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.