Ordinary Faith

The title is an allusion to, and an extension of, “Mere Christianity,” where is undertaken the task of describing that which is fundamental and central—as opposed to secondary and sectarian—to the Christian faith.

     This is beyond that, and yet like unto it.  Beyond it, because I aim to describe faith, not religion.  And not the religion called Christianity, but the ordinary faith in God that Christ reveals.

     I use the word ‘ordinary’ in this way: again, as a sort of cousin-in-meaning to ‘mere,’ as if to say central or foundational; but also to say in a negative sense that the faith I describe is not extra-ordinary.
  Much of religion is the accretion to the pure: the solidifying calcification of an extraordinary religious experience, so that a unique and special event is translated and established as the new norm, the addition to and qualification of the (previous) standard.

  It is the focus on these forms of expressing the central spiritual reality that is the essence of religiosity.  And it is precisely an unflagging devotion to religion that allows one to drift from an attention to faiths vital reality.

  And what is the essence of faith—faith ‘defined,’ if you will?  There is no end to discussions that begin with the oft-quoted beginning verse in Hebrews chapter eleven, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

            Yet I find many of these discussions to be about ten degrees off center.

   Faith is two parts: vision and action.  The vision is seeing beyond what is here and now, beyond what some describe as what is real and actual.  Faith is the perceiving/discerning of a reality beyond this present and material reality; some others would say it is the seeing the ultimate reality.  But in any case, faith is seeing what is not (yet) actual in our present experience.

  The action part of faith is living as if that vision were part of present experience, and thus making it so.  This is not delusional or psychotic behavior, where one doesn’t recognize, rationally, what is real and what is not.  Rather, it is acting with the full knowledge of that the vision is not yet real with the explicit purpose of bringing that vision into actuality. 

   Faith: vision and action.   Some have described The Salvation Army, that part of Christian religious expression that is particularly active in practical socially-community redemptive praxis, as ‘Christianity in Action.’  I am not at all opposed to this description, but again wish to move it to the broader discussion.  Faith is vision in action.

Returning to the distinction between faith and religion, one might say that religion too often takes a vision and enacts policies and practices that shift the focus to the program and away from the principle.  (I must somewhere reveal this bias: my tendency to not trust myself to—rely upon—emotion as the arbiter of the authenticity of religious experience.  Too many ‘religious’ principles [as opposed to saying ‘faith principles’] have been established as a result of emotion-bred experiences, rather than as extensions of faith visions.  But perhaps that is an essay for another time.)

     And so faith, if it is to be ordinary in the sense that I am describing, must resist these religion-forming tendencies.  It is not the vision which becomes our focus; nor is our focus on the action that seeks to make the vision real. 

    No.  I will have none of that kind of religion, or what many call religious faith.  The vision of faith must motivate action in order to be properly described as authentic—and thus ordinary—faith.

     Yet I do not believe that religiosity is pleasing to God.  Not when the focus turns, from Who God is, to What the religion requires of one in order to be described as a Christian.  I do believe that faith—vision in action—is pleasing to God.  Yet even this ordinary faith is not by itself the essence of what it means to know God.  It is at its best the natural expression of one who is already in relationship with God; it can never replace knowing God in the first place.

     (I here confess my another bias: I can in many respects be classified as an iconoclast, for my tendencies are to not trust myself—rely upon—the very religious structures that I have described so far.  But my desire is not really to tear down the institutional framework, as much as it is to name with a clear head and open eyes the limitations of religion.  My ultimate aim is simply to lift up as an alternative to religiosity this ordinary faith; faith not so much stripped of religious wrappings, as willfully unencumbered by them.)

Here I return to yet another thread; perhaps another perceived objection to what I am attempting here.  When I say that ‘ordinary faith’ as an exercise in writing out these thoughts is somehow beyond ‘mere Christianity,’ I realize that I am open to the charge of universalism.  That is, that I neglect the exclusivist Christian claim, quoting John 14.4, where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.”

     I do not forget that line.  There is time and space later to draw what I think John the Gospeler has done in general with community’s response to the milieu of late first-century religious communication.  But this verse in particular bears some addressing now.  I do not forget that line, nor misremember it as I write these words.  Rather, I choose to see beyond John and to incorporate John into the bigger Jesus picture (instead of the way around: taking John and as the primary Jesus lens and thus seeing all the rest of the New Testament witness through John’s reflections).

     I do not mean to undermine the centrality of Christ to Christianity.  Yet it is necessary to spend some time meditating upon the observation that Christ’s purpose was to draw attention to the reality of God and to foster a purer faith encounter with God, and not to draw attention to himself or to develop allegiance to his person to the detriment of the attention to who God is.

   Is it not possible—probable, even, given the other New Testament witnesses—that Jesus’ larger message was and is all about God?  Even more to the point, that Jesus was all about opening up for those mired in religiosity a vision of Who God is and how we might relate to this God?  The power of his life was to reveal God as Father, and so to richly establish God as Person, the divine in relationship.

    Now, align this conception of what Jesus was doing with the perspective of a Jesus with a mission to establish a new, different, or contrary religious principle or movement centered on his own person.

    So that when Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” we ought to really recognize that its connection to the rest, “no one comes to the Father but through me,” is not primarily about shifting the focus of authentic faith from God the Father to God the Son.

   No!  These words ought to be heard by us as a clarion call to abandon altogether a focus on religion per se, and to join with Jesus in a faith vision that leads to the ultimate reality—to know (experientially) God as our Father by living like Jesus the Son; to know the truth of Who God is in this dynamic relationship revealed by Who Jesus is; and to adopt Jesus’ ways as our ways, his faith (vision in action) as our faith (vision in action), even as we are adopted as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, as God’s own children.

