Faith Needs No Justification
Here's a slight rewording of a comment I left on Crystal’s Perspectives that sums up how I experience faith:
For me it’s come down to "the fact of faith" as I call it in that chapter of Original Faith - and being OK with not knowing what might justify my faith or even being able to know that it's justified.
You could say that my personal re-formation hasn't been about "Justification by faith alone" but the discovery that "Faith stands alone, requiring no justification."
Faith is a function of being. Belief does not create it. Disbelief cannot abolish it. There is only being more or less present to something already presenting itself to you.
For me it’s come down to "the fact of faith" as I call it in that chapter of Original Faith - and being OK with not knowing what might justify my faith or even being able to know that it's justified.
You could say that my personal re-formation hasn't been about "Justification by faith alone" but the discovery that "Faith stands alone, requiring no justification."
Faith is a function of being. Belief does not create it. Disbelief cannot abolish it. There is only being more or less present to something already presenting itself to you.
Posted by Paul at 7:18 PM Permalink
24 Comments:
I need no justification for my faith...I don't need to know (yet, times I have known, without really searching)
and My faith is not anything to be questioned by anybody else -- one of those things I am firm about,
wishes,
devika
This was your reply to my post:
"Susie, I think you point to what might be summarized as three important sources of belief – sources not only for belief in the resurrection, but for holding any religious belief.
The first is a sense of tradition, including being able to pass it on to your children and grandson. The second is participation in a faith community – and pretty much any such community, especially in Western traditions, is going to be belief-centered. The third is that belief in the resurrection makes life meaningful for you, and the comment here from iq seconds that motion...
As you point out, these aren’t reasons for belief. I would characterize them as powerful motives to believe, and add that you aren’t the only believer that isn’t able to offer compelling reasons. I think no one can. Here are a couple things that suggest as much.
First, people don’t become Christians when someone presents them with such compelling logic and argumentation that they end up saying – “Oh yeah, I see what you mean… don’t know what I could have been thinking not to believe that Jesus was God resurrecting in the flesh!” Second, people raised in other belief-traditions, like Islam and Judaism, are in exactly the same position as believing Christians. They believe, yet are unable to offer reasons that others find compelling.
I would disagree with Pascal and say rather that the heart has no reasons, and doesn’t need any. And I mean that in a postive sense, having a heart myself.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment to my blog, with its very good question indeed which I'm about to try and answer..."
Paul, I still think Pascal is right. :-) ""The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all."
Thanks so much for your insight over the years. I am glad I have gotten to know you.
I appreciate being where I am and listening to everyone's comments here and with our friends ...
My thoughts to you -
Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters Inspirational Stories
Thanks for the mention. I have to admit, I don't really know what people mean by "faith". I just a hope about God existing and what he may be like if he does. Can you say more about what faith or having faith means?
Each implies the other. Trust in life as we know it now implies hope in where it’s headed, while ultimate hope means that life as we know it now is trustable.
You've asked me where I think you and I differ in respect to the major premise of your book (which, drawing from this post as well as the title, is the idea of faith, whether one calls that faith a trust in a god or human goodness or in an over-riding natural intelligence). My sense isn't that it's all ok. It's that whatever we call life simply is. The okay or not okay comes from us, from our judgments about our experiences.
If there is a guy in the sky creating and keeping track (there may be but I am allowing myself my doubts), then I'd go with E.L. Doctorow's assertion that we better hope never to meet IT because IT would scare us to death.
To digress, I'm making my way through Chapter Five. The concepts here remind me of the Option Method of asking the following questions:
1. What are you unhappy about? (identify)
What do you mean? (clarify)
2. What [is it] about that, that makes you unhappy? (identify)
What do you mean? (clarify)
3. Why are you unhappy about that? (identify)
What do you mean? (clarify)
4. What are you afraid would happen or What are you afraid it would mean if you were not unhappy about that?
5. Why would it have to mean that? or Do I still believe that [being happy would be bad for me right now]?
There's a lot to be said for discovering what you think and why you think that.
As an additional aside, the word verification for this comment is "mindjise". One of the definitions of the acronym JISE is: Joint Intelligence Support Element
Cool, eh?
I’m saying that with or without an explanation, faith exists as your direct, unmediated experience of a profound sense of trust in relation to life or being itself.
“It’s all OK” refers to this experience and not a value judgment. In the book, the “June Night” section presents the time I experienced this most directly and powerfully.
I suppose you could go from the experience of feeling that it’s all OK or alright to “life is good,” and that would be a value judgment. But you don’t have to go there. Going by my own values I’d have to say that life, particularly human life, is at least as bad as it is good. But I prefer not getting into the business of passing judgment on humanity – I just don’t know enough about what we’re doing here, the future, our relationship to the long term history of this planet etc. etc.
Even if you have faith in an experience of trust in life itself (and these words get cloudy when you mix them up), you are putting a value judgment on it. Trust by its very definition (the main one being confidence in and reliance on good qualities, especially fairness, truth, honor, or ability) is a value judgment (good qualities). I don't think we can NOT judge.
For me, yes when it comes to other people, no when it comes to life or being itself. I’ve experienced existential trust most clearly and powerfully when faced with major adversities/mortality.
Things seem not very ok here - there is a lot of suffering. Do you mean suffering isn't bad? Do you mean that even if things are bad here, that's ok? Why is it ok?
I guess many Christians would say that things are indeed bad here but that God either makes them ok by giving them meaning, or he makes up for the badness later in the afterlife.
But you don't see it that way, do you?
Crystal – What I’m talking about is more like a feeling than a value or judgment: I am very deeply not worried.
This doesn’t mean that I never feel worry, anger, or sadness. It just means that I feel these things superficially as compared with this other thing that I call faith and that I experience as how I’m made and not as depending on my getting myself to believe that God or the world does this or that and that’s why I shouldn’t be worried.
My not-worriedness doesn’t need permission. It doesn’t depend on any explanations anyone can or can’t give me for why I am profoundly not worried.
On “going beyond the definitions we’ve been using” see reply to Kaushik below.
Kaushik – I view becoming more aware of one's faith as an important dimension of a broader process of identity development. (For anyone who has my book, see the discussion of how faith can become “statement-like.”)
I really want to understand what you mean but the words trip me up.
It’s this process of identity development that my book as a whole looks at: a process of re-identification from an identity based at least as much on your egoism as your love to one that’s centered mainly on your love and finally to one that includes your love but begins to transcend it.
Most folks are fine with accepting an older institutionalized cosmology because they assume that others have put a lot of thought into it and that's good enough...why should they have to waste time investigating the source?
The brain evolved to assign the assumptions of others as a means of furthering our own cause. Humans live to find mutually beneficial relationships...that's why we always seem to end up in some "group". As long as everybody else believes the same basic themes we feel connected..regardless if there is any empirical evidence. It is more important to belong than to understand..we're sort of lazy..but we needed quick answers because living day to day was dangerous and time consuming.
"A sense that it’s all OK. We’re time-bound creatures so you can break it down further as trust in relation to the present and hope in relation to future or ultimate reality.
Each implies the other. Trust in life as we know it now implies hope in where it’s headed, while ultimate hope means that life as we know it now is trustable."
unbundling like that - disconnecting it from articles of 'faith' like particular dieties - changes everything.
on my path we often say that we're not good at faith, we like direct information and that is what we seek. But that really does refer to the details. The larger sense of trust was already there for me, but was greatly deepened on this path.
And here I've always said I was baffled by faith.
I think, though, that most wouldn't define it as generously as you.
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