What Is Faith? What Is It For? A Conversation

Video Summary:

James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Lutheran idea: faith is trusting God's promises, not intellectually assenting to a set of theological propositions.

Faith is not given to individuals in sufficient quantities, but communities. Similar to how an individual might not believe every line of a creed, but the church as a whole does. In organizing her faith community, the statement of faith required of members will be participating in the liturgy and sharing the eucharist.


David Shay: My initial reaction to this was that it was awesome to hear something that made sense to me about faith, but that I haven't articulated myself before in this way. I've seen a lot of these concepts in books on orthodoxy that I've read, especially the idea of things being based more in the community, the body, not just the individual. What were your thoughts, Dave?


Dave Mantel: I did a quick word study on that 1 Corinthians passage she mentioned, where Paul is addressing a "y'all,"--the community responsibility for faith, rather than the individual--and it doesn't normally get translated that way, but it could be, which is cool. I think a lot of times with this kind of stuff most people will translate something a certain way because it's always been done like that. So that stuck out as something I really liked.

But there was something I'm not sure I know how I feel about, where she talks about the creed, and how not everybody has to believe everything, as long as it all gets believed in the end--that's okay. I can see how that would be encouraging. But I don't know where I stand with that kind of thinking yet.


David Shay: I get that, but don't think we can take what she's saying in this video as "the rules" of faith. It's kind of a catch-22; the way she's presenting it, you almost can't say you disagree, because what she's saying is "Exactly!" and you'd be like "But I don't agree with that" and she'd say "I know, exactly, but we both love Christ and believe he's God." And that's kind of why a lot of what she said makes sense to me. Which brings us back to the first part of what she says, which is that faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Most of the time we only talk about the rules and the function of us being in love with the Creator, and we don't focus on the relationship with the Creator; what are the emotions that you feel, what are the unwritable things that happen to you; that sense is something that would be nice to bask in.


Dave Mantel: I understand what's being communicated, but I have a problem with the way that it's being put. I think it's really cool--there's two ways to think about this: one is that you don't have to have 100% faith in every doctrine all the time, and that's okay, because faith isn't about having all the right ideas all the time; and the other way is this, that there are a lot of extra rules... Rob Bell has a similar problem in his book, Velvet Elvis, where he talks about "flexible doctrine," and he uses the example of the virgin birth, and I'm like "That's not a good example!" because the virgin birth important to all of Christianity, but if you were talking about something else- things that are really side issues that not the whole Church agrees on (I view the content of the creeds as main issues, not side issues)- it's okay to wrestle with those things during different seasons. James?


James Davisson: I have to admit that my initial gut reaction to this video was almost entirely negative. For whatever reason, my brain reacted to the sentence "James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you" with the same kneejerk dislike I usually reserve for people proclaim inghow much they love eating organic produce while they do yoga. Liberal white people sitting around in a room agreeing with each other; I just reject the surface quality of this whole thing. Once I was able to get past that emotional response, I was able to get on board with a lot of what she was saying.

In fact, what I did with it was try to find someone more "orthodox" who might agree with or support her position, and what I came up with was something I remembered C.S. Lewis, that I think goes along with her second idea that faith might not require belief in every line of the creed:

The Resurrection and its consequences were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

To me, that sounds like Lewis saying something similar, that the essence of Christian faith is belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the impact that it has on humanity; everything else is commentary on that.


Dave Mantel: This goes back to our last conversation: what is the point of all this? What is it for? The end result of this conversation should not be "Do we all think the right things?" but "How does this help our relationship with God and each other?" So whatever we conclude should be in relation to those two things; not about doctrine, but relationship.


David Shay: Let me jump on that, relationship: I think that might be the cheesy part that James hated so much. My struggle with faith is that, when I look for someone who "has it going on" with their faith, it can be tought, I'm not actually sure I believe there's someone who actually knows who God is. I get emotional at church, but I'm just like a secular person in line at the Chiptole, or getting gift cards at Target; we live a very mundane life outside of church, outside of our practices. What is it actually like, though, when we analyze our lives and know we're dwelling beside the Creator; how does it make things different, what is the answer? It's not entirely to be found in what you believe, in doctrines, nor only in how you treat people, because we all know really nice people who don't believe in God. It's found in something else, I can't put it into words, but it's found in something that has no need to be proven to others; it's simply dwelling with God and letting God change you. I think we've lost touch as Christians because we're trying to prove too much to others, that what we believe makes sense, and we've forgotten to relate to God and each other. That's the obsession of the individual; all of us just trying to better our own lives instead of contribute to a community.


