Faith Journey (part 2)

In my last post I briefly sketched out my years of uncritical faith, up to about 2006, after which I think I can detect the first glimmer of change. But before I turn to that, I want to reflect briefly on what prevented those changes taking place much earlier. What kept me in a state of uncritical, realist faith for so many years?

After all, it’s not as if I lived a theological bubble, completely sealed off from the world. Of course I was aware that  alternative ways of understanding life, the universe and everything existed. And not just in the world outside the church, but also held by many members of the church itself. And so naturally, my faith also was populated with lots of little question marks. But here’s the thing to understand: any doubts I did have were kept safely on the margins of thought, on the back benches of my mind, where they could have no real say.

This state of mental quarantine was reinforced by a number of factors.

The most important of these, as obvious as it sounds, was simply the influence of other Christians and the believing community as a whole. Most of my family and friends, mentors and teachers were Christian, and so it’s no surprise that my own beliefs were shaped by the common faith. This was all the more with those whose approval I sought or friendship I valued. I don’t think this is terribly unusual: we are social creatures, after all, and it’s commonly recognized that long before we assent to our beliefs or opinions consciously, the tradition we belong to has already determined our basic outlook. The effect of this was that even when alternatives or objections to Christian belief possessed real merit, they could easily be kept at a safe difference. There was simply no need, or desire, to engage with opinions that others were not bothering with. In short, our need to belong more often than not shapes the way we will believe. 

And this leads to a second factor. If you had invested a good part of your life in a religious vocation, as I had done, it didn’t make practical sense to think too seriously about intellectual challenges to the faith. Why challenge the very way of life that gives your life meaning, purpose and a salary? Not that I thought of it in those terms. But if you have a sermon to prepare, a bible study to lead, a confirmation class to teach, a pastoral visit to conduct, and a persona to maintain, it makes no sense to be thinking against the grain. Nothing would ever get done that way. In fact, it would paralyze you. Even when my views did begin to change, I just had to shut the door on such thoughts in the acts of leading worship or teaching or pastoral care. For much of the time, the state of my soul was determined by the demands of my role.

The third factor was the regular – almost daily – practice of bible reading and prayer. For many years the habit of scripture meditation achieved precisely what such spiritual exercises are designed to achieve – to keep you believing, reading and praying, and generally enmeshing you more deeply in the Christian thought world. For we know that without language, (human) thought is not possible. From our earliest years onward, language heard and spoken shapes both our conscious and unconscious mental world. The biblical passages I read and meditated on likewise shaped the pattern of my thinking. By praying my beliefs I confirmed them and incrementally sharpened my take on reality. At the time, of course, I understood this as the work of the Holy Spirit, who works through the word of God to create and sustain faith, and who reveals truths that reason could never arrive at. Formed in Lutheran piety, I  prayed that the Holy Spirit would always guide me into the truth and keep me from error, shape my emotions, heal my desires, direct my will, and generally bring about in my life whatever the text was on about.

What’s more, the worldview gained from such spiritual reinforcement served to frame and interpret any doubts, struggles, or temptations I did experience.  Any number of biblical passages (and centuries of Christian reflection) interpret doubt in such a way to reinforce faith. The human person is dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1-5), hard of heart (Psalm 95:8), spiritually blind and deaf (Mark 8:17-18), and naturally incapable of grasping the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:12-14). We naturally prefer the darkness of sin to the light of truth (John 3:19-20). And that’s not even mentioning the presence of the evil one who works day and night to undermine our faith (Matthew 13:19; 1 Peter 5:8). The net result of this is that any objection to Christian belief is framed within the very categories provided by the belief system itself. The believer then comes to believe that this is precisely what they can expect. Place your trust in the word, and without a doubt (!) the evil one will sow his thorns and weeds.

As a theological student this inoculation against heresy was carried even further. For one of the curious facts is that practically every argument against the factual and historical truth claims of Christian dogma has been raised by biblical scholarship. (If you want to seriously question the virgin birth, the resurrection, biblical miracles, or the last times, get into some contemporary biblical scholarship, much of which has kept apace, and even broken new ground, in the field of hermeneutics). However, I remember being urged by mentors and teachers not to take this stuff on board! For these so-called biblical scholars were infected by liberalism, they had ‘axes to grind’, they were captive to the spirit of the age, they were products of outdated ‘Enlightenment thinking’, they were casualties of twentieth century apostasy. Once again, I was being taught to negatively interpret anything that challenged the faith - even it came from reputable biblical scholarship.

All three factors – the believing community, the demands of vocation, the practice of prayer and meditation – served to marginalize (but not eradicate) any alternative to Christian belief.

All the same, I think it’s worth pointing out that my portrayal makes it seem more clear cut than it probably was. (That’s the nature of narrative, it tends to tidy up the irregularities and inconsistencies of lived experience.) So I’ll conclude this longer than anticipated post with several small spanners that always seemed to obstruct the effective working of my faith.

First, there was no time that I ever felt comfortable with witnessing or sharing my faith with non-believers, unless I knew them really well. Public manifestations of thankfulness ‘to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ made me cringe.  Obviously this was a liability as a pastor, and made me feel somewhat guilty and cowardly. Once again, I could interpret this ‘weakness’ in categories provided by the faith itself (e.g., Matthew 10:32-33). Even so, I put a lot of this down to personality. I was comfortable enough defending, explaining and promoting the faith to those who wanted to listen – but figured that evangelism just wasn’t my gift. But furthermore, no matter what the faith taught, I just couldn’t get gripped by the urgency of saving people from eternal damnation, simply on account of their not believing the way we did. It just seemed to stretch reality too far. I did occasionally preach on judgment or hell, if the text suggested it. And I was deeply concerned that my own children should grow up in the faith. But it seemed harder to generalize this concern beyond the circle of my immediate family.

Another faith spanner was my sneaking suspicion that prayer and intercession did not really have much (or any) effect on the state of the world, apart from the effect it had on the person praying, or on the person who was told that others were praying for them. As a pastor I repeatedly prayed my way through the membership list of my congregation, asking God to keep them in faith , to bring them to faith, to let the word of Christ produce fruit in their lives, and so on. As I grew in maturity and hopefully humility, I not only prayed for them, but with them, recognizing that we are all cut from the same cloth. But despite all the biblical promises about prayer, and despite the assurances that prayer is a secret and hidden work whose outcome in known to God alone,  I found myself wondering. In most cases it just seemed that a person’s commitment to church and faith came down to fairly observable sociological reasons, such as the need for community, the solace of religion in times of need, their upbringing, personality, and so on. Prayer by itself seemed to have very little to do with it, unless ‘converted’ into tangible action. In this sense praying was not much different to the way thinking about others can lead (ideally) to helping and engaging with others. Hence the saying: ‘Prayer does not change things, but it changes people who change things’. Fair enough.  

But as I’ve said, such ‘doubts’, if that’s what they were, stayed on the edges of my thought – they did not get the stage, nor did they hold the microphone. My beliefs continued to form my view of reality, and largely because it ‘worked’ so well. Christian faith gave me a highly effective framework to interpret almost any experience, in particular the experience of failure and fallibility, and did so in a way that only validated its narratives, doctrines, practices, and values all the more. 

Next time I'll start writing about how the challenges to orthodoxy began to take center stage and how my belief system began to change.