Exploring the Matrix: Knowledge, part 1

Exploring the Matrix:  The Perception Axis—Knowledge, part 1

"From a drop of water.  .  .  a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.  So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”[1]  Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

The connection between faith and knowledge may seem obvious, but not to everyone. Existentialists and Postmodernists reject the idea of objective truth, since we are so trapped within our cultural worldview that if “real” truth exists at all, it is unknowable.  Hyperreal religions argue that faith can exist without truth, and that our commitment to a narrative is all that matters.

Reality does matter. There’s a story told about when the Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer sat in the home of an existentialist discussing philosophy. The existentialist argued that they could never fully communicate, since each person’s perception of reality is different.  Schaeffer interrupted him and asked if he could have a cup of tea. The man graciously poured him some.  Between sips, Schaeffer declared ‘Now, sir, we are communicating.”  Our interaction in the real proves there is a common ground of truth.

Faith must stand up to reality. That’s why we must use our minds to fully believe. 

Christians have often justly been accused of mental laziness.  Mark Noll described well the evangelical church:

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.  An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America, including great sacrifice in spreading the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, open-hearted generosity to the needy, heroic personal exertion on behalf of troubled individuals, and the unheralded sustenance of countless churches and parachurch communities.  Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not  exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.[2]

This mental lassitude comes from our overindulgence and lack of mental exercise.  We gorge ourselves on useless information, without digesting it, until we cannot tell what is trustworthy and important.

Critical thinking is hard but important work. It yields three kinds of fruit-- knowledge of God,  self, and  the world around us.

Knowledge of God comes through study of the Scriptures.  Not everyone is gifted in study, but all of us can apply ourselves more diligently to reading and studying for ourselves.  The more time we spend in the Bible, the more we will understand its meaning. 

Knowledge of self comes from our own objective self-assessment.  We must have a clear, well-defined set of personal values based on good judgment and careful thought. With these virtues in place, we are able to let reason guide us even in tough situations.

Knowledge of the world around us yields an understanding of the times.  1 Chronicles 12:32 says “The men of Issachar. . .  understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” Understanding the times is necessary for success. 

Study may be hard work, but can also be fun work.  In Habits of the Mind, James Sire gives this definition of a Christian intellectual:

“An intellectual is one who loves ideas, is dedicated to developing them, criticizing them, clarifying them, turning them over and over, seeing their implications, stacking them atop one another, arranging them, sitting silent while new ones pop up and old ones seem to rearrange themselves, playing with them, punning them with their terminology, laughing at them, watching them clash, picking up the pieces, starting over, judging them, withholding judgment about them, changing them, bringing them into contact with their counterparts in other systems of thought, inviting them to dine and have a ball, but also suiting them for service in workaday life—

--A Christian intellectual is all of the above to the glory of God.” [3]

Children have a natural love of learning. The instinctively want to use their minds to learn and grow. Just as a person cannot be happy without some physical exercise, so we cannot be happy without exercising our minds.  Whenever we discourage thinking and exploration, we cut ourselves off from the greatest characteristic of our nature that makes us the most like God-our capacity to understand the world around us.

Doubt is not the enemy of faith—it is faith’s ally. Questioning makes faith stronger not weaker. In  order to get stronger in our intellectual understanding of God, ourselves, and the universe, we need to develop four cardinal virtues of the mind.  They are:

1.  Curiosity.  Thinking believers are not content to be generally correct about the truth.  Curiosity should never be suppressed. We should never fear learning the truth.  Truth can only help us in the end. 

2.  Humility. Thinking believers listen when other people talk, and pay attention to new ideas. They realize that truth is larger and of greater importance than proving our own opinions.

3.  Persistence.  Knowledge is not an easy quest; anyone who has suffered through college or graduate school knows this. But the rewards are worth it, if we continue to seek the truth. 

4.  Clarity.  Whatever we know, we should strive to express clearly.  A knowledgeable person does not just work at knowing, he also works at expressing knowledge.  A person, who cannot explain clearly what they believe, is not as smart as they think.  We must work just as hard at putting knowledge in simple language as we do as discovering it. 

 

Why is the study of theology important to people of faith? Is it possible to think Biblically without thinking theologically?  What is the difference between being intellectual and intellectualism?  Is it easy to tell the difference?  How can you tell a real intellectual from one who simply acts like one?

Write what you think about it in the comments below.   

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[1] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet Electronic Text Library, University of Virginia Library, 1995, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DoyScar.html, p.  16. 

[2] Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, p.   3. 

[3]James Sire, Habits of the Min        d (Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill) 2000, p.  27-28.

Exploring the Matrix: the Perception Balance

The eight points of the faith matrix are two-way streets.  In one direction, they lead us to connect with our object of ultimate concern, which for a Christian is God.   They are also ways that God flows out of us to God to the world. 

The degree to which God uses them in us differs from person to person, according to the will of the Spirit and our own individual personalities. Ideally, we should seek a balance though in all eight areas. A pursuit of these balances in our faith connection will help us improve our connection with God and our witness to the world.

The first balance is in the area of perception—that is how we learn about God and the world. The two ends of this balance beam are reason and passion. They are the lenses through which we come to understand God and the world.

This dichotomy can be labeled in many ways--Word and Spirit, knowledge and emotion, reason and passion.  Perhaps the best way to understand them is to think of one as objective understanding and  the other as subjective understanding.

Objective understanding is learning about our actual, material, concrete existence. It is the knowledge of the real, material universe, that we can either see, hear, taste, touch, and smell and what we can discern from it by logical or experimental means.  Observation, critical thinking, and experimentation help us test objective truth.

