I've had a couple of recent posts about faith, belief, reality and the like, and I want to bring them toward a conclusion. I can't say that this present post is going to follow precisely where the last one left off, but it should be close enough.

I've been talking about what I consider to be a confusion in mainstream Christianity between faith and intellectual belief, and I closed the previous post in this area with the philosophical idea that to believe a proposition p is to act is if p is true. Setting aside Pilate's question of what is truth, I tend to think that most of us adhere to this statement about belief and action; even if only by default in that it is part of our Western tradition. A simple example would be that if the weather forecast claims it will rain tomorrow, then if you believe it you will dress accordingly, carry an umbrella, or plan on getting wet. On the other hand, if you don't believe it then you will do none of these things. Your actions, even if only mental, will be in accord with your belief concerning the forecast.

So if our religion tells us that faith is intellectual belief, and if our intellectual tradition tells us that to believe is to act accordingly, then the implication is that if we have faith, we will act according to it. I'm pretty sure that plenty of preachers have used James chapter two to make this very point. Well taken. I would absolutely, fully agree that in a large and general sense, if my faith does not direct my life, I probably don't really have any faith after all. But, bear with me, oftentimes there are some serious problems with this as it actually plays out in Christian life.

No one argues that faith is important, and the "stronger" one's faith, the better. Absolutely. But, suppose that faith equals intellectual belief and so requires action in accord. Then when presented with an article of faith, for me to have faith at all, I must act in accord with the acceptance of that article. The more decisive and sure and confident my action, the party line goes, the stronger my faith. The more God is happy with me. The better my chances of Heaven. This is a strong motivation to find within myself an equilibrium between belief and action; read, my faith and my living. Striving for this equilibrium is quite complex—more complex than most care to think about. It occurs at multiple levels, with multiple articles, simultaneously. The ability to reconcile one article of faith with one action or way of being affects all the others. The quantities of articles vary from person to person, from a few to hundreds, and at the latter end of the spectrum, the mathematics are relentless. At the lowest level, the articles begin with "There is a God, yes or no?" and "Does it make a difference?" and "There is a Heaven and a Hell, yes or no?" and so forth. Obviously, what a person thinks and feels about these sets the stage for everything to come. Bluntly speaking, it's a matter of analyzing chance and probabilities with our innate human propagator/predictor. I know that sentence sounds like it comes from an engineer, but if the shoe fits, and besides, I'm convinced this is how it is. Well, almost all of the time. More on this later.

And so, in the work of trudging through all the interlinked possibilities, there are a few basic ways this all plays out in the individual person. The lines between them aren't cast in stone and there is some mixing together of them, but they're the ingredients of the pie. (1) We can work backwards from how we are willing to act, that is, how we are willing to live, and let this determine what we believe. This does reconcile belief and action, but it's a bit short of taking part in a life-changing spiritual path. If, for example, I am unwilling to give up my incessant greed for bigger and more expensive material goods, I will not allow myself to believe that the Bible calls us to do so. I will instead pluck from the Bible the idea that God wants to richly bless his children, and smile complacently at the new SUV in my driveway. Note that this now becomes a value in the mathematical analysis, and colors what I can or cannot believe a "blessing" to be. (2) We can start with belief, and claim to believe certain things, but fail (or refuse) to act accordingly. This approach has two major divisions I'll call "moral frailty" and "hypocrisy."

Moral frailty believes, and desires to submit and act according to the belief, but is unable to do so. To me, this is the authentic Christian place, and in it rests the entire concept of the Christian struggle vis-à-vis the Grace of God. I intellectually believe that God calls me to places and states of being that I am as yet unable to go, although it is my heart's earnest desire to do so. My actions and my beliefs do not match, but I am trying, because faith (note: faith, not intellectual belief) tells me that in hope, in trust, in devotion to God in all my poverty I will grow and I will progress. That in all my regrettable human failings, God's Grace is more than sufficient to cover me. Paul covers this just fine in Romans chapter seven and on into eight:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (NRSV).

As for hypocrisy, forgive me for creating a taxonomy here, but hypocrisy must be broken into two parts, both of which are types of moral fraud. The first hypocrisy is the good old-fashioned kind, of which the world (often rightly) accuses Christians. In this form of hypocrisy, the speaker claims, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," while proudly doing otherwise because he doesn't think he will be caught, or because he thinks he has some special right to act in opposition to his claims. This hypocrisy is a blatant and public moral fraud, wherein claimed belief and action do not meet, and there is no intent to make them meet. The second hypocrisy is an inward moral fraud which says, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," wherein the speaker believes he does, in fact, live according to the belief, but in actuality does not. While the first form of hypocrisy keeps the world from liking Christians, the second form keeps people from wanting to be Christian. After all, who likes somebody who is a phony on the outside, and who wants to become a person who is phony and self-deluded on the inside? I figure—nobody.

