The Spirit & Faith
One of the 'gifts of the Spirit'
Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 12 is faith (vs 9). Much of the New Testament is
guided by the view that faith in Jesus Christ, is the result of the activity of
the Spirit. Paul explicitly says that no one can proclaim Jesus Lord without
the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). This kind of view is not universal throughout
the New Testament. For instance, when Peter has what is probably the most
famous confession of faith in the New Testament, it is the Father and not the
Spirit that is named as the Source (Matthew 16:13-20). But throughout the
Church's history, the idea that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit has often
been dominant, especially among protestants, and I am definitely a protestant
Christian.
Much of my reflection on faith has
been rather intellectual and volitional. One has certain experiences, and
reflects on those experiences. Having reflected fully, one realizes the
possibilities those experiences indicate, what they might mean, and it is very
big indeed. However, these experiences are not the type that can give one
certainty, and so one must take a risk, and go out on an adventure, seeing how
far they can push those experiences and finding out where all they leave. One
makes a commitment to the reality those experiences seem to point to, God and the Church, and walks
down the life of faith. As one walks down that life, one is confronted with
some difficulties or problems, like the problem of evil. So confronted, one
must choose what kind of faith life best deals with them, and I argued in my
last book that Christianity looked the best.
I think that a lot of this is true
so far as it goes. But it must be remembered that volition includes more than just the mind, it includes the heart and
the imagination. The adventure of faith is something we take because, through
certain experiences, we feel called to it, and we feel empowered to make
a decision to leap into uncertainty and risk, on the hope and the considered
possibility of finding something truly 'better' in life. Whitehead describes
the nature of the religious experience and commitment succinctly when he says,
"In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the
attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its
individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is
world-loyalty. The spirit at once surrenders itself to this universal claim and
appropriates it for itself. So far as it is dominated by religious experience,
life is conditioned by this formative principle, equally individual and
general, equally actual and beyond completed act, equally compelling
recognition and permissive of disregard." The religious experience, the
call of God, always comes to us as something that might be vastly important and
yet something that we have the option to throw away if we so choose. But it is
the choice, and the experiences that bring about faith, it is the sense of
being called to anything at all, that gives us a place for the Spirit, and an
important one.
And as it is for faith in God, and
in religious experience, so it is with faith in Jesus Christ. We can only
become Christians if we feel called to it, if we feel ourselves 'nudged' a
certain direction. No doubt, reflective, intellectual reasoning plays a role in
this, but no reasoning, no power, no inspiration is possible without the Spirit
anyways, so we don't have to dichotomize our lives between that which the
Spirit affects and that which it does not. So the Spirit is the Source of faith
in the following ways:
First of all, the Spirit prepares
our hearts and the hearts of all humankind for faith through what I have called
elsewhere (look up), "mundane religious experiences". These are
encounters with the world, ways of experiencing the world, that everyone
shares. When we sit and reflect on what these experiences are like, what
philosophers would call their 'phenomenology', they give us some indication
that there is more to life than
meets the eye. Some of these experiences include artistic and aesthetic
sensibilities, play, humor, our experience with the concept of perfection, the
experience of innocence, hope, and as I've mentioned in this book, certain
skills that strike us has having come from a higher source. When we live into
the moments that are defined by these experiences we get the sense that there
is more to life than meets the eye.
There is an inspiring quality to them, they move us to consider certain things
and perhaps to live in certain ways. That inspirational quality can only come
by the Spirit, the Spirit is inspiration and motivation. In this way the Spirit
prepares the heart for faith.
Second the Spirit prepares the heart
for faith in Christ specifically through repentance. By confronting us with an
ideal possibility, what we could be in each moment, the Spirit also reveals the
imperfection of the world. This gives us our sense of God as transcendently
good, it is how the Spirit brings Yahweh's transcendent goodness and confronts
the world with it. This is the source of our sense of the otherness of God.