Objective knowledge must be based on faith. In order to apply logic, some truths must be taken as axiomatic. A Christian believes God has revealed Himself to us through Nature,  the written word, and though His physical incarnation in Christ.  These sources of revelation are taken by faith. An atheist, on the other hand, must have faith that everything that have ever happened has a rational worldly explanation. Rational thought requires solid assumptions, taken by faith. From these assumptions grow all we believe and accept about God an and the world around us.

Subjective understanding is our reaction to the objective world around us. It is made from our emotions, creativity, intuition, and imagination.  Subjective truth is not proven but felt.  It is not measured or weighed but express through symbolism and metaphors. It is not simply a factual statement of concrete knowledge, but a subjective statement of what we feel about what we believe.

An atheist or deist does not believe that subjective knowledge can teach us anything. To the atheist, the world as a closed system in which the feelings we share or the symbols we use to grasp the world are merely echoes of reality, grasped with rational thought. But for a theist, who believes that God can speak to the inner heart as easily as He can speak though nature,   subjective impressions are an important avenue through which God can speak. Things we cannot grasp with our minds can be experienced through the heart though our heart interacting with the Spirit of God.

Objectivity and subjectivity are not divided, but are points on a compass. We cannot make rational observations untainted by subjective feelings.  Neither can we accept what we feel in our heart to be true without testing it objectively.

The Bible states “the Heaven declare the Glory of God.” Though our objective observation of the universe, we see the evidence of God’s hand.  But God also God spoke to the prophets in dreams, visions and revelations, using metaphors and symbols.   A call to the ministry or some other occupation usually springs from desires that God placed inside us. But it must be tested by objective analysis and not just in subjective emotions.

Johnathan Edwards compared the head and the heart to the rudder and the sails of a ship.  The ship cannot move without the sails, but the ship cannot be controlled without the rudder. 

God speaks to us through both the head and the heart. We cannot truly perceive the world around us with out being grounded in both.

God is everywhere around us—in His Word, in nature, and in our heart.  To see him and understand Him, to really experience Him, takes more than our study or our feelings alone. It takes reaching out with both our minds and hearts together.  Without the heart, all our intellectual study of Him lacks the power to move or change us. Without the mind, we cannot know if the feelings and voices we hear in our head are really of God, the devil, or just echoes of our own mind.  But with the two together, we can experience God on earth, with all the fullness and Glory of His Divine nature. 

How People Change Faiths

Our "faith matrix" is either formed by nurture or conversion. Nurture means we learn it from our parents, our religious culture, childhood rituals, and the stories we learn from childhood. We never question our faith, since it is deeply ingrained in who we are.
The child  is taught the faith of his or her parents, but only when their parents teach it.  Parents teach by word, deed, and example.  Through their influence they  overcome the voices of the world around them. A faith that is consistently taught becomes stronger as we grow older, deepening into a lifelong sustaining faith.
But when the faith does not grow or if it is inconsistent, then will often fail us later on. When this happens, we don't actually “lose” faith, but we change the ultimate concern of our faith to something else.  When our old faith fails, and we find another.  This is  conversion-- the move from one ultimate concern to something else. If we don't have faith in something, we can't function in the world.  Faith isn't an option for us, since we all need faith to survive.

But the move from one faith to another is rarely quick or easy.  It takes time to fully  shift from an old faith to  new ones. People flirt with a new locus of faith, before they adopt it. We may exist for a time, caught between one faith system and another,   But eventually, we commit ourselves to one or the other.  Elijah asked the Israelites “how long will you hop between two branches?” This the limbo between worlds as we seek a new direction.
 The process of change begins with disillusionment. Disillusionment isn't always a bad thing, but the beginning of change as we give up our old illusions. Christians call it conviction of sin.  We grow weary of a dual citizenship in heaven and earth, and admit that what we known, felt or did is wrong, and needs to be changed.  Disillusionment is necessary if we  seek to have a pure and undivided heart.
Disillusionment leads to searching.  We look for new answers.  We read books with different perspectives.  We build new friendships.  We try on new ideas seeking a new ground to stand upon.
Watching a person's progress at this time is like watching a spider moving between two twigs on a tree.  One by one, they let go of their old faith as they find security in the new. They do not simply jump from one faith system to  another, but gradually adopt one as they put away another.
This is the time of our greatest vulnerability. If a crisis hits our life, we may be torn in two,  because we do not stand on solid ground.
Sometimes, people get stuck between two faiths, without fully committing to either.  I think of people who have told me they were Christian Buddhists,  Christian Muslims, and even Christian atheists.    They seem unaware of the inconsistencies between these belief systems. What they fail to recognize that taking a stand for many faiths at the same time means that they make themselves their one true faith.  We alone become the judges of these faiths. We cannot serve two masters,  rather we seek to make these faith systems serve us,  picking and choosing the parts that suit us.  we are seeking to make God bend to us, not we bend to God.  If we are the judges of God, then we are own true god, or ultimate concern.  Our true God is what we serve--He does not serve us. .
True searching leads to confession.  This is when we finally admit to ourselves and others what our true faith is.  We make a choice, and stick with it. 
This happens not immediately but after a long process of small changes.  Like a spider moving first one leg, then another to a new branch,  our lives move one segment at a time from one faith to the next.
There are eight dimensions of our soul that need to line up in order to have a true and solid faith. These are,   (1)what we base our knowledge upon, (2) where we look for emotional fulfillment (3) what we submit ourselves to in self-discipline and habit (4) How we act in the world (5) the source of our self-identity (6) the community to which we perceive ourselves belonging (7) the tradition and heritage we embrace as our spiritual genealogy, and (8)  the source of our future hope.
Every change in any one of these is a move towards our faith or away from it. This move happens in small increments. When a new Christian moves towards Christ, they first move on wobbly legs. They wonder whether it is all real.  Christian fellowship seems forced.  At first, the things they read in the Bible may make no sense.  That is because the new matrix is not yet formed. In time,  the elements of Christian life and behavior become part of us as we live in a new reality. 
When a person leaves the faith,  they move the same way, first dropping Christian fellowship,  dropping out of church,  growing cold to the passions of faith that they once enjoyed. At first, they revel in their newfound freedom,  being free of those old "legalistic" restraints that they felt their faith imposed. They become critics of other Christians and complain about their judgmentalism and hypocrisy without realizing that in doing so they have become hypocritical and judgmental. They insist that the no longer need the "old myths and stories" to worship God, and feel superior to those who believe.  They throw off traditions they never understood,  and begin to see themselves as higher and more sophisticated to simple believer.    They do not realize that they are adopting a new god,  a god of self,  and are in the process of enthroning themselves above the heaven.  It all feels natural and right,  and they dismiss any feeling of discomfort as  just "old hang-ups that need to be exorcised.  Without themselves knowing it, they are slipping from a believing state to an unbelieving state.
It is important that whatever our faith may be, that it lines up together. Whatever we do, we should do it with our whole heart.
We need to look at ourselves--does our walk and our talk match?  Are we building habits based on our central core beliefs, or are we divided.
The pursuit of faith and faith formation is learning to line up our lives with our ultimate concern, which for a Christian means with the image  of Christ.

