Reflection on Faith

At the core of the religious journey is a sense of faith. Unfortunately, too often, folks seem to reduce their understanding of faith to some mishmash of long ago learned words that have little meaning to them and no impact upon them. That reductionism is detrimental to spiritual health.

At the end of February, when Vicki and I were in Athens for the first annual Piedmont Conference on Religion and the Liberal Arts, we went to the local Borders bookstore. While there, I came across a new book by Brad Hirschfield entitled, You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right. From his title, you can tell that Hirschfield speaks against the current intolerance he sees in religion.

I, of course, did not have time to read the entire book, but a quote on the nature of faith early in the book caught my eye. Hirschfield wrote, "When faith simplifies things that need to remain complex, instead of giving us strength to live with complexity, when it gives answers where none exists, instead of helping us appreciate the sacredness of living with questions, when it offers certainty when there needs to be doubt and when it tells us that we have arrived when we should still be searching – then there is a problem with that faith." (page 9)

His description of an "appropriate" faith certainly seems to go against the dominant trend of the understanding of faith in many American churches. Most folks I have met want a "simple to express" faith and an "I have all the answers" faith. For them, a faith as described by Hirschfield is no faith at all.

When I was a young person, I was nurtured in a Southern Baptist church. The good people of the Fort Sanders Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee taught me Bible stories during Sunday School and Training Union classes. They invested themselves in my life and showed me love so that I could begin to catch a glimpse of God's love. The faith that grew inside me was a simple one - one that could be grasped by a 6 year old. I embraced that faith and allowed it to embrace me.

Yet, this faith was based on a "zero sum" understanding of truth. By that I mean, I was taught that my group had the truth, and, if some group who taught something differently from us was also acknowledged as having truth, then, somehow our truth was diminished. As a Baptist, I was taught to be quite skeptical, dismissive even, of every other religious group's teaching, including other Christian churches. The old joke about Baptists thinking they will be the only ones in heaven is more accurate than joking.

As I journeyed in my faith pilgrimage, I began to ask questions of the scripture and of my teachers and ministers that were not considered "proper to ask." I have been chided for engaging in "foolish disputations" more than once. But, I could not help myself. I wanted to know more, and the answers I had been given were not sufficient to deal with my questions.

So, my faith, especially since seminary days, has been one of complexity and questions and on-going pilgrimage. Paul Tillich, in his book Dynamics of Faith, wrote "Faith is certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy. But faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a finite being." I recognize my finiteness as I struggle in faith to comprehend the infinite.

I would suppose that some of the migration from one religious denomination to another taking place in America (see the earlier post on the Pew Center American Religious Survey) might reflect people's search for an expression of faith in church that goes beyond the simple.