Thinking Christian

I’ve been having an interesting interaction with The Atheist Ethicist on the nature of faith, here and here. Please feel free to join in.

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Some time ago a commenter here wrote,

The core problem is that religion teaches that holding absolute beliefs without evidence (aka faith) is a virtue.

Is that what faith is? No, actually not. The other day in a Bible study at church, I noticed a great way to illustrate the difference between this and true faith. There are four different accounts of the life of Jesus Christ in the Bible, known as the four Gospels (a word whose etymological roots go back to “good news”): Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each of these presents a kind of narrative biography, mostly of the last three years of Jesus’ life on earth. No biography tells every detail of its subject’s life, and no two biographies of one person cover the same details. This is true of the Gospels.

All four Gospels tell of Jesus calling Peter to be one of his followers; in that they are all the same. Two of the accounts are very similar, and it is very likely that Matthew borrowed from Mark here:

Matthew 4:18-20 (all scriptures quoted from the ESV):

While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Mark 1:16-18:

Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

This looks a lot like the way some people conceive of faith. You meet someone or get some kind of idea or impression, and boom! you change everything you think about the world. There’s no evidence, no logic, no background, no thinking. Now, I do not mean to distort the purpose or message of these two accounts. If they do not teach a clear message about how faith is acquired, that is because that was not their authors’ intent. I mean this instead as an illustration of how faith can be misunderstood by those who think they have the full context, when in fact they do not. Let’s broaden our view to get a more complete picture, starting with the Gospel of John.

John 1:35-42:

The next day again John [the Baptist] was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter).

Here we discover that Peter’s brother had been a disciple of John the Baptist, and we know that John had been preaching about Jesus Christ. He had more than just a glance from Jesus to go on, he had very strong personal references. Interestingly, there are some scholars who think this event may have been a full year before Jesus came and called Peter, as recorded in the passages quoted above. Jesus seems to have had a one-year period of ministry in Judea (where Jerusalem is) early in his time of ministry. This event with Andrew was probably before that year, and the final call to Peter was probably afterward, when Jesus traveled the 70 or so miles north to begin his Galilean ministry. If that’s true, then Peter had plenty of time to think about this great man he had met, to ponder his teachings, and to hear of his reputation.

Even if that’s not the case, the picture we have in Luke tells us even more clearly what Peter was working from when he decided to follow Christ. He had seen Christ at work (Luke 4:38-39):

And he [Jesus] arose and left the synagogue and entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to him on her behalf. And he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her, and immediately she rose and began to serve them.

And much more beyond that (Luke 5:1-11):

On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

Peter never “left everything and followed him” until after he had had (possibly) a year to think through what he knew at first about Jesus, seen Jesus heal his wife’s mother, heard Jesus teach at least once, and seen Jesus perform the miracle of the fish. Peter’s faith in following Jesus was no blind leap. It was based on an experienced reality, on data he had had a chance to reflect upon. “If I leave everything to follow this man, will I end up a starving itinerant no-good?” he might have asked himself. But he would have known by then that Jesus was truly good, by his teaching; and that Jesus could certainly find food when he needed it!

Of course he still had to have faith to follow. He was trusting his whole life and future to this teacher Jesus, and to the God whom Jesus taught. But it was not belief against the evidence. It was belief based on evidences and experience. God can grant a person faith by directly relating to a person’s heart, and there is always that element in any person’s coming into a faith relationship with him. Still, a tried and tested faith knows from experience also that God is real and God is good. For some of us who have the inclination to explore it, our faith also rests on the trustworthy testimony of history, where the reports of Jesus’ life can be tested like any other historical report, and on evidences from nature, human experience, and philosophical reflection.

Faith is not a leap into the dark against evidence. It’s a leap into the light of God, based on knowledge and experience.

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Do people really believe in God? That’s the question Bradley Monton asked in a blog entry today. He’s a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, an atheist, and yet somewhat sympathetic toward Intelligent Design. He begins today’s article,

I’ve recently read a couple different pieces arguing that belief in God is less common that it superficially appears — many people who profess belief in God don’t really believe.