Where are you in the process of faith formation?  Are you changing, or are your growing deeper and more committed?   What do you perceive as your true and ultimate  concern?

The Balance Beams

Picture a tightrope walker, walking between two buildings.  The only thing between her and death is a thin cable.  The wind is strong, and she must struggle to keep her balance.
But this is no ordinary person. She is a trained professional, familiar with the tricks of the trade.  In her hands, she carries a large, flexible pole.  Because of its length, it helps her to keep balanced.  She knows that the higher and more ecarious the wire, the longer and more balanced the pole needs to be.
To walk by faith is almost as precarious as walking a tightrope. It is important to keep our balance in life as we are buffeted by inner and outer pressures. We, too, must keep our balance in the wild winds of life. 
The secret to keep both sides balanced.  We do this not by cutting one side short, but by building up the smaller side.  Usually we have a tendency to favor one side over the other. That is why we need to be constantly extending our faith into other areas of our personality.
In faith matters, we usually have four different balancing beams.
1.  The perception balance. 
This balance beam has to do with the way we come to understand the world around us.
Some people are more intellectually inclined. They tend to see all thing about faith as an intellectual exercise.  In their faith, rational intention based on knowledge leads inevitably to proper action.  Life is a logic puzzle to be solved,  which then leads to the discovery of truth and our true path. While this approach is often the best one,  the intellectually inclined often fail to take into account the place for emotion and intuition.
Others are more emotionally inclined. They tend to go with their feelings and intuition, relying on God to lead them through feelings and impressions. While this can also happen at time, it fails to take into consideration that feelings lie, and that our emotions are just as defective as our reason. 
Balanced is not achieved by worrying over being too emotional, nor is it reached by becoming anti-intellectual. People of faith need to celebrate God, even while seeking to understand.  Neither head nor heart will lead us right all the time.
This balance can be related to the Word and the Spirit of God.  Anthanasius called the Word and the Spirit 'the two hands of God." We perceive the  written Word mainly through our intellectual faculties.  Biblical exegesis and critical theological studies sharpen our understanding of What God has revealed in the past.  The Spirit speaks to us mainly through the subjective impressions of the heart. As we seek for answers with our minds, we feel we have reached certainty in our heart. As we feel the leading of the Spirit, we critically test it against the Word.  Together they lead us into understanding what God says to us.
2.  The action balance.
To this has to do with the development of inner and outer habits. We call these Submission and Witness.
Inner habits--the 'habits of the heart"--are the regular rituals we use to connect to the center core of the faith.  They include things like prayer,  fasting,  regular worship, silence, solitude and Bible study.  These regular habits keep us grounded in submission, piety, and integrity.
Submissive Christians know how to keep still. They do not have to be in charge but are willing to wait for God to speak.
Outer habits are the way we interact with the world around us.  They are the pre-rehearsed responses that get us through life.  When develop the habits of reaching out and doing when we see a need,  of loving people who are unloved, and of forgiving those who hurt us. 
Action-oriented Christians  want to get up and do something when they see a need  They cannot sit still for long, but want to get their bodies involved in serving God. 
But action without obedience is dangerous.  Peter, at Christ's arrest took immediate action, resulting the cutting off an innocent man's ear!   Unless we learn to stop and listen to God in humility and silence, it easy for us to lose our way.
3.  The Community  balance. 
This has to do with our relationship to ourselves and others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it this way "Let he who will not be alone fear being in community. Let he who will not be in community fear being alone."  People of faith need to seek out people who share their faith, but they should also take time for aloneness and silence.
Self awareness is necessary for developing personal integrity and self-control  As we define ourselves in relationship with God, we are able to stand up against peer pressure and the distractions of the world.
Community awareness reminds us of our need for other people.  There is an old African proverb that says we never become a person until we are in community with other people.  We need others to support us at all times.
4.  The time  balance. 
This has to o with our sense of time-- past, present and future.
Living as people of God in the present means looking backward through tradition and forward with hope and expectation.  To be stuck in the past or lost in the future turns us away from being mindful of current realities.  There is nothing wrong with the dreams of the future or time-honored traditions, as long as we reach out in both directions.
Four balance beams means stretching out in eight different directions--knowledge, emotions, action, submission, solitude,  community, heritage and hope.

Where do you fit in the matrix?  Where do you need  the most balance?
Next time, I'll offer a tool to help you discover your spiritual balance. 

The Faith of Christ

Christianity is a God-based faith in which God reveals Himself through the person of Jesus Christ. Not only does Jesus reveal God, He also reveals what it means to be perfectly human.  He was as fully human as He was divine.

