What is Faith?

In the movie City Slickers, Billy Crystal asks and old cowboy "What is the meaning of life?"

He holds up a finger. "One thing," he says.
"What is it?"  Crystal answers.

"That's for you to find out," he says.
The "one thing" of our life is our true faith--our real god.  It is the thing that gives our life meaning, hope, and stability.  Paul Tillich calls this our "ultimate concern." (The Dynamics of Faith, page 4) It is the basis for our continued existence. 
Faith has been called a crutch--it's really more like a skeleton. Everything we say, do, feel, or hope connects to it.  Faith is our orientation towards a single object, which is the organizing principle behind all our actions.  Faith and spirituality are the same thing.
None of us can say we hold to our faith object perfectly. There's an element of hypocrisy in the best of us.  Our lives are at times a soup of conflicting loyalties and half-realized certainties.  But nevertheless, there is always one thing we value more than all others. It shapes our thoughts, feelings and habits. That is our true faith, whether we realize it or not. It is our true object of worship, our real god.
 “No one can serve two masters," Jesus said in Matthew 6:24. "Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." He could have said God and country, God and family, God and personal fulfillment, or anything else, and it would have been just as true. Our faith is our master, whether it be self,  community, or God. It is the single thing that brings fulfillment and strength to our lives. 
The worth of our faith comes out under pressure.   We may go for years without thinking of God or faith.   Then we suffer a shocking tragedy—a divorce, or a terminal illness.   Suddenly we need a reason to endure.   Like a student who has never studied, we are unprepared for the final examination.   The dimly recalled beliefs of childhood are not enough.   Our faith needs to be able to accommodate loss and death.   If we do not have mature, thoughtful answers, we may find no reason to continue.One way of describing how faith works is to imagine our lives as having three sides--our mind, heart, and habits.  Faith stands behind all three, lending strength to each part.  Faith stands behind our beliefs, and lead to our adoption of a belief system. It provides a filter for assessing information.  It stands behind our emotional life, too, regulating, restraining, and encouraging our feelings of love,  disgust,  fear, and courage.  It stands behind our habits also,  giving us the motivation to develop some habits and suppress others

Jesus illustrated this with a parable in Matthew 7:24-27:
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.   The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.  
 “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.  The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
Wind and rain represent the stresses of life—illness, death, change, or trouble.   If our spiritual base is not adequate to cope, then our lives will collapse like a house without foundation.
We can illustrate faith this way. 
Imagine our lives as a triangle. three sides--our Mind,  Heart, and Habits hang together in mutual support.  Our faith object is the center of them.  It is what gives shape to the others.  Our faith interacts with each side. To our minds, faith gives reasons for existence and a basic mental architecture that enables us to cope with new information. Our faith is strengthened by knowledge, even while it gives us a structure to assess right from wrong.  To our emotions, faith provides a filter and a reason to restrain and encourage. We hold back our tongues from hurt,  deny our tendencies to give up or be depressed,  as well as encouraging love, tenderness and praise, based on our relationship to our object of faith.
To our actions, or habits,  it gives us a reason for breaking bad habits and developing good ones.  Our faith  is strengthened by developing habits of worship, and weakened by habits that run contrary to our beliefs.
When stress comes into our lives in any of these areas,  our faith pushes back, as we see in this second illustration. When questions arise that we cannot answer,  faith pushes back.  When faced with overwhelming emotions such as grief or anger, faith gives us stability, and holds us strong. When the force of our negative habits threaten to ruin our lives, for example, when dealing with addictions of various kinds, our faith provided a "higher power" to break free.,
Without faith, we face breakdown and collapse. 
We need to know our faith--our true faith, not just our professed faith. We need a faith that tough enough to stand firm when the storms of life come raging.
So far, we have nor talked about any particular faith, but the function of faith in general. Right now, we are just talking about the role of faith in general. In later blogs, we will zero in on one particular system of faith, the Christian faith. But for now,  it is important to understand how faith works, and what it does.
Our "one thing" may be our religion, or it may be something different entirely. In the next two blogs, we will talk about the relationship between our faith and our belief.


Let me know what you think:

How does faith work in your life? Have there been times in your when faith has helped you survive, ?when your head, heart, or habits were challenged?
What do perceive is your real faith?  It is the same are your religion, or is it actually something altogether different.

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The End (and New Beginning) of the Christian World

I am writing this blog because I believe we are approaching the end times.  I do not mean the End Times, even though we must always concede that the end of the world is always nearer than it was yesterday. No, the "times" that we can be sure is fast approaching is the end of the so-called  "Christian" era in Western civilization. Christianity is thriving in other parts of the globe to be sure,  but in America and in Europe, where Christianity has been the dominant religion for centuries, it is undergoing a staggering decline of influence and numbers. Church attendance in America is down 1% to 3% each year according to the best estimates.[1] The Barna Group reports that four out of five young people will leave the church by the age of twenty-three.[2] 83% of clergy now believe that the church is losing influence in our culture.[3] The overall statistics paint a grim picture of the future of Christian institutions

Traditional Christian approaches to spreading the faith, which have relied heavily on mass media and big programs, have lost their effectiveness in a post-Christian age. The world has already heard us in the Western world, but has stopped listening. They have seen us and are not impressed. The church has been weighed in the balance of public opinion and has been found wanting.

