Disclaimer: Of course, this is by no means a sufficient survey of a tradition that spans more than two thousand years; and I, being only a student, humbly present this blurb as an impressionist portrayal of the glimpses I have seen since my infancy. I suspect that something like this has already been written, the details of the observation far more intricate; the poetics more abundant and delightful, like a masterfully delivered oration and not a desperate attempt at self-examination.
Whenever I have the occasion to go to a gathering, to an assembly of ‘believers’ such as defines the word ‘church’, I have the tendency to note all that is assumed in the words that are said: prayers, sermons, biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and whatnot. For the past couple months, I have not been able to get out of my head a certain idea, a vague image, of a dividing portal-perhaps resembling a curtain, or perhaps, to be more figurative, something like a ‘sphere’—that these devotees solemnly enter with “heads bowed and eyes closed.” That this happens in the mind, which lends itself to difficulty of analysis, is of fascination to me, for I feel that I have inadvertently stepped out of that realm (and one might label this happening a ‘transgression’), and consequently see a need to understand this phenomenon.
There are certain things that are preached on many a Sunday morning that disturb me greatly, and there is one train of thought that often hits me with all the vigor of a knight of faith: faith is a willful negation of the self’s capacity to figure things out with its mind, a willful action based on its acknowledgement of the need of the heart, which cries, “I cannot do this on my own; I need you and therefore believe you-so help me God…” so that, if constructed as a proof, it would consist the form of: A is X, therefore B is —X; so that the sum of A and B consists of a harmonic negation.
Faith is beautiful, says the teacher, because it elevates something that is the object of microscopic scrutiny to the status of an overarching and unifying force of one’s experience, the “given” of a geometrical proof, the rock solid foundation of a house. It enables one to live righteously—because faith leads to righteousness, since faith is the prerequisite for righteousness—as well as enabling one to maximize one’s security by investing “where moth and rust cannot touch.” Faith is beautiful because it checks our self-centered tendencies and places the self in the right relation to the world, namely, that its finitude compels it to have a submission to the infinite—that ‘faith’, a humble submission of our egotistical selves, is just because justice requires the right ordering of things.
Something seems cyclical here: Faith (the belief in God by virtue of recognition of the self’s finitude) is good because the best way of ordering the self is faith (submission of the finite, elevation of the infinite)—it is good to believe without proof because it shows a humbling of the self. And a humbling of the self is good because such humbling is a necessary connector of the finite self to the infinite God. The “reason”, then, for faith, is because “God is God, and we are not”.
By claiming such beauty, by negating the self and imbuing majestic qualities, by elevating to the status of an unquestioned and positive existence, the person with whom we seek out a personal relationship becomes the reference point of all our thoughts—and that is the paradox for the self-referential individual.
How do we move from individual experience to a universal claim? How do we make the universal claim to be the point of reference for the individual? Is this not a paradox?
Presumably, stepping into this sphere is somewhat experiential, a direction of the will rather than of the mind (something intuitive that the mind cannot see)—something analogous to the irrationality of the long-term commitment to the significant other based on a short term experience); something inter-personal. God is not to be treated like a scientific hypothesis (falsifiable, testable, etc.) but as an interactive Being. Even so, a relationship can only be formed with a person with whom one can somehow communicate; and the prospect of basing one upon a belief without any motivating reasoning other than that the object, assumed to exist, is greater than the subject-this seems to me nothing short of an absurdity. I do not claim to have the authority to discredit or dismiss the great “cloud of witnesses” that fill the earth; experience is subjective and serves as a good justification for the individual’s beliefs—but such a rationale as I have tried to outline, that of “Believe in God because he is God” is one that I cannot assent to, nor should any Christian who is worshipping God with all of their mind.