As a human being, Jesus provides us with a model of perfect human faith. His example shows what is meant by living with God as our ultimate concern. The ultimate concern of Christ was to seek His Father’s will and pleasure.   In John 14:31 He said “I love the Father and do exactly as the Father commanded Me.”  In John 15:10 he said “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” 

We see how Jesus lived out this ultimate concern through in Gospels, through four axes of faith (perception, action, community, and time) and eight points of those four axes (knowledge, passion, submission, outer action, self-awareness, community, heritage and hope.).

In the axis of perception, He experienced God and the world through seeking both objective knowledge and subjective experience. 

He was a scholar of the Scriptures and the world around Him. He was able to hold his own among the intellectuals of his day, even at a very young age. He encouraged his disciples and his opponents to study the Bible.  He reasoned with his opponents—he did not just preach at them, and understood their questions and arguments.  Even on the day of his resurrection as he walked with believers on the road to Emmaus, He pointed them back to the Scriptures.

He was also a student of people.  He knew the hearts of men not only from divine revelation as good, but from personal observation, as He grew in wisdom and in stature. He was a student of nature as well.  The examples He used in His teachings show this. He paid attention to the movements of the  birds of the air and the lilies of the field.  He was familiar with the works of men of his day, including farming, fishing, shepherding—the most common occupations of His day.

He did not just take authority for granted, but challenged authority with critical thinking.  Even so, He took the Word of God as His final authority, and used it as a basis for His thinking.

Jesus did not just perceive God and the world with his mind; he sought to understand God and the world with passion and emotional involvement. People were not bugs to be studied from a distance, but lives to be experience though empathy and compassion.  He was also passionate, and deeply cherishing the emotional and subjective experience of His father. 

He broke tradition among the Jews in not addressing God simply as His sovereign king, but also calling him “Abba”—daddy.  For all his life, He reveled in a passionate, emotional connection with the Presence of God, which was only broken on the Cross.  The shock of that emotional separation caused Him to cry out ‘my God, why have you forsaken me,” using the words of Psalm 22.

He did not just pray to God to receive from Him, but to experience His presence.  He spent time every morning and evening in regular contact with the Spirit of God. He listened to and obeyed the Spirit, and had supernatural experiences and visitations from angels. He was as much a mystic as a scholar, and stayed in contact with God through the mind and the heart.  

In the axis of habits.  He practiced both inner submission and  activism. 

Jesus spend much time in submission and silence.  He did not begin His earthly ministry until the age of thirty,  waiting for God’s time instead of rushing ahead.  Whenever there was a time of particular peril or opportunity, His first reaction was to seek God in prayer. He prayed and fasted for forty days to experience God’s presence in His life.   He made a daily habit of submission, silence and stillness.  He attended worship not only to preach, but sometimes just to sit in silence and worship among the crowd.

But when the time came to act, He acted decisively. He spoke out against injustice and hypocrisy.  Risking his own life, he drove the moneychangers out of the temple.  He healed the sick  raised the dead,  cast out demons, and performed miracles by the power of God.  He was exemplary in his forgiveness and compassion to others. 

In the axis of community, he was both self-aware and compassionately involved in community. 

His self-awareness is shown especially John’s gospel, which is full of statements about Himself.  “I am the door.” “I am the Good Shepherd.” I am the light of the World.” I am the way, the truth and the Life.” His assurance of Who He was in God gave him the power to stand up against the ridicule and slander of the religious leaders.

Nevertheless, He entered fully into soul friendship. He made it his practice to take His disciples with Him everywhere. In spite of being rejected by the religious leaders, He remained a faithful practicing Jew, fully participating in public worship.  He was surrounded by crowds most of the time. 

In the axis of time, Jesus respected the past, present, and future. 

He was in touch with his tradition, identifying Himself as first being in the tradition of the prophets of Israel. He often told his disciples that He had come first to the House of Israel. He identified Himself with Abraham, David, Moses, and Jonah.  He did not reject that tradition, but built upon it, emphasizing the connections between His teaching and the tradition of the past.

He was not stuck in the past, however. He was not afraid to change traditions when they needed to be changed. One of His favorite phrases was “You have heard it said. . . but I say.”

He connected with the future through practical hope. He talked to his disciples about heaven, promising that He would be with them there forever.  He believed that this world would get better, too.  He preached the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. He believed in his own resurrection and through His triumphant return the scattered and immature disciples who followed Him would be turned into a force so strong that “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”

Faith in Christ is important, but just as important is that we emulate His faith in every way we can.

Where do you have the faith of Christ in your own life?  Where do you see yourself falling short?  Where else do we see Christ connecting with His Father in faith.

Let’s talk about it.  Write your comments below.    