We may blame a lot of things for this decline---secularist and atheistic misrepresentations of the faith,  sexual promiscuities, or dark conspiracies--but the cause lies more within ourselves. Christianity has lost its preeminent place in society mainly because it had already lost its preeminent place in in the hearts of those who practice it.  When the church becomes popular in any culture, it takes on that culture's gods.  Professional Christianity becomes just one more career path to worldly power, while the mission of Christ is lost.

Christians were cultural pariahs for the first three centuries of our existence.  The early church was a  persecuted, slandered and misunderstood minority.  Even so, the quality of the early Christians drew others to Christ.  In spite of their terrible and unjustified reputation,  the church survived and even grew. The Christian church grew because the Christians acted like Christ. They did not just preach the Gospel--they lived it. Like Jesus, the Word was made flesh in them, and the people around them noticed. They did not just preach--their lives were sermons.

In times of moral darkness, the light of the Gospel does not shine through the windows of the churches, but through the quiet witness of lives  transformed by Spirit into the image of Christ..  

Darkness is falling over the institutional churches in America. The Bible belt has buckled and the bastions of Christian culture have crumbled.  But we do not have to despair.  As the individual churcs fail, it falls on individual Christians to bear the Christian witness to the world.  We cannot hold back the coming darkness, but we can light the stars. The church still has a vital role in bearing witness to the world through faithful ones who live as imitations of Christ. 

In the next few weeks, I will be posting on this blog an approach to helping us all become more like Jesus. 

First we will examine the general concept of faith and how it functions in our lives.  Then we will look at how the early church built, and how the church build, contrasting with the approach of the modern church.  Then, we will suggest an approach at how we may do a better job of building a deeper, more lasting faith, so that we as modern Christians can better represent Christ in the world.

I hope along the way you will join me in this discussion.  Write and let me know; what you think.  Each week I will suggest a question hopefully will encourage you to write.


Let me know what you think:
Do  you think we are seeing a decline in Christian faith in the west?  What do you think is the biggest cause of this decline? 

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[1] Ted Olson, theamericanchurch.org

[2] Drew Dyck, Generation Ex-Christian (Chicago: Moody, 2010), 17. 

[3] Dickerson John S. (2013-01-15). Great Evangelical Recession, The: 6 Factors That Will Crash the American Church...and How to Prepare . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. quoted in the Great Evangelical Recession, (kindle edition) 

What Matters

What makes—

--A soldier volunteer for a dangerous mission?

--A missionary forsake his country to live overseas?

--A cancer patient endure the pain of chemotherapy?

--A terrorist blow himself up for a cause?

--A fighter keep standing after being knocked down repeatedly?

--A father work two jobs to get his daughter through college?

--A European village to spend a hundred years building a town cathedral?

--St. Paul say “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain”?

Whether we agree with them or not, there are no obvious reasons for any of these acts of perseverance and self-sacrifice.  People sometimes choose to do things that cause them personal pain and suffering for some  someone or something they love more than themselves. We sacrifice ourselves for someone or something we see as  more important than ourselves.  We obey laws when no one is watching, give anonymously to charity, wait in line, respect others’ property, stop to help strangers, endure criticism, and create art even when no one is watching.  We continue to live even when it would be easier to end it all with pills or a bullet. Humans have always chosen  to live for something greater than immediate self interest. But  why?

The answer is faith--not mere assent to a proposition, but real commitment to something more important than this moment.  Faith is our ultimate concern in life. It is not just a religious or philosophical belief, but a life commitment.

We all have faith--even when we think they have none.  Without it, civilization would fall.  The strength of our faith can make the difference between success and failure, happiness and misery, meaning and chaos.   Paul Tillich called faith our "ultimate concern." It is what we serve and believe in beyond everything else.  

Faith is the key to life—faith that is not surface religion, empty tradition, or idle belief, but real, honest faith which is the foundation for our lives.  In the end, that is the only kind of faith that matters.  

In the following weeks,  we will be describing the dynamics of faith in our lives,  and in particular the Christian faith.

I hope you'll join me in the following weeks as we look at what faith is, and how faith works.

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I'd like to hear from you about it.  What do you see are you "ultimate concern" in life?  What would you be willing to die for?  What would you be willing to devote your life, endure pain, or sacrifice everything for?

Do you agree with the idea that we can only one ultimate concern in life? Can we have several objects of devotion and hold them equally?  What do we do when they conflict with each other?