So. At this point, we have four possible methods for dealing with the tension between belief and action:

1. Pride: Allowing my own selfish will to determine what is believable to me.
   
2. Moral frailty: Believing, and wanting to act, but failing in human weakness.
   
3. Blatant Hypocrisy: Saying I believe but knowingly acting otherwise.
   
4. Inward Hypocrisy: Saying I believe, and mistakenly believing that I act according to my belief.
   

Like I said earlier, these are the four main methods I see, although they come mixed together in differing amounts within each of us. To my mind, number two is the truly Christian situation, and I want to note briefly that it begins to demonstrate the problem with thinking of "faith" as synonymous with "intellectual belief." Belief becomes null and void without action in kind, and therefore thinking in these terms can drive a would-be Christian crazy. It leads one to think, "Since I cannot act this way, or be that way, I obviously don't believe (read: I obviously have no faith), and therefore (yada-yada…) God will send me to Hell. But the fact of the matter is, faith is not wholly dependent on our ability to act or be a certain way, but rather in our desire and effort to do or be so. Faith is made perfect in the God in whom we have faith. Belief is often impossible because of our inability to act according to it, but faith is never confounded because God makes up for our frailties and therefore faith is not nullified by human weakness.

Almost done. Having read the previous paragraph, and accepting for the moment that there are people who have never been taught its idea, now consider the fifth method for dealing with "faith" as tension between belief and action. This is the ugly one I alluded to in my previous post on this topic. Sigh… here goes…

In this fifth method, the Christian thinks something along the lines of: "To please God, I must have faith, which means I must believe, which means I must act." I'm going to cut to the chase here and get it over with; the thing that has been bothering me for quite a while now. Consider this approach, this mindset, presented with the following combined articles of faith:

There is a God. There is a Heaven and a Hell. The saved go to Heaven. The unsaved go to Hell. Faith saves us. Lack of faith damns us. All worldly concerns are meaningless compared to gaining or losing salvation. Heaven is a better place to be than is Earth. Heaven is eternal bliss. Hell is eternal suffering. All children go to Heaven when they die. Few adults go to Heaven when they die. Murder is a sin and endangers your soul. Greater love has no man, than he give up his life for another [(by extension, his soul)]. The primary duty of a good parent, as much as it is within their power, is to lead their children to Heaven and save them from Hell.

And so I have to ask, what happens? As an answer, I give you—Andrea Yates. Now, please please don't misunderstand me. Ms. Yates' murdering of her children was an act of total insanity, embedded in what I can only call theological evil. Absolutely, without doubt. And I stand by that statement whether she was "clinically" insane or not. To murder, let alone children, let alone your own children, is pure insanity. And, it is an act of evil. However—and this is my point—in a state of being where one is fully devoted to his or her faith beyond all things, and where faith is viewed as synonymous with intellectual belief, and where it is recognized that to believe is to act, well… Ms. Yates' actions were positively, imminently, logical. What's more, in this (twisted, erroneous) view of faith, her actions were incontrovertibly acts of strong, resolute, unwavering faith on par with… well, Abram and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. This is terribly, terribly problematic to any Christianity (or other religion for that matter) that confuses faith and belief. The Yates case is, it seems to me, the reductio ad absurdum argument demonstrating in horrific, tragic consequences the dirty little secret of the brand of Christianity in which she was immersed: it is flawed at its very core.

Lots of times "in church," we are lead to think that when we cannot believe something, that if are not convinced beyond a shadow of doubt about an article of faith, that there is something wrong with us; that our faith is weak or flawed, that we are a bad Christian or not "truly" a Christian at all. This thinking is wrong, and for the (thankfully) rare individual who falls prey to it with a full commitment, tragedy results. Evil results. There is something wrong with a system that calls "good" what logically culminates in evil. It's not a system I can accept.

So. What's this mean? It means that we who are Christians are not supposed to be convinced of certain things. We are supposed to have times of doubt. We are supposed to be frail and weak. It is necessary that we be so, in order that God's Grace may always and forever be the one Thing which perfects our faith. The power is not in our faith, but in Whom we have faith. That's a story for another post, but I want to leave with this: the Yates story really, really stuck in my gut, on a number of levels. In a nutshell, the thought I couldn't get out of my head was that she managed to find within herself, after some break with all that is holy, the will to do exactly what her religion taught her that a fantastically faithful Christian would logically do—and it could not have been any more wrong. It made me think about the basis and history of my personal faith, let me tell you. And you know what? Here's my confession. Do I really, really believe there's a Heaven just like I've been taught? Nope. I don't. I don't, and I am so very glad I don't. But you know what else? I have faith that there's a Heaven (of sorts); I really, really do. And thank God, there's a huge difference between the two.