A Shaky Foundation

My house has a problem.
It was built as part of a planned development of eight-three homes.  The developers were in a rush to build,  so they skimped on the foundation. Before a foundation was laid, the ground should have been pounded solid before the concrete blocks were put in place. This was not done, so now cracks appear in the wall and doors and windows stick.  the longer it goes without fixing the foundation, the worse these cracks become.
Foundations don't sell houses.  Vinyl siding, landscaping, front doors and hardwood floors sell houses.  People react to flash and elegance. They usually don't see the problems with a foundation until it is too late.
What some developer did with our house, most of us do with our lives. We focus on  the visible, "showy" parts, but neglect the foundation.  We want to impress the world with our beauty,  strength and creativity--and it works at first. But as time goes by our flaws become apparent to everyone.
This is what Jesus means at the end of Matthew 7 24-27
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
When we build our lives on a good  foundation it lasts. When we build a show cover over a bad foundation, it will eventually collapse. It isn't the floors or the doors or the windows, but the foundation that makes or breaks a life.
Mother Theresa once said that if you want to change the world, go home and attend to your family. Jesus said that if we are faithful in a few things, we may be rulers over many.   It's not the big projects we undertake in the world, but the little things we do in our tiny sphere of influence that makes the difference. 
The church in America institutionally has chosen to focus on the big things--evangelism, social reform,  building megachurches, and world missions.  This is great, if the foundation is in place, but it isn't.  There is a deep groaning today from within the Body of Christ, an ache that something is seriously wrong.  Cracks are showing in the walls of the church.  People visit and go away with a queasy feeling of vague disappointment.  The music is good, the preaching is great, but something isn't there. 
Within the church, we feel it, too. We know that somehow we are not so much professing Christians as professional Christians. We follow Christ professionally, but inside we are not followers.  We are employees of Christ,  but we do not know him.
We tell ourselves that our neglect of an  inner relationship to God is perfectly normal. We may even argue that it's an moral necessity. Why take time from an busy schedule of serving God to pursue an inner life of prayer? Why struggle with our inner thoughts,  when there is so much sickness in others?  We excuse our feelings of distance from God as the natural result of being so publicly active for Him.  We do not realize how much we resemble those builders who failed to look after a foundation, because they were in such a hurry to put up all those showy doors, floors and walls.
Now, we are seeing the results of this. Institutional churches are collapsing as the veneer of faith which we esteemed so highly crumbles. Christianity in America has great looking walls but no foundation.  We don't really believe what we say we believe and do not seek what we say we seek.
We have ignored the building of our own faith matrix to impress others with our showy success. Now our neglect comes back to bite us.
 The true foundation of our lives is faith--our ultimate concern.  It's more than just belief, but a  basis for all our thoughts,  feelings, and habits.  If we neglect Christ as our ultimate concern, then the  institutions we build will not survive.
What does it mean to build on God as a foundation? 
It doesn't mean to just mean to follow as set of godly rules, like the Ten Commandment.  That would be like having a house with strong crossbeams and braces, but still built on sand.  Strong crossbeams and floor joists will probably keep you together longer if your house is washed away in a flood, but it won't keep you forever. It isn't just God's foundation but God as a foundation that keeps us together.  It is building on an awareness of Him being alive and real.
Smith and Lundquist  in their book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers  coined a phrase that describes the commonly held view of God among many Christians--Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This the idea that God gave us moral principles to follow that will help us with our lives, but nevertheless has little to do with us personally.  It sees the Bible (and in some cases nature) as an instruction book which gives us good advice  but does not require any personal connection with the writer.  It is religion reduced to "click bait.""Six principles God wants you to know about marriage." "Five principles that will make you happy." or "Six habits of an effective leader."  The principles are there and work up to a point, but ultimately it is moral structure to help us achieve our therapeutic needs, not connect us to an eternal, transcendent Deity.  They could be practiced by anyone of any faith and are not unique or different to ours.  There is nothing uniquely Christian about them, and they do not answer the basic question--what am I here for?
To press the metaphor of a house, we can talk about a three-step process of building our lives.
Foundation comes first--which is our ultimate purpose in life. The eight aspects of the faith matrix, previously discussed are how we connect to our central concern. For a Christian this is God, revealed in Christ.  It is not only to practice faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus, who said his ultimate concern was "to do the will of My Father."  (John 8:28)  He found His ultimate concern in His earthly life by staying centered in the presence of His father.
How do we stay connected with God's Presence?  We can reflect at the end of the day on when and where that day did we felt close to God.  If it has been weeks or months without some sense of the Divine presence, we need to find out why.  Our foundation may be shifting.  We should not flippantly dismiss this lack of feeling by saying it doesn't matter.  It does matter whether we feel His Presence or not.  If we don't we need to find out why. The message of the Bible, both Old and New Testament is that God wants to have a personal relationship with us, and wants us to be with Him. If we have no sense or desire for His presence, then something is seriously wrong.
We build on the foundation of faith with the habits of the heart.  These are the spiritual practices that are like pillars which joists and frame to the house, joining eternal purpose with everyday life. These include for the Christian worship, prayer, fasting,  meditation, Scripture meditation, and intercession.  Then comes the horizontal habits of our lives,  like the joists and frame, which link us together with others.  These habits include soul conversations,  fellowship, forgiveness,  tolerance, and love.  These connect Christian with Christian, and strengthen us in mutual faith.
Outreach, justice, and social concern are also part of who we are as Christians, and are important. But these grow out of our inner life--the cannot substitute for it.  As important as our ministry in the world may be, it can and does easily become a way of hiding the fact that we can't get along with our churches or families.
I once met a college student who was an outspoken anti-war protestor. He told me that he was protesting because he loved love others and therefore hated all wars.  But he also disclosed that he  hated his parents and his family, who he thought didn't understand him. It was soon revealed that his   protest was not an act of love at all, but a way of escaping the obligation of caring for his parents. If he loved the world in general, he felt free from his obligation to love his own family.
Many churches and social movements get started this way. Instead of investing our love in the imperfect world  around us, we invest in an imperfect world that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist. We are like a contractor who can't build a straight wall, so hides his mistakes under the best vinyl siding.
Don't try to change the world before you make your part of the world livable. Invest time and effort into building a good foundation.   Build your faith matrix, and you will have something to give the world.
Good habits and value grow outward, like rings on a tree.  First we love God, then we love ourselves, our family, our fellow Christian, and finally our neighbor. Each level depends on the strength of what the one beneath it.
These articles are intended to lead us to the foundation of our faith, which is in God through Christ.
As we look at the ways we discover Him, we also discover the ways we can reveal Him to the world.


How strong is your foundation? How do you stay connected with it?  Do you find that is it easy to hide a shaky foundation from the world with religious or social activity?

Write a comment below, and let me hear from you.

