Week One: Day Five - Myth #1: Belief is the same as Faith
STEP ONE: BREATHE
Take a deep, cleansing breath. Allow the air to fill your lungs and expand your body. Exhale and empty yourself into the room. Repeat three times - once for the one who Created you, once for the Incarnate One who walks beside you, and once for the Spirit whose life fills your being.
STEP TWO: DWELL IN WORD
“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
— 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
The first of the Faith Myths that we will be cracking open might raise an eyebrow or two. For some, it might seem downright wrong to suggest that belief is not the same as faith.
In our secular culture, faith and belief seem to be interchangeable and live in the realm of unsubstantiated opinion. I have my faith/beliefs, and you have yours. Thanks to the internet, we can see that the range of views is seemingly limitless. Many of these sentiments are fickle, temporary, or downright bizarre. Today we believe this; tomorrow we have faith in that. This movement is such that it can give us spiritual whiplash and we bounce back and forth.
What is more, since we define belief/faith as things that are accepted without proof, there appears no objectable way of sorting out between my 'truth' and yours. No matter how bizarre or baseless our convictions might be, we are allowed to hold them. Your beliefs in unicorns, large men in red suits, magic, and that the Twins are the best team in baseball, stand alongside my belief that you can't get a good slice of pizza outside the New York metro area. Oh, we can, and do, debate such things with varying degrees of passion. But at the end of the day, to each his/her wacky opinions.
No wonder we find ourselves spiritually adrift. We are bombarded with so many varying truths, lies, beliefs, sentiments, speculations, and even conspiracies. We have privatized faith in the process and have put it on a proverbial shelf along with other volumes of things disputed. We take faith down from the shelf only when we feel the need, or we want divine intervention in a crisis. If we don't get immediate satisfaction, we'll put it back and reach for the book of unicorn lore and get out our crystals.
It is time for us to crack open the myth that belief and faith are one and the same.
We start with clarifying our language and definitions. I have found Paul Tillich's distinction between belief and faith to be instructive. Belief is an act of knowledge with varying levels of evidence and probability. Like I mentioned above, we hold all sorts of beliefs with different levels of proof. We know stuff, and that stuff allows us to carry on in specific ways.
We make predictions about how things will turn out in the future because of things we believe to be true. For example, we buy a particular brand of car influenced by our belief, past experiences, and knowledge of a specific car company's track record. It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on something that we know will leave us stranded on the side of the road. Only time will tell if our trust was well placed. If we have years of hassle-free driving, then we were wise in believing in the carmaker whose product we chose.
Of course, we might hold out and despite all evidence and experience to the contrary continue to maintain that a particular manufacturer makes the best vehicles on the market. Some folks just buy Chevys or Fords no matter what. Belief works like that too.
Faith, on the other hand, is more significant than our accumulated beliefs and opinions. Tillich points to faith as a matter of existential import. What is the grounding for your life? What matters most? Where do you find the strength to live? There are no other books on this proverbial shelf for none are able to stand alongside our ultimate concern and conviction. No unicorns. No Twins. No New York pizza. Faith, if it is true faith, stands alone.
To have faith is to seek communion with God. It is a life-long quest of yearning, questioning, praying, doubting, and committing ourselves. Belief is undoubtedly a part of the journey. Traditions, experiences, sacred texts (such as the Bible), and wisdom all help to shape beliefs along the way. But none of these finite realities are ultimate in themselves. They all fall short of being God and therefore ought not be the object of our faith.
When we put faith in things that are not ultimate, we find ourselves engaging in blaphemous living. We exchange the mystery, majesty, and magnitude of the Divine for simple, tangible, and off-repeated creeds and doctrines of narrow belief. When this happens, we worship gods that are not GOD. These idols will disappoint and leave us in despair and desparation.
Seeking God which is above all and beyond limitations, we yearn to be set free from all that limits life and prevents relationships from flourishing. In short, we long for the kingdom that Jesus announced through his preaching, teaching, healing, and self- emptying living.
When we talk about faith, we are having a big conversation about big things. God. Existence. Life. We also get into places of good and evil, suffering, restoration,
redemption, and resurrection. Across the globe and within each religious tradition, questions related to all these are pondered endlessly. Wisdom and foolishness, insight and ignorance, clarity and confusion, all these things abound as each makes holy claims about faith.
Faith lives in that part of the human creature that we call the spirit or the soul. It is the spiritual lifeblood of all people. It can be felt, thought, experienced, imagined, measured, and observed. That said, language might have a hard time describing or capturing its essence. It is not unlike trying to catch a beam of light in a jar. Good luck with that.
We would do well to keep our thoughts about faith as open as possible, allowing for them to transform over time. Doubts and questions are actually useful tools, alongside belief, that can over time shape and form faith.
Though real, honest to goodness, faith is illusive and impossible to contain, it drives us onward to life itself. We find the courage to live through our faith. Perhaps that is the best proof of faith's existence. Because humans have faith, we carry on through all sorts of unknown perils and possibilities. Faith allows us to face the future and even death itself.
STEP THREE: RESPOND IN PRAYER
Gracious God, let me seek you above all things. Push me beyond the deepest of my convictions and darkest of my doubts. Nuture my faith so that it stays open to your unimaginable presence. Guide me to focus my life in your direction. Through Jesus Christ, amen.
Permission granted to share with friends and family. Copyrighted 2019. Walt Lichtenberger