Faith. What is it ?

"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.” 

 - Olivier Clement 

Faith. What is it ? There’s the perspective from Biblical theology, Matt Bates puts it like this :

“saving allegiance includes three basic dimensions: mental affirmation that the gospel is true, professed fealty to Jesus alone as the cosmic Lord, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus as the king”

And I can see that, faith being basically loyalty, as Paul says, “I have been true to the vision” - and indeed, when wracked by doubt, I think, this is such a beautiful vision, that there is a God madly in love with us, desperate to embrace us and make us whole that, even if it turns out to be false in the end, it is a vision worthy of being true to.

One must, little by little, believe God, trust His word, rely upon his presence, depend securely on his promises.

But, if I had to recommend one book, it’d be Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust :

“[Knowing God]... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. 

That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth..” 

“At the heart of the desperate suffering there is in the world, suffering we can do nothing to resolve or remove for good, there is an indestructible energy making for love. If we have grasped what Jesus is about, we can trust that this is what lies at the foundation of everything.”

Rowan Williams Tokens of Trust

It’s a great risk of love, but no relationship can start, and then deepen, until we put more and more trust in the other…

It’s also to take refuge in God, not idols, food, books, idea’s, dogmas, Priests…

And it’s also to anchor the meaning of our lives in Christ - if we get sick, or fall in love, are we interpreting these things through the person of Christ ?

In this short article Rowan Williams says, 

“Faith is not about what public opinion decides, and it is not about how we happen to be feeling about ourselves. It is the response people make to what presents itself as a reality - a reality which makes claims on you. Here is something so extraordinary that it interrupts our world; here is something that makes you "turn aside to see," that stops you short. Faith begins in the moment of stopping, you could say: the moment when you can't just walk on as you did before.

But even more challengingly, it is something whose claims involve change and even loss. If this is really what it seems to be, ideas, habits, hopes all change, and it is a change that is going to be painful…

When people respond to outrageous cruelty and violence, with a hard-won readiness to understand and be reconciled, few if any can bring themselves to say that all this is an illusion.

The parents who have lost a child to gang violence; the wife who has seen her husband killed in front of her by an anti-Christian mob in India; the woman who has struggled for years to comprehend and accept the rape and murder of her sister….in their willingness to explore the new humanity of forgiveness and rebuilding relations - without for a moment making light of their own or other people's nightmare suffering, or trying to explain it away - these are the ones who make us see, who oblige us to turn aside and look at Jesus, who asks of us initially just to stop and reflect, to stay for a moment in the light that allows us to see ourselves honestly and to see the world differently.

That is the heart of it: seeing ourselves honestly; seeing the world differently. That is where faith begins, beyond the answers of a system, or the disciplines of a ritual, or the requirements of a moral code. These have their place; and those who spend time in the company of Jesus will find themselves working out all these things in the light of the scriptural witness to the new life. But it all starts with that turning aside to see.”

Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be
connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues. 

In a chapter entitled “Why Theologians Must Pray for Release from Exile,” the theologian Dr. D’Costa suggests that “prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”

Dru Johnson says :

“our knowing is connected to what we do with our bodies. We don’t know as disembodied minds; without bodies and the tools by which we extend our bodies, we couldn’t know at all. Further, we don’t come to know in isolation but in community—specifically, in communal rites. We practice rites to know.”


James K.A.Smith has asks the important question :

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart? 

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.”

Which is why I had to go to an Orthodox Church with “thick practices” to shape me, to orient me towards knowing God, in a community. I had to preform faith. It’s relational knowledge, you have to act your way into this knowledge, live it.