Faith Versus Belief

Faith and belief are terms that are usually used interchangeably.  However, they are not necessarily the same.  You can believe in something without having faith in it.  You can also have faith in things you do not actually believe. 
Belief is what we suppose in our minds to be true. To believe in something is to acknowledge that it exists in a reality outside ourselves. To believe in God, for example, is to accept the idea of a Higher Power above and beyond ourselves.
Faith is an hold on to something to with our minds, our hearts, our wills and our emotions.  Believe is intellectual assent; faith is our personal foundation. 
Our beliefs may or may not have anything to do with how we live. Many of us have beliefs which have nothing to do with our everyday lives.  If we do or do not believe in aliens or Sasquatch, it will probably not have much bearing on our family lives or our choice of occupation.  It is an intellectual choice, not a life-supporting foundation.
Belief in God is for many people little different from belief in Bigfoot. They accept the concept of God, but that is all. One can believe in Jesus' existent, even in His resurrection and divinity, yet it makes no difference to them in their everyday lives.  A person may believe in God, yet cannot point to a single life decision or personal habit influenced by that belief.  They may as well believe in the Loch Ness Monster.

Faith can exist where there is no belief. We can build our lives around things that we know to be fantasies.  It is living in the subjunctive case.  We ask "what if this were true" and construct imaginative views of life around it, until we forget that it is merely a supposition, not reality.
Think of a person who plays the lottery every week, and fantasizes about winning it.  They become so focused on the dream of lottery winnings that they sell all that they have and buy tickets. It is still a remote fantasy, not as likely as being struck by lightning on a cloudless day, yet they have built everything around it. Intellectually, they know the odds. They know the difference between truth and fiction, yet they choose to define themselves by their allegiance to willful fantasy. emotionally, they have bought into the dream so deeply that they do not care.  That fantasy has become the basis for their life. 
Belief is what we hold in our mind.  Faith is what gives meaning to our existence.  Ardent sports fans,  movie buffs, re-enactors, serious gamers may just be part-time hobbyist, but at least a few become so engrossed in this that it becomes a faith, not a hobby.  They look to their heroes and imaginative fantasies to give meaning to our existence. In the age of virtual reality, this becomes more and more common.
"Fantasy religions” which Adam Possami labels “hyper-real religions” are increasing.   In Dunedin, New Zeeland, nearly two percent of the population listed on a census their religious preference as “Jedi Knight.” Often these religions start out as a joke, but over time they develop real belief systems, code of ethics,  fellowship,  and rituals.  Some start out as serious attempts to build a moral philosophy on fictional stories.  There are religion based on the movie The Matrix, Start Trek, the novels of H.  P.  Lovecraft and Robert E. Heinlein. It does not bother their followers that they have a non-real mythology--any more than(as G. K. Chesterton suggests in The Everlasting Man) the ancients always believed the myths and stories of gods and goddesses were true. In postmodernism,  the actually reality of the narrative that shapes our lives is purely incidental.  Apparently, knowing that something is unreal is not necessarily an impediment to having faith in it.  
While it is possible to have faith without belief, it is not ideal.  When our faith is challenged by real-world problems, unreal forms of faith tends to fall apart.  Even a child knows enough not to point a toy gun at a real robber.  We cannot continue to play games when our lives take a somber turn. 
As inadequate as faith is without belief, having belief without faith may be worse.  When we believe one thing and live another, we are live a lie without uttering it.  For such a person, belief exists but it impotent. We have denied the link between the head and the heart.  A person who is mistaken may be corrected, and that correction can change their lives, but one who knows the truth and does not live it is like a person with nerve paralysis.  They have severed the spinal chord of their lives, and no longer respond to the mind.  A hyper-real religionist may be following fiction, but they can change through confronting reality, but the non-following believer is inoculated against reality,  severed from the real, and cannot be persuaded by it.  Only the most desperate of circumstances can bring them to seek the power of true belief.
Belief and faith are not the same, but they should stay together.  Together, they enable us to withstand the challenges of life.

Here's some questions  for discussion:

Do you agree that it is possible to have faith without belief or belief without faith?  How important do you think it is to have your faith and belief together?
Do you think in you own life, your beliefs and your faith match?  Do you depend upon your beliefs to form the basis of your everyday life decisions?

Three Kinds of Faith

All people everywhere have some system of faith, whether it based on the truth or not.  Without faith in something,  life would be impossible.  Not all faiths lead to heaven, nor do all people believe in heaven. We can build our lives around all kinds of things. 
 It is not always obvious what category a person’s true faith lies, not even to the person themselves.  Many people who profess a religious belief,  do not hold that religious belief very strongly.  The center or their being is not located in religion, but in the pursuit of something else. This is what the Bible calls idolatry—worshipping a false god rather than a true one, or worshipping a true God without sincerity. God is merely a means to serving something else, though what we serve may be unclear. Their spiritual selves are double-minded and confused, and moral choices or necessarily belief becomes difficult.
Generally, we can divide these faith systems into three broad categories—self-based, community-based, and God-based. 
Self-based faith
Self-based faith finds its meaning in a person’s inner being, not in outer relationships.   No exterior standard or truth is necessary.  The poet William Ernest Henley in this kind of faith in his poem Invictus:
            “Out of the depths that cover me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever gods may be

For my own unconquerable soul.”

