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Creeds, Scripture and Post enlightenment
27 January 2007
Rev'd Cate Thron, Priest Associate
"You are my chosen one on whom I depend, indeed I chose you, formed you, brought you into being and sustain you – I give meaning and purpose to your existence, you are to speak my word, bring me into being in the world."
The first bible reading today is taken from a prophetic book attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, who may have exercised his ministry ay the end of the 7th and beginning of the 6th century BCE. In this passage we hear the narrative of Jeremiah’s call, which follows a typical pattern of prophetic call; God identifies the task and commissions the called one to be God’s agent, the commissioned one responds with excuses, God promises to be with the commissioned one and gives a sign.
Both these explanations could be used to extract meaning from the Old Testament passage from Jeremiah read today. Both feed us and inform us - albeit in different ways. We would not expect to be asked to chose between the two, or ask that we judge one or the other, for their differences provide complementarity, feeding both our head and our heart. So why then do we think it’s reasonable to assess and judge scriptural and creedal texts that evolved in a world of understanding well before the Enlightenment by just those Enlightenment scientific, standards with their scientific ways of understanding?
Now what on earth do I mean? Let me explain.
While much of the Dean’s media activity was underway I was on holiday in the South Island, where the NZ Herald seems to be about as common as a Blues supporter in Canterbury territory, there are some but you really have to know where to look! Not only that but religion and the people we were with weren’t on conversational terms nor was religion a priority for people in camping grounds – from what we could understand from the conversations that flowed freely through tent walls, religion wasn’t even on the horizons.. So when I returned to the North Island and to Auckland I was interested to hear all that had been going on and somewhat bemused that despite the furore caused by the articles it hadn’t even touched the world in which I had been living. So without wanting to belittle anyone or the debate, it seemed the pond in which the ripples had been made wasn’t located near the larger one I’d been swimming in.
Although these issues are important for those of us who have a commitment or interest in faith and religion the reality is that they simply don’t touch the lives of many people. It occurred to me that if we expend all our energy on insular debates we’re likely to have even less relevance or meaning to those who have no relationship to or need of the church. Having said that if we are committed to a faith with its particular traditions it’s of vital importance that we’re able to ask questions of and about our faith, to express our doubts and disbeliefs and to be expected to develop a robust, not just a well-refined faith.
My pervading sense of the significant response to the Dean’s articles is one of confusion. I’ve no doubt of the passion and commitment some people have to their faith and belief and their wish to defend the same. I’m not convinced that many are familiar with the religious terms that have been used or with the notion that we’re allowed to talk openly about our religious doubts without offending God, which might even cause God’s wrath to fall upon us or destroying the church. For those who choose to comment on the articles one thing seems certain, if the church pays you, you ought to be jolly sure you know who, where and in what packaging God comes.
Out of the recent confusion has emerged an earnest and urgent desire for people to want to know more, to understand more about the Christian tradition and how to make it more plausible in our modern world. People don’t want to have to leave their brains at the door as they enter church, cross their fingers or omit saying parts of the Creed in order to maintain their integrity.
I think we’d agree that central to a Christian commitment is faith. Yet what do we mean by faith? In the history of Christianity Marcus Borg suggests there are four primary meanings. The most familiar meaning is one that understands faith as a matter of the head; the other three understand faith as a matter of the heart. Borrowing from Borg I want to explore this understanding of faith as a matter of the head.
Borg uses the Latin word assensus, in English assent, faith as belief, giving our intellectual assent that a statement or claim is true. He suggests there are two reasons this understanding of faith has come to dominate our Christian thinking. The first reason emerges from the Protestant Reformation. Although the issue of faith was a significant impetus for the Reformation; “justification by grace through faith” as different denominations emerged each came to distinguish itself from the other by its “beliefs”. Christian faith began to mean having “right” beliefs and orthodoxy to mean right or correct belief. Faith therefore began to mean, “believing the right things”.
The second reason emerges from the Enlightenment period of the 16th and 17th centuries with the birth of modern science and scientific ways of knowing. In this new way of knowing truth became identified with factuality, in other words, truth is that which can be proven as factual. Armed with this approach people began to call into question the factuality of parts of the Bible and by implication many traditional Christian teachings. The impact of both these changes in the meaning of faith and belief was profound. Borg suggests, “For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. …, belief … about believing something against the evidence.” Faith is what you turn to when you no longer know, “faith is what you need when [your] beliefs and knowledge conflict.”
Faith as a matter of intellectual assent, of the head, has come to dominate our thinking because as the central claims of Christianity have become questionable, faith has come to mean believing in spite of difficulties, believing even when you’ve reason to think otherwise: If you cannot assent to Christian beliefs then you face its opposite, doubt or disbelief. Doubt suggesting a lack of faith, and disbelief an absence of faith. If you think “beliefs” are what God wants from you, then doubts and disbelief are sinful and guilt begins to arise, a powerful motivator for assenting intellectually to a set of beliefs.
If we hold that Christian faith is about belief then we’re suggesting that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads as if having correct beliefs will save us. As Borg writes, “Faith as belief is relatively powerless, you can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. Believing as a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.”
In a pre Enlightenment world the Bible and tenets of Christian faith were the conventional wisdom of the time, there was no conflict between the Biblical and contemporary worldview. It was from this world that the scriptures and creeds of our faith evolved. Perhaps the questions we ask of them today and the responses we demand come from the expectations of our own worldview. Today we’re shamed by the attitude of colonisers of old who demanded indigenous peoples conform to the worldview and perspectives they brought with them and interpreted difference as deficiency and deviance. Perhaps we need to be careful to understand our tradition in scripture and creed in its integrity, openly seeking from it answers, aware of its intention. As there’s more than one meaning of faith so there’s more than one way of knowing, just as we saw in the Jeremiah passage today. We should not be asked to leave our intellect behind as we engage our faith, yet equally we need to be open to the transformative presence of God in our lives and careful not to limit God to fit the confined demands of our intellect.
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