Dave Mantel: That's where I get sometimes; I get wrapped up in "head knowledge," in having the right ideas and telling other people about them. It's not something that changes my life; I'm not letting it. It's not expressed in loving other people, and that's the trap I get stuck in sometimes.


David Shay: Right. She says that maybe faith isn't for the individual, but I think it can be--there are people who have just, crazy amounts of faith, overflowing faith.

I know people who I admire as Christians, with very different theological views from me. I know a guy, he's very Reformed, and I am not, and I admire him, and I look up to him because of these weird moments we've had, like this time we were out with a group of people at camp in the woods, and it's midnight and crickets and animals are going off, and he says "Let's just stop for a second--y'all hear that song?" And we just stand there, silent, but the woods aren't silent--I think that sort of thing is more the point even than what this person even gave a sermon on earlier that evening, that is how the Kingdom of God can work. And that sounds pretty tree-huggish, wishy-washy, I get it, because I can't tell someone that story and it really hits them, necessarily, but I think that experience of community, faith, and God, that happen within that story, is an important thing. This person's theology that's different from mine, that's not as important.


James Davisson: Couple things. I question too what's important about Christianity and what sets us apart from good, secular people. And what does that is that we live in the age where Christ has come and changed things, and we can spread the word about that, and we can further his Kingdom even change the world for the better because of that story and the knowledge we have about it. And we too often look to the distant, end-of-time future, rather than this immediate future that we have the power to shape, as Christians. 

This other thing I was reminded of in listening to your comments was this item we've been meaning to talk about, this blog post called Twelve Myths Too Many Christians Believe, and the first myth is "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion." The idea is that we say things like this because we're uncomfortable with admitting that Christianity is a religion, because then maybe it's just one religion among many that are all equally right/wrong, the slippery slope of pluralism, etc. I'll quote from the post:

[I]it is entirely possible to believe that there are more religions than one while still holding to the perspective that yours is the right one. I feel that it is important to keep in mind that Christianity is indeed one religion among many because it will help us to see the Other as real – someone with beliefs that they hold as dear to them as we do ours. Naturally we think Christianity is the best religion available; if we did not, we would hold to a different one. Further, we believe that our particular church or denomination is the best expression of that faith; if we felt otherwise, we would go elsewhere. We must, however, allow ourselves to remember that there are others who do feel otherwise and are not idiots.

David Shay: My response is that God is not a religion, nor is Christ a religion; I think that our desire to know God is what created a religion. I think my biggest issue is that people don't acknowledge God as real, they acknowledge God as a figure, someone they know about that they read about in a book. But you have to experience God in the world.


James Davisson: I've heard some Christians speak on the idea that some people are given the ability to have faith, and some are not. Which is something that seems to be borne out in reality; cognitively speaking, there seem to be people who are and others who are not able to experience God, in terms of brain function. What do you guys think about that?


David Shay: I wonder about that; I wonder if it's something that appears outside of western societies. But it's an interesting question; what can you do? You love them, you share with them in experiences that you maybe see as spiritual and they maybe see as a good time. Go to a concert that you think is a spiritual experience and that they see as fun. And just believe what you believe; believe that the concert was spiritual and you shared it with someone who didn't feel that way.

Example, Erica and I went to a Sufjan Stevens concert and we all sang together, a capella, Come Thou Fount, I'm sure the theater was not filled with just Christians, but we all sang that song; people sang and closed their eyes, and I believe it glorified God. I don't know what the non-Christians would say about it, but I can say that I think it was good.



Dave Mantel: I've had similar experience; I was a Thrice farewell show, and there was a song where the bridge was "We are the image of the invisible," and I looked around and thought of the people singing along "Do you believe in that, or know what you're singing? Because it's true." That was one of those moments where I thought, this is interesting, it's a moment that glorifies God, this primal acknowledgement of God.

I think this ties into our other conversation about salvation and evangelism; if it's not about believing the right things- if someone is not predisposed to believe in or desire a deity, how do we interact with them? We have to live differently, not to make them conform to a doctrine, but to bring them into contact with the invisible.


David Shay: I think we've come full circle! Because that sounds a lot like "relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you." James, I want you to agree.


James Davisson: I mean, just after that sentence, I was like "I'm mostly on board," but before that I was like "Shut up!" That sentence just sounds so...homeopathic and new age-y to me.  My gut reaction, not my actual analysis.