Or as Frank Sinatra put it,
         “For what is a man what has he got? If not himself then he has not.
            The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.”
In self-based faith, doing it our way is all important. Self-fulfillment or self-actualization is our ultimate concern.
This kind of spirituality goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Hedonists and Epicureans taught that the ultimate goal of life was personal pleasure—not the passing desires of the flesh, but the higher pursuits of the human spirit, which included personal self-discovery, self-expression and well-being.  This is not necessarily a selfish faith since love is usually considered one of the highest personal pleasures. A person can be loving and generous to others, but they do it to make themselves feel good. 
Another variant of self-spirituality is the modern “self-esteem” movement, which puts our own personal growth above everything else.  Getting in touch with our “inner selves”  is the same as getting in touch with God.  Relationships and activities that do not bring us self-fulfillment are considered detrimental to our spirits. 
 C. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.
That Jones shall worship the "god within him" turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon - anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners."
Self-based faith is its lack of outside checks on morals or behavior. The only true discipline is self discipline. The only true morality is being true to ourselves.
 In anxious times, self-based faith easily becomes sheer selfishness. If we are on a sinking ship, why should we obey the cry “women and children first” if self is our own ultimate good?
The other problem with self-spirituality is that it has no real mirror.  Other people give us a measuring stick that helps us see ourselves. If we are absorbed totally pursuing our own self-esteem, we cannot discover our true selves.  We are like a person, living in a room without a mirror, who cannot see our own faults, or even our own beauty. We need other people to help us realize our own best interests.   
Community-based faith
Community-based faith finds its meaning in relationship to a community.  This community can be very large or very small--It can be all of humanity, our family, country, ethnic group, circle of friends, or even one other person.  Being part of any other set of individuals, losing our identity in a group, is the essence of community spirituality. Nationalism, patriotism, regionalism, racism, family values, and school spirit are all expressions of this kind of faith.

One of the most striking expressions of community-based spirituality I ever saw was while I was traveling in a van from Moscow to Bryansk, Russia.  Along the road was a monument to a battle fought in World War II. A woman in a wedding dress was there, stopping traffic. She spoke to our driver and we drove on.  The driver explained that in this province, brides on their wedding day stop cars at war monuments to remind people of the men who died, who never had a chance to marry.  

 It’s hard to imagine American brides spending their wedding day doing something patriotic. But in her mind patriotism came before marriage. Personal lives are secondary in Russian culture to the welfare of the whole, even on your wedding day.  

Conservative talk-show hosts talk about “family values,” as if family and God are the same.  Liberals talk about community values in the same way. We put American flags in our sanctuaries and national anthems in our hymnbooks without ever thinking that patriotism and godliness are the same thing.  Holy days like Christmas seem more about family and the universal kinship of humanity than the incarnation of a transcendent God.  Christmas stories like The Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life that are more about loving others than meeting Christ. 

Community-based faith produces altruism and self-sacrifice more easily than self-based faith.  But it creates problems. What happens when the many different communities of which we are a part do not agree with each other? When we have to choose communities which one comes first?

Another problem with community-based faith is how we treat those not in our community.

 In the Godfather movies, Michael Corleone chooses loyalty to his family (the Mafia) over life as a law-abiding citizen, and destroys his family in the process.  Soldiers like Irwin Rommel fought for the Third Reich because they believed that their country came first. Marxism, which claims to stand for uplifting of the common person, has produced more bloody dictatorships than any ideology in history.  Community-based faith can deny the value of those outside our community, even when it claims to serve all. Those who do not go along with community values are usually treated as enemies to be crushed. Morality is situational, absolute, based on what one community views as “the greater good.”

In the end, community-based faith has no outside source of morality, patriotism devolves to nationalism, creedalism become oppression, families become clans, and churches become cults. 

 God-based faith

God-based faith finds meaning beyond self and community in an all-wise Creator Who is the source of all truth and goodness.   God judges the actions of all countries, communities, races, and families.    

God based faith does not have all the answers, but it at least acknowledges the fact, which community and self-based faiths do not. When our ultimate concern is something in this world, we can only make moral choices based on what we see around us and the needs of the moment. But God-based faith looks for truth beyond ourselves, which keeps us humble.

One drawback to God-based faith, is that in order to have it, you must actually believe there is a God. Not only that, but you must believe He has spoken. Not only that, you also have to believe He is still speaking.   If we are not sure, or if we believe He is not speaking, there is no   lreason to make Him the central concern of our existence.  Deism, which believes God started the universe but is now has nothing to do with it, rarely produces anything like real faith.  If God is absent from the world, then there is no reason to base our lives around Him.  God may be our Creator,  but He is an absent one, and or no real value in our daily living.  Without faith in God,  we necessarily fall back on self-satisfaction or community life as the reason for existence.

Here are some questions to get you thinking:

Is your ultimate concern in life God, some community, or yourself?  Which one  do you serve on a day-by-day basis? If you had to live without self-fulfillment or family connections, could you find fulfillment in life?    If you believe in God, do you serve Him so you can be a better person or have a better community, or do you seek to be a better person or have a better community so you can serve God? 

Write a comment and share what you think.

Good Faith

All people have faith of some kind. Without faith,  we cannot function.  Even so, some faiths work better than others.  A faith is useless unless it is strong enough to provide real, sustainable support. 

A personal  faith may fail for two reasons. It may fail because what we believe in may be inconsistent or even false.  It may also fail because we do not really have faith what we say we think we do.  We may not understand our belief system and its implications;  or we may understand but are not willing to practice it.  If we expect Christianity to provide support, we must actually put it into practice.  If we neglect our faith,   we cannot expect it to give us anything but  stress and disappointment.  

A strong, sustainable system of faith will have certain characteristics: 

First, it should be durable.  A durable faith holds together. It is not contradictory or haphazard.   We cannot be a Christian atheist, or a Mormon agnostic.   If we believe that Jesus is the unique Son of God, we cannot also believe Buddha was also a son of God.  If we believe there is no God, we cannot also believe that God answers prayer.  Even so many people hold to such logical inconsistencies and wonder why thus faith isn't working.  

A good faith system contain paradoxes but not contradictions.  The Trinity is a paradox--one God and three persons.  Sine we believe that God is more intelligent than we are, we should expect parts of revealed truth to be unexplainable to us.  This is not contradictory though, since the real focus of our faith is in God divine nature, not in our understanding of that nature. It is Him we trust, not our picture of Him. 