If you haven’t already done so, you should scroll down and read my previous posts that are part I and II of The Weak and the Strong.

TO INTERJECT a bit of levity into this discussion, I am thinking of a couple of religious jokes that go hand in hand with the topic. If you’ve ever spent time in certain Christian denominations, the jokes will bring a smile to your face. If you haven’t, then, well, they won’t make any sense at all.

Why don’t people from certain denominations ever make love standing up? They’re afraid somebody will see them, and think that they’re dancing.

If you belong to a certain denomination, and if you go fishing, why should you always bring along two friends from your congregation? Because if you only bring one, he’ll drink all of your beer.

Now, the cynical, critical or uneducated person would say that these jokes are about Christian hypocrisy. But this would, in almost all cases, be incorrect. These jokes are not about hypocrisy, but about the struggle for what some might call propriety. In this post, I refer to it as expediency.

Expediency is one of the things at the heart of what Paul says in Romans fourteen, and he mentions it explicitly in two places (chapters six and ten) of first Corinthians. In my previous post, I referred to these latter places by noting that Paul seems to accept a claim that was being made by at least one person in the Corinthian church: “All things are permissible.” Paul’s response, interestingly enough, was not to deny the claim, but to put it into perspective. It appears to me similar to the idea of a person saying, “I’m stronger than he is, and I can end this issue by wiping the floor with his face,” and a mediator saying, “You’re stronger than he is and you can end the issue by wiping the floor with his face… but is this the most responsible and mature way to handle it?” Paul is not denying, and seems to accept, that all things are permissible for those of faith, but qualifies the idea by noting that not all things are beneficial for the brotherhood. To whom does the burden fall to act responsibly, with the best interest of all parties at heart? To the one who has the ability to command the situation. In the case of our would-be bully, it is up to him to choose to resolve the issue with something more mutually beneficial than brute force.

It is the delicate dance of a person acting in his or her own faith while attempting not to damage the faith of others, that often leads to being accused of hypocrisy. Now, don’t get me wrong—I know that there is plenty of hypocrisy in the church. I’m just saying that most non-believers, who are not familiar with the issues at stake, mistakenly view behavior born of the weak/strong/expediency issue as being hypocrisy. There isn’t a lot we can do about this, but we should keep it in mind, because it can help us understand the viewpoints of those who aren’t enmeshed in the situation. But I digress.

At this point, it should go almost without saying that while Paul’s ideas are at one level of great comfort (a vindication, in fact) to those who believe in Christian liberty, the pill to swallow is that his ideas place a much larger portion of responsibility upon them. If your faith is strong (and, yes, therefore relatively “liberal”), then it is your responsibility to live your Christian life with a sense of responsibility to those who are not. This is not intended to sound condescending, nor should it be so. Nor is it a blanket sanctioning of the dummying-down of faith. To condescend and to dummy-down our faith are both, in my opinion, mistakes. But what is the person of stronger faith to do, especially given these last two points?

As best as I can tell, struggle. Struggle in prayer, struggle in humility, struggle in your own frustrations. Struggle to allow God to kill all the pride and arrogance in your life. Struggle to successfully teach what you can, struggle to successfully swallow what you have to. Struggle to never be condescending. Struggle to not let the message of Jesus be dummied-down. Struggle to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Struggle to remember that Jesus said much will be required from the one who is given much. Struggle to remember that even Jesus admitted to keeping his mouth shut, and not sharing what he knew others could not bear to hear. But most of all, struggle to love your Christian brethren with the love of God. If you are strong in faith, then your strength comes from your knowledge that it is only the love of God that matters. So struggle to act according to your faith, and live in the love of God above all things.

If you haven’t already read it, you should scroll down and look at my December 01 post, The Weak and the Strong.

NOW, NOTHING is ever as simple as we would like it to be, or when it is rather simple we seem to have to make it complicated. In either case, there is a verse in Romans fourteen that can cause a problem for us. A popular translation of the sixteenth verse goes like this: “Do not let what you consider good to be spoken of as evil.” Another translation takes it as, “So do not let your good be spoken of as evil.” And, a literal translation of the original Greek would go something like, “Not let be insulted then of you the good.”