This reveals our need for something other than ourselves to save us, it makes
us aware of our dependence on the goodness of God. It also enlightens the
problem of evil, since this encounter with God makes us keenly aware of the
evil in the world, and we are forced to try to reconcile this goodness we
encounter in and through the world, and the evil that seems to define so much
of it. Bringing to bear ideals of mercy and justice, it also enlightens the
'prophetic problem', the problem of how we are to reconcile God's mercy and
justice. By confronting us with our own sinfulness, the Spirit makes us aware
of our need for God, by confronting us with the sinfulness of the world, it
makes some solution to the problem of evil necessary, by confronting us with
mercy and justice it makes us aware of the prophetic problem. To the degree
that these problems demand a solution which Jesus Christ seems to give (and I
argued extensively and I think persuasively in my last book He did), the
Spirit's gift of repentance is the gift of faith in Christ Jesus. John the
Baptist must baptize with the water of repentance before we can receive the
Christ.
Finally, to the prepared and
receptive heart the Spirit can give the call of faith, it can give us a role
that includes belief in Jesus Christ. But we must be very careful here. It is
so easy to go around judging people who do not believe or do not believe as we
do, especially if what we think God has chosen to deny them the gift of the
Spirit. I do not think that this is the way we should understand the Spirit or
its role in our faith-life. It is not meant to be used as weapon, a dividing
line, or a law book whereby we can judge others as less than ourselves. We are
not to aggrandize ourselves as having received faith through the Spirit nor
judge others as having been judged unworthy by God. This is antithetical to the
unity which defines Her, and the humility that defines Christ.
We need to keep our eyes on the
mystery that is the Spirit, and the Spirit's work. We cannot know all that is
going on in a person, nor why it is that the gift of faith has not been given.
Honest people reject belief in God for honest reasons. Faith is a matter of
'seeing' and we can't ever be sure why it is some people see and some don't but
we should not just assume that God has judged them unworthy. In the vision of
the Holy Spirit given here, the Spirit is limited by what is going on in the
world. The image it gives is of the 'best' the world can do, given the facts on
the ground as they are. The free choices of the past place a limit on the
Spirit's power. It can only offer roles, and empower people, in relation to
what situations people find themselves in. And our situations are not just an
external matter, they include our states of mind and abilities. Who we are is
largely our responsibility, but it is not completely our responsibility. If a
person, because of the horrors of the world, or because their mind has been
hardened by past experiences into a purely empirical relationship with the
world, cannot give themsel ves over to faith, it is not always in the Spirit's
power to countervale this situation. They may just be too far along a given
path for a singular and 'all-at-once' leap into faith. The role they are called
to may not include belief in God or Christ, at least right now. I don't doubt
that the Spirit, in the end, in the long term, wants to bring all people to
faith in Christ and even Jesus Christ, but a person may not be in a place where
that is psychologically possible for them, right now.
Things cannot 'jump' into an
absolute perfection. Perfection is a process. The Spirit's ultimate goal may be
to make all people believers, but it can't do that until a process of
transformation begins. A person's heart would have to be worked on, and the
world they see around them would have to change. The next 'moment' the Spirit
calls the person to, the completion the person is called to, is limited by what
the person is now. So in the next moment the atheist may be called to do
something or see something that would, given enough time, bring him or her to
faith, but that doesn't mean that the next moment is one in which the atheist
will have faith, necessarily.
In fact, the best the world can be right
now may include athiests. If an atheist, for instance, can defend the
goodness of Christianity as an institution to other atheists without being a
Christian themselves, such that their fellows won't be militantly opposed to
it, it may be that this position makes them a better ally to the work for the
Spirit than they would be if they came to belief. As such, the call they have
received, though they would not understand it as a 'call', might not yet
include a call to faith. We cannot box the Father in, His plans and ways may be
broader than our own limited vision. We also need to be careful not to
underestimate (nor overestimate, for that matter), the pervasiveness of sin. A
parent who claims to be a Christian may also be an abuser of their child,
should it surprise us that the child or those who claim solidarity with that
child may, right now, be literally unable to accept the faith call? And
in such a case it would do no good. There are some things that are impossible,
even for God, even in relation to the human soul.