Contradictory faith systems are different at the core. We can't ultimate trust God and ourselves at the same time.  The prophet Elijah told the people of his day "you cannot hop between two branches" meaning that a bird can't rest in two trees at once.  Jesus put it this way.  "You cannot serve two masters. You either hate the one and love the other, or love the one and hate the other."  It is contractor to say "Love your neighbor as yourself," and affirm "Every man for himself."  You can't say "trust in the Lord with all your might" and also affirm.  "God only helps those who help themselves."  These are contradictions not paradoxes, since the essence of our faith.  Contractions have to do with faith--our ultimate concern--nor belief, our understanding of that concern.  We can only have one  ultimate concern at a time.   

Second, good faith is verifiable.  It can be tested by critical thinking and open questioning. If we don't put faith to the test, then circumstances will.  It is better to test our own faith before a crisis, rather than have it break in the middle of one..   

New faiths spring up in every age.   Unlike the old ones, they haven't been tested.  Judaism has been around for three thousand years, Christianity for two thousand, and Islam for fourteen hundred years.  During that time, they have been debated, discussed, challenged, tested, declined, reformed, split, reconciled, split again, renewed, rejected, and reclaimed.   That is why they  survive. Innovative faiths that have not been tested are much more likely to fail.  

We don't have to completely " prove" faith, just have sufficient answers to verify for ourselves its trustworthiness. Every answered prayer, changed life, or unusual demonstration of love provides evidence for its plausibility.  If  God’s hand exists, we ought to see His fingerprints on something.
On the other hand, the absence of His fingerprints does not prove his absence.  it is not necessary to see God everywhere to believe. It is only necessary to see him anywhere. 

Third, good faith is  practical.  Faith had better give us a realistic foundation for survival.  Cults and other high-control religions will often  make harsh  demands upon their members  that can harm the people who follow them, because they are not able to adjust to real life.  Their strictness does not allow for variable circumstances, human failure, or allow the possibility of real forgiveness and restoration.   

But overly  broad and flexible faiths are not much help, either.  If everything is allowed, and nothing is forbidden, so there is no way to test our faith with submission.  They are like a body without a backbone, making no demands or having no harsh edges.   A faith that cannot say “no” cannot say anything at all worth hearing. 

Even good faith will fail though, if we do  not practice it. In order for faith to work for us, we must understand it and obey it.  Our faith will fail under three circumstances. 

Faith will fail if is misplaced.  We may think our ultimate concern is one thing, while it really is another. 

Sometimes this  happens when we mistake the means of holding on to faith  with the object of  faith itself. This is the reason for the commandment in Exodus 20 about not making graven images.  Idols were originally means of worshipping an invisible God but they became gods themselves. When we put our trust in the church or the pastor instead of in the God of the church, then the church becomes a kind of idol. People fail and churches fail all the time, and if we become overly connected with the means of worship instead of the object of worship,  we will always be disappointed. 

Misplaced faith also occurs when seek the object of our faith not for His own sake but as a means to something else.  We may worship God in hopes that He will reward us.  Our goal then is not Him--He is simply a means to an end--but our real concern is elsewhere.

Faith also fails if it is mixed faith—faith a la carte.   Our faith system will not work if it is a cobbled together from a variety of beliefs, based on our own personal preferences.  

Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart, calls this kind of faith “Sheilaism” after an interview they had with a young nurse named Sheila.

“Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as "Sheilaism." This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us.  ‘I believe in God,’ Sheila says.  ‘I am not a religious fanatic.’  [Notice at once that in our culture any strong statement of belief seems to imply fanaticism so you have to offset that.] ‘I can't remember the last time I went to church.  My faith has carried me a long way.  It's Sheilaism.  Just my own little voice.’"
“Sheila's faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many.  In defining what she calls ‘my own Sheilaism,’ she said: ‘It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.  You know, I guess, take care of each other.  I think God would want us to take care of each other.’ Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.” [1]

Sheilaism makes its own faith out of bits and pieces of things she has heard or felt. Her faith is without inner consistency, since the pieces were not made to go together; and no durability, since it changes every day. 

A la carte faiths are not particularly helpful in times of trouble, since they exert no real control over adherents—rather, their adherents control them.  

Bellah continues:

 “The language of ‘values’ as commonly used (by these individualist faiths) is self-contradictory, precisely because it is not a language of value or moral choice.  It presumes the existence of an absolutely empty unencumbered and improvisational self.  It obscures personal reality, social reality, and particularly the moral reality that links person and society.”[3]

Faith will fail if it is a childish faith--not the childlike faith of the New Testament, but a faith which is unformed or underdeveloped.   

The solutions we have as children do not work when we reach adulthood.   We may believe that God always heals, but when we grow older we have to face the inevitability of death and long term disease. We have to broaden our understanding of God to accommodate this.   We may believe that God wants us to always be a winner, but then we grow older and discover that everyone can't win all the time.   We may believe in our own power to resist temptation, but then discover as we grow older that everyone fails sometime.    

Childish faith is not a failing of faith itself, but of our understanding.  It usually results from our own limited knowledge of our own beliefs.  

Faith has to grow to be successful.   It requires effort on our part to come to a higher understanding of the truth, and to develop a lifestyle around it.   That is why we have to keep growing in our faith until the day we die.


Here are some thoughts to think about. Let me know what you think.

Is your faith a "good" faith? Has it proven to be durable, verifiable and practical.  Has you ever discovered that your faith has been mixed or misplaced?

How can we test our faith today, so when we face personal crises we know it will be strong.

How can we grow tougher in our faith, so it will sustain us in times of trouble?

Write your comments below.

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[1] Bellah, Habits of the Heart

[2] Robert Bellah, ed.  Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Harper & Row, Philadelphia, 1985.     

[3] Ibid, p.  80.