The Squinting Eyes of Faith

“Do statements like Ed’s challenge your faith?”

No, I’m afraid they don’t challenge my faith. People come to faith and lose their faith for the darndest reasons. The reasons we offer to explain our new faith or to explain our lost faith so often have nothing to do with the reality.

Most of us struggle day to day. Most of us cannot answer all of the intellectual difficulties that can be and are posed to our faith. But as Newman said, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”

The human heart has its own reasons, both to believe and to disbelieve.

May God have mercy upon us.

Actually, that would mean your theology would’ve started in the year 2033, whereas you’re granting that the Catholic theology started at the time of Christ. Not that that’s what you meant, though.

C.S. Lewis said “where there is a difficulty, we can expect to find a discovery”. Honest searching and earnest questioning will be honored by God (it is one of the joys of our salvation that THE MAKER OF EVERYTHING chooses to reveal tidbits of His creativity to us personally thru Holy Spirit). In fact, I feel like it is better to leave the church for a time if you are not going for the right reasons, if you are not fellowshiping and involving yourself in service, etc, than simply to show uip and warm a pew. At least you are then being honest with yourself and your God. I do admire Ed for his honesty (I am assuming this is what he is being, anyway I have no reason to doubt that he is). Holy Spirit can do anything, but our hearts are much more sensetive when we are not trying to sell them something.

I find, coming from the evangelical/semi-fundamental background that I do, that too many Christians from my neck of the theological woods tend to try to explain every little thing — which is where some of the more reasonable skeptics get their best excuses to dismiss Christianity.

My bro-in-law was saying the other day that one of the things he admires about Catholic theology (in contrast to Protestant theology) is that it still embraces the mystery of certain teachings (using the actual word “mystery” even), whereas certain other sects of Christianity try too hard to make their faith sound totally logical.

Maybe that’s a little of what repels folks like Ed. I think the apologist slant of many of my Christian brethren can come off as little more than insecurity — and many people won’t buy what you’re selling if they don’t think you’re all that sold on it yourself.

In honor of my absent bro-in-law, that’s my two cents…

Pontificator, I’m glad you stopped by and contributed. 🙂 How has your faith life been lately? I read with great interest your appraisals of the sad shape the Anglican Church is in.

Yup. Been there, done that. I too had the experience of defending Christianity vigorously and rigorously for several years–so much so that I alienated a few friends in the process–only to feel less honest the more intense my defense became.

An extended metaphor I used a few years ago while explaining this to a friend is that Christianity is like a huge machine. It’s been built and rebuilt and modified and fixed up and bubble-gummed re-painted and expanded and remodeled for thousands of years now. All the builders and rebuilders and modifiers and fixer-uppers and bubble-gummers and painters and expanders and remodelers are, of course, quite proud of their work and the way they have kept this machine running. After all, it is no small task to maintain a particular worldview for thousands of years as the world changes rapidly around it. But all too often I found that the job of the ordinary Christian is merely to circle the wagons around the machine, so to speak, to stand with their backs to this gigantic monstrosity, listening to it shake, rattle, and hum while constantly affirming its stability, uniqueness, unity of design, etc. People on the outside, though, can easily look over their heads and see something that looks absolutely ridiculous, like some kind of hopeless, fantastical Dr. Seussian contraption. Meanwhile, every now and then, ordinary Christians turn around, so to speak, and get an eyeful. Suddenly they’re terrified. (Find a minister and ask how many people have shown up in private with desperate concerns about the viability of the scriptures, church history, and the faith itself, precipitated by, say, actually reading the Bible and finding something terrifying in its pages.)

After a while, I got tired of passively defending the machine, so I decided to get in on the action of maintenance, the dirty work of theology–smoothing over the lumps, making sure things work right with a changing world and problems or contingencies that were never explicitly anticipated by the scriptures, things like that. Off to the Christian university for me, with seminary on the horizon. But then I realized that all the people who were doing that work were just like me, and that the whole thing was made up by people, some of whom had good intentions, some of whom did not.

Furthermore, amongst the theologians, thinkers, and ministers I encountered, there was a surprising–no, astonishing–number of them who, while they toed the party line in public, were not shy about admitting their doubts in private. Though, as we all know, woe be to that Christian scholar who says these things in public, e.g., John Robinson, John Spong, Robert Funk, John Crossan, Hans Kung, et al. I would go down to the library and, like a good, honest Christian, read these guys’ books, feel shaken to the core, and then go knocking on the doors of thinkers and theologians, and even my own pastor, to have them debunked. Well, no, I was was told, after some hemm