There are certainly some people who
probably recieve the call of faith and reject it. We cannot know for certain
when we are dealing with one situation or the other, and we should be very wary
of labelling anyone the devil, believer or non-believer. Rather, let us rejoice
for the gift that we have been given in the form of a call to faith and the
power we have received to respond to that call, testifying to the fact that
nothing we accomplish is possible without God's help. Our response to the
atheist should not be hatred or rejection, and certainly not rejection in the
name of God. The Book of Job explicitly speaks against this kind of approach.
Rather we should seek solidarity with the sufferer, even when their suffering
leads them to rejection of God (Job 6:14), and try to make the world the kind
of place that reflects the truth we believe: that God is real and that God
cares about us. Lets seek not to judge the work of the Spirit, but rather to
grease the wheels so the Spirit can bring all souls into Her wondrous Truth.
We should also remember that faith is not the
only gift of the Spirit. Faith is a wonderful gift, but relationship with God
is more important than faith, and
the Spirit ensures that God relates to all beings, all creatures, all objects,
whether they know it or not. An atheist may be gifted in healing through means
other than miracles, or in kindness or faithfulness, or in hospitality, to
degrees greater than we are. And they may be recipients of the greatest gift of
all, prophecy. There are, no doubt, many atheists who have spoken God's Word
without even knowing it. There have been non-believers who have spoken on issues
in ways that are truly Holy, when believers have kept darkly silent.
In my last book I made a distinction
between the "Institutional Church " and the "Hidden Church ".
I said that the Institutional
Church 's job was to make
Jesus Christ's existence presence to the consciousness of the world, to help
people experience Christ's life, death, and resurrection. The Hidden Church ,
I contended, is where God is working in the world, bringing about the Kingdom.
We could never identify its workings, because it was animated by an
ever-mysterious Spirit. While I have distanced myself from the idea that the
Spirit is in all ways mysterious or uknowable, I still maintain that the Spirit
is Holy Mystery. I want to re-affirm my Hidden Church/Institutional Church distinction.
The Institutional
Church 's job is to embody
the Spirit by pointing the way to Christ, through the man Jesus. We bring Jesus
into people's lives through sacraments, by bringing the Disciples' experience
of Jesus Christ, and ours, to more
and more people. We ourselves also
re-acquaint ourselves with Him continuously. The Hidden Church
is the true Body of Christ, the places in the world that have been brought in
line with the Character of Christ, with the Mind of the Universe. This may
happen through Jesus, and it was for this reason in part that Christ came into
the world as Jesus, but it can also come directly through the Spirit. It may be
in the Church's food bank, or in the atheist's gift to a homeless man. Any
moment that is in line with the behavior of Jesus, is Christ with us. It is
important to remember that Jesus identified His family as those who do the
Will of His Father (Matthew 12:49-50). It is about action, not belief. In the
process of becoming the Body of Christ, on the road to theosis, an atheist may
be farther along than I am.
But belief does matter. It is
through faith in Christ that we deepen our relationship with The Spirit. Faith
helps the Spirit empower, and sustain us. Harold Kushner in WHO NEEDS GOD once
suggested that the main difference between the average morally committed
atheist and the average believer may be that day after day, as the 'long, hard
slog' that is the war against sin drags on, the atheist may find that the well
of power that he finds within him has dried up. Whereas the believer has an
Infinite Well to turn to, to be refreshed from, to gain strength from. The
Spirit's ability to empower the individual may be limited by our unwillingness
to turn to God, to pray, to find faith. The atheist may find that the role he
or she is called to is one that they can no longer fulfill, without the gift of
faith. Hopefully at that point, the heart will be ready for the gift, because
we need all the warriors we can.
