Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats “ The Second Coming”
What is faith? Is it an unshakable conviction? Is it the bottom line for what we believe? Is faith a certainty? Is it sometimes fragile trust in God? Is it a hope that battles with doubt?
Certainty
“Faith of our Fathers . . . We will be true to thee till death.”
“T’is so sweet to trust in Jesus, Just to take him at his word . . . Just to know, Thus saith the Lord.”
“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.”
These lines of favorite old Protestant hymns reminded me that nothing has been more sure than my faith in God. In a life that might be upset, faith was a guarantee that I was safe and confident. My parents and grandparents passed down a faith that could not be shaken.
In Sunday School I was taught that faith was the opposite of doubt. Cautionary tales of doubting were important: Peter walking on the water till his confidence failed, and he sank; Zechariah struck dumb by his lack of faith that his wife would become pregnant with John the Baptist; “Doubting Thomas” challenging the resurrection until he touched the nail prints in the hands of Jesus.
Faith was an available commodity we could pass on, but should not lose. We needed to be steadfast: “We will be true to thee till death.” Our unsaved friends also treated faith as a commodity. “I wish I had your faith,” some said to me, as if I had a stash of it in my wallet. It existed as a scarce, but reliable resource.
Jesus reinforced this concept of faith by scolding his disciples for their lack of faith, especially in the Gospel of Matthew (6:30, 8:26, 14:31; 16:8;17:20; 21:21). Yet Mark shows the paradox of having faith, yet needing faith, in the healing of the boy possessed by demons. When Jesus tells the father of the possessed boy, “All things can be done for the one who believes,” the father exclaims, “I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 8:24).” Jesus proceeded to heal the son despite the father’s admission of doubt.
Matthew’s concept that faith defied doubt and physical evidence found its way into the dictionary definition of faith:
- “unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)
Constancy in faith is the understanding that does not require “proof or evidence.” True faith dismissed the appearance of things. Jesus healed contrary to the evidence of hopeless infirmity. Jesus ignored the political predicament of his people. He also counseled against fortifying our material security with wealth in Matthew (6:19-21). The only reality was the coming of an invisible kingdom, “not of this world.”
In my family our middle class poverty was compensated by our future heavenly wealth. A lack of regard for money was considered a sign of faith. My mother’s favorite hymn was:
This world is not my home
I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up
Somewhere beyond the blue
It can be liberating to cast off materialistic goals, but in our family it minimized our savings or investment for retirement. We imagined spiritual wealth, and so believed we were never poor, even though a day never went by when my Dad did not say, “We can’t afford . . . .”
Because of our hope for heaven, we did not see social and political events as consequential. For example, we saw the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s as a compromise of faith in our future heavenly liberation. Faith meant that the material world did not matter as much as the spiritual world.
Faith devoted to permanent beliefs, independent of experience, could be described as “dogmatic” from the Latin word meaning “an opinion which one believes.” Experience does not threaten or revise dogmatic beliefs.
In my early experience, faith was certainty, and certainty became a disregard for material reality, a detachment from facts and evidence. Peter walking on water was total faith; his sinking in the waves was a loss of faith. Enduring faith dismissed the material circumstances of life.
Uncertainty
After a mid-life battle with doubt, I looked back at what the Christian Bible said about faith. I found a new definition in the Epistle to the Hebrews, attributed to a contemporary of the Apostle Paul:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
This version of faith seemed more paradoxical, less certain than what I had been taught.
“Convictions” and “assurance” were something we chose to believe. Not banked commodities, but high-stakes beliefs. As defined in Hebrews, faith seemed less a legacy or acquisition, but a gift. This faith is “organic,” because experience could revise our beliefs, allowing us to grow in understanding, as well as faith.
The biblical epistles are likely to show faith as a gift, as in the letter to the Ephesians “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (2:8). Or when enumerating the gifts of the Spirit, Paul says, “To one is given the utterance of wisdom . . , to another faith by the same Spirit (I Corinthians 12:9).
Faith was not about guarantees, but about hopes. Faith was not about a substitute reality, but about a conviction we could not empirically prove. Therefore, faith was not certain, not a foregone conclusion, but an “organic” faith that could change with experience. We had a faith that could struggle with doubt.
I think of the Yeats poem, quoted above, as prophetic for this time and place. My alternatives for faith relate to the famous lines from “The Second Coming:”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Sometimes “passionate intensity” can be dangerous. With passionate intensity, Crusaders killed Muslims; Muslims killed Crusaders. With passionate intensity the Spanish Inquisition killed both. With passionate intensity Protestants killed Catholics in the war Yeats wrote about.
There’s something about the tension between faith and doubt that makes us humble. We are not so vindictive, when we realize we are blessed with a gift of faith, not a guarantee. It may be all right to have convictions, not certainties. We can hope to listen and hope we can be heard.