The pieces he’s referring to are one by George Rey, who thinks “people who say they believe in God are deceiving themselves,” and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He quotes Dennett,

some people who consider themselves believers actually just believe in the concept of God. … They … think that their concept of God is so much better than the other concepts of God that they should devote themselves to spreading the Word. But they don’t believe in God in the strong sense. (p. 216)

Of course I’m excerpting from Mr. Monton’s excerpts; I’m counting on you reading his own article to get the full sense of how he represents these two writers. Ultimately he doesn’t agree with either of them.

It leads me to wonder just what they have in mind by “believe.” In the excellent book edited by Ravi Zacharias, Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, Michael Ramsden writes (p. 138-139),

This conviction is often expressed most politely in the following form: “Michael, I’m so happy that you’re a Christian, and I wish I could believe what you believe, but I can’t.” In my experience, what most people mean by this is: “Michael, I am so happy that you are so happy. There seems to be a joy and completeness in your life that I find attractive. But the reason you are happy is because you are a Christian. In other words, you believe in things that are not true or real.” (Now, what do you call people who believe in things that are not there? The answer is, lunatics.) So what they are saying is, “Michael, you are actually insane. But the main thing is that you are happy and insane. And I am happy that you are happy. As a matter of fact, I’m so desperate to be happy, that I too would embrace insanity just to join you, but I can’t do it. I’ve thought about it, but I just can’t.”

Ramsden’s point here is that faith is not some kind of wishful thinking. To believe in Christ is actually to consider that the message of Christ is really true, that there really is a God, and that Jesus Christ really is his risen Son. It is, moreover (for those who are inclined to look deeply into these matters) to consider it true after having considered the matter from the perspective of evidences and reason in the face of multiple challenges.

It is, in one sense, to consider it the right answer to the question, what is ultimate reality? It is much, much more than this besides. Belief is not merely about considering something the right answer; it is about entering into a trust relationship with a living Person, and arranging one’s life accordingly. Nevertheless it is also not less than what one considers actually to be the right answer to that question.

So the question, “do people really believe in God?” resolves in part to, “do people really, having considered the question as carefully as their abilities permit them to, consider it true that God exists?” The answer of course is yes.

Following a brief discussion on that, Monton moves on to another form of the question that I find very intriguing, because it touches on belief beyond the “right answer” level:

That said, there are real issues about how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God, issues that I’ve thought about long before reading Rey and Dennett. For example, people who say they fully believe in God, and fully believe that saved people are going to heaven, are nevertheless really sad when a loved one dies. Why? These theists should believe that the loved one, assuming the loved one is saved too, is in a much better place than Earth. The theists should be happy that the loved one is in a better place — just as I would be happy if my loved one got to go on an amazing vacation.

He could have stopped after just that first clause. How can we Christians reconcile our behavior with our professed belief in God? Are we as loving, as just, as devoted to truth, as worshipful toward God, as humble as our beliefs call for us to be? Of course not. We’re all on a path, at different places and moving at different speeds, and often our behavior is at odds with our beliefs. You could hardly ask for a better short explanation of our problem and the solution than what’s in 1 John 1:8-10 through 1 John 2:1-2:*

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

The truth is, we mess up. Our one hope is the loving grace of God through Jesus Christ.

But what about grieving for the departed? I don’t know how much experience Mr. Monton has with various grieving families. Those with more experience than I say they do see a difference between believers and non-believers, broadly speaking (certainly there are exceptions). The difference is not so much in the degree of sadness but in the degree of hope. My mother died two years ago. I still get a heart-stab thinking about it. It was hard to say good-bye, and it’s still hard. But it’s not a sadness of desperation, and in fact there is joy in it. I am very, very glad for Mom—even though I miss her.

In a few short years my son and daughter will (presumably) be going off to college. I’ll be very happy for them, very pleased and proud—and I’m quite sure I’ll blubber like an idiot, because I know I’ll miss them. That’s the kind of sadness true believers feel when other true believers go to be with the Lord. We’re sad because we miss them. Jesus himself wept when Lazarus died (John 11:28-37, including the shortest verse in the Bible).

So the question of Christian grieving is not so hard to answer after all. Had Monton just stopped after that one clause, “how to reconcile people’s behavior with their professed belief in God,” he would have had his finger pointed at the really tough problem, the one that continually concerns me more than all the logical questions that have ever been thrown at me.

*I’ve split up that reference for the sake of link software that can’t understand it written out as one.

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