The upshot of all this is that
Christ's body extends beyond the Institutional
Church . It no doubt
includes not only atheists, but even more so
other religious movements as well. Balaam, in the Bible, is a pagan, but he is
able to receive the Spirit of God for the benefit of the Israelite people
(Numbers 24:2). The Spirit works in all movements for good in the world, and
doubtless other cultures and other faiths have had access to the Spirit in
countless ways. The Spirit loves variety, and it may have prepared the world
for Christ by expressing God's reality to the world, in vastly different ways
in all of the world's great religions and cultures. No Person of the Trinity
can be boxed in too tightly. Nearly every religion includes conversations that
have been moved along by the Holy Spirit, and may include insights from the
same Spirit that are superior to the ones found in the Bible. There may be
conversations that the Bible doesn't include at all, that are important in
their own right. But we must, as Christians, see all of these religious
movements as pointing the way towards Christ. We should proclaim the Spirit-led
truths that we find in any religion, and yet also proclaim the Spirit-led truth
of Jesus Christ. We need to learn, through theological dialogue, philosophical
reflection, and by helping people experience Jesus, to bring Christ to bare on
all that the Spirit has done throughout the world. But we must, as with the
atheist, respect the decision any person comes to, knowing that we are not in
control of all that happens to the world, and that not even God is. To do
otherwise is to be an enemy to freedom, and thereby to remove from ourselves
the image of the Spirit that we are supposed to be taking on.
The Church should also consider the
idea that it is Christ that we need to be pointing people to, and this may not
mean that we have to point them to Jesus. I am not saying that we should stop
proclaiming Jesus Christ, the Man-God, quite the opposite. What I am saying is
that through Jesus people may experience Christ and accept Christ without
accepting Jesus. Harold Kushner does not believe in the Trinity, nor in Jesus
as God, but he does accept a vision of God as Suffering Love, as limited and
creating/redeeming through a process much like crucifixion and resurrection.
Alfred N Whitehead did not believe in the Trinity, but he saw Jesus as a
reflection of Who God is. He coined the succinctly Christian phrase: "God
is the co-sufferer Who understands". To the degree that these people, and
others, have allowed a Christian vision of God to shape their theology (though
I'm not sure Kushner is fully aware how indebted to Christianity he is for his
vision), I believe they have accepted Christ without becoming Christians. I
think that God's goal in and through Jesus Christ has been fulfilled in them.
Jesus the man cannot become a stumbling block to accepting the Son. Jesus IS
the Son, to accept the one is to accept the other and vice versa. We need to
quit worrying so much about historical and philosophical formulations. If our
proclamation of Jesus Christ brings the world to a vision of God, of various
cultural expressions, that is Suffering Love, I'd say that we will have
fulfilled our call to baptize 'all the nations' 'in His Name'. One consequence
of this, however, is that there are a lot of Christians who need converting to
Christ. There are so many who claim solidarity with Jesus Christ but who
believe in a God that has no relationship to the Image we receive from Him.
Harold Kushner is more a Christian
than they.
I want to make one modification to
the Hidden/Institutional Church idea here. I said in my last book that the Institutional Church
could never move with confidence that is the selfsame Hidden Church ,
except in hindsight. I want to amend that, I think now that The Institutional
Church can move in confidence that is the Body of Christ in one way: during
worship. When it takes the position of the nothing, giving all glory to
Another, proclaiming its own sinfulness and its absolute dependence on Christ
and the Spirit, it can have some confidence that it is moving as the Body of
Christ, and more over as a reflection
of the reality of the Spirit. There are so many ways the Church tries to
express that reality, so many arguments as to when worship has truly reached
the summit of the Spirit's world. So many ways in which the Church has claimed
to be a community of the 'Born Again'. Those arguments will form the backbone
or our next section.
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