. From this perspective, reality is a spiritual reality. It is where we interface with God in the moment of crisis.
Faith is an obligation or responsibility. I must believe. I must go to church. I must be a good person. Or God will reject me. Faith, in this sense, is a burden, a weight, possibly the recognition that reality is pressing in on us in a way that requires us to pay attention.
Faith ultimately is a combination of two realities.
One is the reality of this world. It is a world of hardship, pain, and consequence.
The other reality is the world beyond our understanding.
This is the world of the spiritual. The context for all our relationships.
It is where hope can be found as the focus of faith.
The Transition in the Meaning of Faith
As modern people, we view the world through a lens that places the individual at the center of society. During the early modern period, the focus was on industrial production. People were the means of production. They did the work, and the owners benefited. This clip from the beginning of John Ford’s great film of a Welsh mining community, How Green Was My Valley, shows the relationship between the world of production, the society of working families, and the place of faith in the context of that world. As the men return home from the mine, they sing the old Welsh hymn, Guide Me O’ Thou Great Jehovah, celebrating the Bread of Heaven of the coins dropped into their mother’s apron to feed their family.
Faith for these people is the bond of the family and dependence upon God’s grace and provision for survival through a life of hardship. God was an all-encompassing presence in their lives as faith focused them on the benefits of the next world, not this one.
In the post-World War II world, the content of religious faith began to shift. I grew up in the older traditional church environment where family and faith were the focus of belief. It was more like the family in How Green Was My Valley. Just as consumer product companies began to appeal to consumers to buy their products as a representation of their social advancement, churches emerged with a similar message.
Faith in God in many churches shifted to the benefits to come to people in this world. As incomes rose, the modern middle class emerged. As wealth and opportunities for social and professional advancement beyond that of previous generations, status grew in importance. The result was a world of increasing emphasis on individual success. With this change, came the emergence of the Prosperity Gospel, believing God wanted everyone to be rich and successful. Its conflicted message was that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and poverty a sign of a lack of faith.
Emphasis shifted away from the collective of the congregation as an intergenerational faith community of families, toward the church as an outlet for networking for business and social advancement. Religion became, for the individual believer, another form of consumption. It doesn’t mean that a person in this context does not have genuine faith. Rather, this consumer culture inhibits the spiritual growth of people.
New forms of being the church grew as a popular way for churches to attract members. If we think of faith as how an individual orient him or herself in the world, these new expressions of being a church became another place to find messages about self-development, like that of psychologists, life coaches, spiritual gurus, and media personalities. Self-development became synonymous with spiritual development. As a result, churches had to appeal to the self-interest of people to attract them into the church. Their self-interest cut across the conservative to liberal spectrum, where both personal development and justice activism were representations of this consumer version of Christianity.
This transformation in American culture took place as people began to see that they were no longer subject to a culture of production, but were now the objects of a sophisticated form of consumer marketing. Every person became classified as a particular type of consumer. I learned this through the marketing of my first book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
Traditional book marketing focused on specific roles in business or society. I tend to ignore those labels because they do not explain the complexity that is found in a person. Instead, I wrote the book for people who saw themselves in transition. During the year after publication, as a traveled the US doing book events, the universal character of the book was proven to me as people at every event told me their stories of life or career transition. In every situation, the question of purpose, which is analogous to faith, was central to their transitions.
Who we are in a consumer culture is how we serve in that culture. In this sense, society or the culture that is closest to us defines who we are. If we believe this to be true, then we come to believe that we are deserving of all the good things that life can provide. The idea of original sin, which had long served as a way to understand the complexity of human nature, was cast aside as it was seen by marketers as a negative message of shaming people. Instead of joining a church to find salvation from sin, many churches attracted people by a message of God’s love for the individual. The seeming lack of ability to hold these two defining characteristics of human experience in tension - Original Sin and God Loves the Sinner - is a product of the consumerist nature of the modern church. Consumerism, commodified, monetized, personalized, and marginalized, affects the full experience of a person. The reality question of “Why do I feel so alien and without meaning, if God loves me so much?”, never gets adequately answered. The effect of the COVID pandemic has changed this for people as I have found an openness for conversation and discovery about what lies beyond what is already known about faith, God, the church, and the person.
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.
Only this year, when actually making the effort of opening a Bible after a very long time, I realized how affectionate God's reaction was to learning that Eve and Adam had eaten from the Tree of understanding. He does not show wrath nor contempt. He even explains that he is not in first line expelling them from the Garden of Eden as a punishment for their transgression. Rather that this transgression unfortunately makes it necessary to take a precaution - evicting them - in order for them not to also eat from the Tree of Life. He is somehow in a loving way endorsing what you say he gave them, their having made use of their agency. This thought of agency fits with the theodicee aspect and I find it very helpful that you point this out. And the point about Adam and Eve's anticipated next move if not expelled, namely proceeding to the Tree of Life, is so interesting in the light of the transhumanists' ambitions. In my understanding, the transhumanists are now frantically searching for access to a Tree of Life outside the garden of Eden. And it is my comfort that I take away from the story about "Adam and Eve, snake, Trees of Understanding and of Life being located in Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve being removed from access to the trees" - that the Transhumanists must necessarily fail in their efforts. That's how it is for me. On some level it may be ridiculous to take things that literally. But you describe very well the phenomenon where someone just "knows" something, and this for me is part of what I know against all rationalization. This is not part of another important aspect though, of "credo quia absurdum" which for certain aspects also applies. But not for this aspect, because a lot of what I believe, just does not happen to seem that absurd to me at all. That's how it is. Insofar I think it really is a gift to be able to plain believe in certain things. A gift that one can pray for. And that one can lose. And pray not to lose maybe. - You cite an author with a very good citation, Ian Gilchrist or so. I happen to have thought about buying his books for a long time, but always was deterred by the extremely high prices. I am not sure that I had realized until now, that he seems to be a religious author. - Thank you for this great essay.