What are we supposed to do with this? It appears first to place us into a quandary, because here in the middle of Paul talking about how we should keep things to ourselves, do everything to preserve peace amongst our brethren, not judge one another, and not cause one another to fail in the weaknesses of our faiths, there appears to be the admonition to stand up for a doctrinal point that we believe is right. Certainly, I have more than once met a person who will quote this verse as a justification for publicly (and sometimes heatedly) defending his or her views or attacking other views. And more problematic than that, you do not have to think about this very long before you figure out that if we persist in this vein, we will soon all be at each other’s throats.

But it seems to me that when taken in context, what Paul is saying is that we need to make sure the strength and goodness of our faith is not exercised carelessly, such that it brings damage to another good (yet weaker) faith, which would end up causing our good faith to be viewed and spoken of as a bad thing. In more simple terms, our good beliefs can have bad effects, and we must be careful not to let this happen. This admonition of Paul is the same admonition he is making over and over again in various ways throughout the chapter. There is no quandary. We have misused the sixteenth verse to promote our own views, rather than to censor our own views. It is another thing we have gotten backwards.

Reading through the fourteenth chapter, I am unable to escape the idea that if we all followed Paul’s advice given therein, then eventually we would all pretty much end up sitting around with nobody ever complaining about another person’s faith. We would all simply consider each other brothers and sisters in God, trusting in him to accept our individual faiths as they are. It also strikes me that, after some thought, one is inclined to make a statement that is far too outlandish for us to accept: That when it comes to living as a Christian who has a strong enough faith, we can do anything in faith that we care to do, and remain in sound relationship with God. I will admit that this is a pretty crazy conclusion, and honestly I don’t think I personally know anybody who would agree with it. But, come to think of it, it is a claim that (in the sixth and tenth chapters of First Corinthians) Paul seems to accept as true.

SO FAR, Romans fourteen is tons of fun if you happen to be a Christian who believes in liberty. But the fact of the matter is, for those who value liberty, this chapter has a down side that demands a great deal—too much for some to bear. Such will be the point of discussion in part three of The Weak and the Strong.

PAUL, IN the fourteenth chapter of Romans, addresses a problem that still exists, virtually unchanged, in Christian churches and society at large today: The faith of those who are “weak” versus the faith of those who are “strong.”

I encourage you to read it, since it only takes a couple of minutes and there is no substitute for reading something for yourself. But, the gist of it is that some Christians were doing things that other Christians believed to be wrong, and it was causing a big problem amongst the fellowship of believers. In a nutshell and to get my points, according to Paul the stronger faith is the one which recognizes a liberty in Christ that the comparatively weaker faith does not. I find this interesting for two main reasons.

One, I have spent a lot of years in churches where the people of “strong” faith are considered to be those who most steadfastly hold to, and prescribe to others, as many items of doctrine concerning proper Christian morality as possible. A man who has lived sixty years never flinching on the importance of keeping the rules becomes one worthy of special note for his devotion to his faith. He becomes an icon of strength. Nobody ever seems to speak much about the fact that, according to Paul, he is quite likely a person of weak faith.

I’m not trying in any way to insult such a person, and certainly a well developed discipline and a heartfelt devotion to doctrine, when present, are very honorable and admirable things. I’m just saying we have our definitions backwards, and if we ever come to see this, it may change our thinking in grand and glorious ways.

Two, and the part I was thinking of at the beginning of the post, is that Paul makes a statement that is obviously born of personal experience and observation: He tells the weak not to judge the strong, and he tells the strong not to hold the weak in contempt. It seems that those of weak faith, who placed importance on following all the rules just so, considered the strong to be in danger of Hell. And, it seems, the strong, who understood that rules were of little consequence, considered the weak to be, well, stupid. These two derogatory views are born of different understandings, but they equate to a common thing—both the weak and the strong considered the other to be less in the sight of God than they were. This reminds me a lot of our churches, politics, and whatever else we can think of today. Half of us think the other ones are riding a rocket sled on rails straight into Hell, the other half thinks the first half is just plain stupid, and each side thinks the other side has no clue at all about God.

Paul tells us to leave each other alone in our own faiths, to love one another, and not to injure each other’s faith. For, what the weak believes, he believes in faith, and what the strong believes, he believes in faith. It is the faith, not the particular belief, that matters.

I KNOW many Christians who loathe the kind of thinking that leads a person like me to type out that last sentence and mean it with complete conviction. According to them it invites all kinds of evil, like “situation ethics” and “moral relativity.”

Which are, as far as I can tell, completely biblical concepts.