     I cannot bear to see such a lovely and vital call to authentic faith in God being wielded as a weapon to force others into alignment with a religious requirement, all the while frustrating the words’ effort to lead all people to God.

     The way to God is the way Jesus lived.  The way to God is not adherence to creeds or formulas or religious practices.  All these can be good; but they do not lead inevitably to knowing God. Only following the example of Christ may we truly find God.

    And only by following the example of Christ can one truly be called a ‘Christ-ian.’  It is Jesus’ way of knowing and relating to God, and Jesus’ way of knowing and relating to other people that Christ-people ought to be described as knowing and practicing; not by how they are saying words in religious ceremony or performing rituals in religious duty.

    So if I am iconoclastic, it is to the extent that I follow the example of Christ (who is himself the fullest example of the prophets before him) in railing against the stultifying principles of the religious institutions, and in lifting up instead a purer focus on God-reality and the demand that this ultimate reality become our reality: by our actions, in the way we live our lives.

     Again, I say that the religious practices of a sectarian unit can be an aid to one’s faith walk—yet one must keep the priority straight: praxis is an external shell expressing a vital spiritual reality; praxis is never an end to be served itself, for its own sake.

In this way I find resonance with the message of ‘Mere Christianity’: the particular additions to the core of the Christian faith need not be strictly rejected, though quite often we might find that one particular expression is contrary to the particular expression of another sect or denomination of Christianity.

     At its best, a ‘mere Christianity’ describes that which is essential to believe and to practice in order to be called ‘Christian.’  To step further in with this description of a ‘mere faith,’ I have been attempting to describe what it looks like to be a Christ-ian seeking relationship with God, seeking to know Who God is. 

        At the end of the initial exploration of what it means to be in relationship with God, what it means to know ‘Who God is,’ there is this: the realization of our role as God’s people to reflect the reality of God’s existence.  So faith is related to demonstrating that God is alive.

         I submit that we do this best by how we live.  The highest form of worship is living a life—especially in the most mundane, ordinary of circumstances—that is so given over to God, that God’s very reality is revealed.  No greater gift or sacrifice or act of worship exists beyond living as if God were alive and real and known by you.

       (Some will here object, saying that the great thing is to be known by God; yet God already knows me; there is nothing in that.  The something upon which one may remark is in our knowing God, or perhaps at least, knowing the impact of the reality of being known and loved by God.)

        Worship in the formal sense of a weekly gathering of concentrated and intentional singing and reading and praying has its best merit in the willfulness and the togetherness.  These times are critical for our shaping, and the building up of the body.  But living out the faith vision comes in all the social interactions, often apart from formal worship settings.

[In future/potential continuations to this essay…worship redefined/expanded to include ordinary interactions…these ordinary interactions, when reflecting God’s presence, become the basis of speaking about living sacramentally]

Process & Outcome

Imagine that you and another person each follow the same decision-making process and yet end up with different choices. Why? What has happened? Why isn't the process itself determinative?

What has happened when you follow the same steps in making a decision as someone else, yet you reach a different conclusion? The most logical inference to draw from this is that some other element--integral to the scenario or the decision at hand--is different.

Just so. Take, for instance, a decision on what kind of milkshake to order. You have before you the menu of options at ice cream shop, you factor in what others have said about the quality of various flavors there, what you have ordered previously at other places, and your personal tastes. You order chocolate.

I read off the same menu board, factor in what others have said and done, what I have ordered before, my personal tastes--just the same process as you. I order strawberry. The same process, the same set of factors taken into consideration. One thing is different, and this leads to a different conclusion.

Change up the scenario just a bit. It's thirty years earlier, and you are at the same location, only then it was called a soda fountain. You move through the same decision-making process. Obviously, some of the factors are different: a different era might mean the quality of the ice cream (or other ingredients) is different, and so the reputation surrounding various flavors as an input factor is different. So too are the friends whose opinions you take into consideration. And you--are you the same or a different person?

You are different. You may well end up making a similar choice--chocolate--but the experiences you have over those thirty years make you a different person.

Now, move the whole conversation over to a subject of a different depth of import, and as a Christian making moral and ethical decisions with the Bible as our primary guide. As a Wesleyan, I will add, three other factors that weigh in early Church Tradition, logic or reasoning, and the testimony of personal (and contemporary community) experience. These four, Scripture, Tradition, reason and experience, are the factors that guide us in making moral and ethical decisions.

Suppose that you--or even a whole group of people in the same church denomination--return to a decision that you-all made thirty years ago. You are determined to retrace the decision-making process, and use that prior decision as a guide: you will return to study the same set of Scriptures; you return to seek the wisdom of the same Church Fathers; you follow the same logic and reasoning processes; and you give weight in the same way to experience.

And you reach a different conclusion. What has changed? Not the Scriptures. You might be focusing on a broader set of Scriptures or give higher priority to some texts over others. That would be a change. But on the whole, you value the Bible with the same conviction and seek the God's wisdom via Scripture in the same way. Similarly, the voice of Church Tradition has not changed. Though you are certainly reading the Bible and "hearing" the Church Fathers differently for some reason.

Ah reason: but, no, you have determined to follow the same mental processes. That has not changed, though the outcome certainly has. The answer, obviously, is experience. Over thirty years, your experiences (individually and collectively) have added to insight.

Just the one factor. Of course, as we've noted, that simple change (additional experience) also floods over to other factors. Experience does affect how you read the Bible, how you receive the wisdom of Tradition, how you give weight to certain factors in reasoning processes.