Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog

Friends, I’m heading off to Bangalore, India, for the next week to teach pastors and graduate students at Dr. Ken Gnanakan’s ACTS Institute. I’m not sure if I can post from there, so I’ll leave you with something substantial over the meanwhile: this splendid, touching prayer of commitment from the Methodist Covenant Service, anthologized in The Oxford Book of Prayer, edited by George Appleton.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt:

Put me to doing: put me to suffering:

Let me be employed for thee, or laid aside for thee:

Exalted for thee, or brought low for thee:

Let me be full, let me be empty:

Let me have all things: let me have nothing:

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth let it be ratified in heaven.

In this short series, I’ve responded to the common charge by the current crop of atheists about Christians being not too bright (Richard Dawkins), if not positively dangerous and downright insane, such that one simply must choose between contemporary science and religious faith, between one’s brains and one’s beliefs. And I have replied twice in the negative.

But there is an important sense in which Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. are on to something.

They say they can’t see how someone can reasonably believe the basic tenets of the Christian faith: that God is a trinity of one being in three persons; that one of those persons became human in Jesus of Nazareth; that Jesus of Nazareth atoned for the sins of the world on the cross; that the resurrection of Jesus signifies eternal life for all who trust in him; and that all of these propositions can be believed because taught by the Bible, which is to be accepted as the Word of God written.

And they’re right to find it impossible to see how someone can reasonably believe that–if by “reasonably believe” they cling to a particular mode of reasoning, namely, inference from empirical data or self-evident propositions.

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Much of the confusion in this discussion surrounds the question of faith. Faith is typically seen as non-rational or even irrational by its opponents, who congratulate themselves on adhering strictly to evidence, inference, and the like. Worse, faith is sometimes championed precisely as absurd or “supra-rational” by some of its defenders. (Um, thanks a lot, guys.)

At least two mistakes about the concept of faith need to be dealt with here. The first is to think that faith is a peculiarly religious word and has nothing to do with everyday life. The second is to presume that faith has no relationship to knowledge, that the two stand as utterly separate categories of assent.

Some of us might think we can do entirely without any sort of faith and conduct our lives strictly according to what we (think we) know. Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge.

Faith is what we do when we cantilever our lives out over what we do not and cannot know, while anchoring our lives upon what we think we do know. Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.

Darrell cannot know for certain that this canoe bobbing by the dock will still float once he gets in it, but he cannot be “mostly convinced” and stay with most of his weight committed to the canoe while reserving some of his weight for the dock. To enjoy the canoe, he has to get all the way in. He has to make a commitment. He has to exercise rationally-based faith.

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I was privileged to offer a public lecture this past week on the UBC campus on this question. I’ll write more about the topic soon, once I’m done a brief bit of travelling (Banff, Alberta, this weekend; the coastal town of Anacortes, Washington, the next).

But I confess that I had to resist offering the following flippant answers to the question instead of the serious ones I did (again, which I’ll set out for you soon):

“Yes, you do. That’s why I handed back my Ph.D. and professorship last week, and now happily believe unencumbered by intelligence.”

or

“Well, since I have so few of either, it’s no big deal for me…”

or

“Why do we have to keep answering this question? After two thousand years of Christianity, with figures as various and as brilliant as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, J. S. Bach, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and [fill in the names of any number of geniuses here] to point to, why is this still an interesting question?”

or

“This event is sponsored by UBC Christian students, who by definition have good brains (or they couldn’t get into UBC) and serious faith (or they wouldn’t bother sponsoring events such as this). Q.E.D. The End.”

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I said something more sober and sensible.

(But I did think it, I confess, and perhaps when you read this post’s heading, you thought something similar!)

A friend recently read my piece mentioned below, “A Bigger–and Smaller–View of Mission,” and asked this good question:

“You say you are an inclusivist (salvifically speaking). Isn’t the inclusivistic position really a gentler approach of the exclusivistic position (in the eye of a non-follower) since, at its core, it really believes that only through Christ people are ultimately saved even if they come through another religion (akin to J.N. Farquhar’s position on Christianity being the crown of Hinduism)? Or are these salvific positions to be viewed on a spectrum of pluralist, inclusivist, exclusivist? I would consider myself an exclusivist because I believe that only the true and living God ’saves’.”

There is much confusion about terms here in the scholarly literature, so no wonder my friend isn’t sure what is meant! Let’s see if what follows can help:

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The Seattle Times reports that Rev. Dr. Ann Holmes Reading, an Episcopal priest, has announced that she has been a Muslim for the last fifteen months. The conversion of a clergyperson of one faith to another is newsworthy, perhaps, but Dr. Holmes Reading has surprised people by declaring that she is both Christian and Muslim.

Her bishop has backed her, saying that he finds “the interfaith possibilities exciting,” while the leaders of her Islamic study centre welcome her. Other Episcopal and Islamic clergy, however, find the whole notion preposterous–indeed, heretical and blasphemous. Even the newspaper runs a list of contradictory doctrines.

The question at the heart of this interfaith controversy, of course, is what “faiths” are going to be “inter-ing.”

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A correspondent recently posed a series of good, tough questions about the nature of faith. One of them had to do with just how a Christian definition of faith differs from that of magic: “Some Christians pray as though they can compel God to do their will. I would argue that doing so is very much like or identical to doing magic.”

For the record, however, Jesus does seem to sound to some ears as if he is recommending a kind of magic: “Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, `Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22-24)

Health-and-wealth “prosperity” preaching loves this passage. So do certain sorts of faith-healers. “Name it and claim it,” they say.

So, is faith just a combination of wishful thinking and incantation?

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