Have Faith, Pursue truth!
In the coming days, week’s, months, as you encounter ideas and situations that seem a challenge to your faith or a challenge to Christianity itself, how do you think you’ll respond? Will you continue in your faith? If so…how will you do that?
There are two paths that I hope you don’t take…One is to give up…to easily be defeated. (Sometimes people abandon their faith)
The other is to retreat. Sometimes we run; we decide to just stick with what we know and with people who think the same as we do. We ignore the challenge, or dismiss it easily. At least we keep our faith, but I think the result is a weak and less effective faith.
In the face of challenging ideas, to give up or to retreat, while both are very real temptations, to choose them is to choose NOT to do the hard work of faith. And it’s hard work – it’s hard to honestly and seriously wrestle with an idea or challenge.
To do the hard work of faith, to be a genuine person of faith in this world, I think that amongst other things, this involves two key qualities: humility and courage. (And perhaps in a different way than you might think) Humility, to realize we may need to change a belief that needs to change; and courage, to look our questions and doubts in the eye, and not to look away.
In thinking about how to encourage you in your faith, two people come to mind: Galileo and Thomas.
I think about Galileo a lot. He lived at a time when most everyone around him believed something that he figured out was wrong, and he was persecuted for it. You probably know that he, along with Copernicus, discovered that the sun is stationary and the earth moves around it. The church leaders and most Christians at that time were convinced that the earth was the centre of things, and that the sun revolved around it. People had believed this for centuries, and they firmly believed this in large part because of what the Bible said.
And Galileo, he had it right, but he was labelled a heretic, his works banned and confiscated, and he was ordered to abandon his ideas. At his condemnation, the Holy tribunal stated that his ideas were “absurd and false”, because they were “expressly contrary to the Holy Scriptures”.
There are plenty of other examples of Christians sincerely getting it wrong. The gravestone of a seventeenth century American Puritan reads, “Sacred to the memory of Lynn S. Love, who, during his lifetime, killed 98 Indians that had been delivered into his hands by the Lord. He had hoped to make it 100 before the year ended when he fell asleep in the arms of Jesus in his home in New York state”.
It’s easy for us centuries later, to be smug, and from a distance think, “How incredible; how could they have gotten it so wrong?” But living then, that’s what made sense to them; it was hard for them to see another way.
We are not at the end of history. We, like they, are just at a point along the way, and if we are sincerely interested in truth, we need to remain open to where we may need to see things differently, and to the fact that where Christians see themselves today, at times, may in fact be wrong.
It’s a kind of integrity of the mind. We are called to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and MIND. When we are challenged, our first reaction needs to be an honest desire for the truth, whatever that might be. And that can be hard, but sometimes it’s the heretics who have it right.
Continue in your faith; a faith that is strong because it loves the truth. You can rest in the knowledge that “All truth is God’s truth”. That His truth will endure, and that a genuine pursuit of truth, ultimately brings us closer to a deeper knowledge of God. We hold onto God, not necessarily to all of our ideas about God. Remember Galileo.
Living with that kind of openness means also being open to our own doubts and questions. And that brings me to Thomas.
A Calvin College professor, in a recent article, describes Thomas’ so-called doubt as “a kind of brutally honest faith.” He reminds us that Jesus didn’t actually die in his sleep. Thomas’ questions were real and Jesus doesn’t reject him. What does He say? He says, “Peace be with you.” Then He invites him to wrestle with his questions as Jesus invites Thomas to put his hand into His broken body – to enter the brokenness.
When I was in high school, even though I was a leader of a Christian rock band, I certainly had questions about my faith, and still do. In particular…then it was the Holocaust and God’s apparent absence. I heard all of the explanations about God and evil, but none of it made much of an impression.
Someone then pointed me to the writer Rilke. In his “Letters to A Young Poet” he writes, “I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books, written in a very foreign language.” He goes on to say not only to love the questions, but LIVE the questions.
It’s easier to live feeling like we have everything all figured out; it’s usually harder but more real to live with our questions. Every question is not neatly linked to an answer, and when we doubt and struggle, we can do it in the spirit of the psalmist and the prophets, and our questions and shouts become a prayer.
Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he was taken from his home to the Auschwitz concentration camp and then to Buchenwald, where his parents and young sister died. He saw other children die there too. He didn’t write of his experience until 10 years after his liberation, but when he did, one of the things he said was simply this: “I don’t have the answers but I have a lot of very good questions”.
Christianity and the Bible itself asks a lot of good questions, and the Christian life is not so much about having all the answers, but about living deeply within those questions that really matter.
Last year, the journals of Mother Teresa were made public, and they revealed serious questions she had about her faith and her work. This great woman of faith lived with serious doubts. This, of course, should not surprise us. She along with so many others, from Abraham to St. John of the Cross, lived a genuine life of faith. It has been said that spiritual development is founded on two crucial things; the first is great faith; the second is great doubt. We seek truth, but we see “through a glass darkly.” At the heart of it all remains a mystery.
Remember Galileo – be unafraid of new ideas. Remember Thomas – be unafraid of your own questions. And with Galileo on one side, and Thomas on the other…trust God, have faith. Choose to hold onto God, and trust that He holds onto you in the messy-ness of this life of faith.
We are going to need that style of faith. It’s not exactly a cheery time to be on this planet. The planet, the world is in crisis, and we have before us a tremendous challenge and opportunity – it’s a huge responsibility to be alive at this point in time…to shape the changes we so desperately need.
May our faith guide us. May it be a healthy, vibrant, full, deep faith…a faith that can stand the light of day, and endure the dark of the night. May it give you hope and vision…courage and strength.
DC
