I've had a couple of recent posts about faith, belief, reality and the like, and I want to bring them toward a conclusion. I can't say that this present post is going to follow precisely where the last one left off, but it should be close enough.

I've been talking about what I consider to be a confusion in mainstream Christianity between faith and intellectual belief, and I closed the previous post in this area with the philosophical idea that to believe a proposition p is to act is if p is true. Setting aside Pilate's question of what is truth, I tend to think that most of us adhere to this statement about belief and action; even if only by default in that it is part of our Western tradition. A simple example would be that if the weather forecast claims it will rain tomorrow, then if you believe it you will dress accordingly, carry an umbrella, or plan on getting wet. On the other hand, if you don't believe it then you will do none of these things. Your actions, even if only mental, will be in accord with your belief concerning the forecast.

So if our religion tells us that faith is intellectual belief, and if our intellectual tradition tells us that to believe is to act accordingly, then the implication is that if we have faith, we will act according to it. I'm pretty sure that plenty of preachers have used James chapter two to make this very point. Well taken. I would absolutely, fully agree that in a large and general sense, if my faith does not direct my life, I probably don't really have any faith after all. But, bear with me, oftentimes there are some serious problems with this as it actually plays out in Christian life.

No one argues that faith is important, and the "stronger" one's faith, the better. Absolutely. But, suppose that faith equals intellectual belief and so requires action in accord. Then when presented with an article of faith, for me to have faith at all, I must act in accord with the acceptance of that article. The more decisive and sure and confident my action, the party line goes, the stronger my faith. The more God is happy with me. The better my chances of Heaven. This is a strong motivation to find within myself an equilibrium between belief and action; read, my faith and my living. Striving for this equilibrium is quite complex—more complex than most care to think about. It occurs at multiple levels, with multiple articles, simultaneously. The ability to reconcile one article of faith with one action or way of being affects all the others. The quantities of articles vary from person to person, from a few to hundreds, and at the latter end of the spectrum, the mathematics are relentless. At the lowest level, the articles begin with "There is a God, yes or no?" and "Does it make a difference?" and "There is a Heaven and a Hell, yes or no?" and so forth. Obviously, what a person thinks and feels about these sets the stage for everything to come. Bluntly speaking, it's a matter of analyzing chance and probabilities with our innate human propagator/predictor. I know that sentence sounds like it comes from an engineer, but if the shoe fits, and besides, I'm convinced this is how it is. Well, almost all of the time. More on this later.

And so, in the work of trudging through all the interlinked possibilities, there are a few basic ways this all plays out in the individual person. The lines between them aren't cast in stone and there is some mixing together of them, but they're the ingredients of the pie. (1) We can work backwards from how we are willing to act, that is, how we are willing to live, and let this determine what we believe. This does reconcile belief and action, but it's a bit short of taking part in a life-changing spiritual path. If, for example, I am unwilling to give up my incessant greed for bigger and more expensive material goods, I will not allow myself to believe that the Bible calls us to do so. I will instead pluck from the Bible the idea that God wants to richly bless his children, and smile complacently at the new SUV in my driveway. Note that this now becomes a value in the mathematical analysis, and colors what I can or cannot believe a "blessing" to be. (2) We can start with belief, and claim to believe certain things, but fail (or refuse) to act accordingly. This approach has two major divisions I'll call "moral frailty" and "hypocrisy."

Moral frailty believes, and desires to submit and act according to the belief, but is unable to do so. To me, this is the authentic Christian place, and in it rests the entire concept of the Christian struggle vis-à-vis the Grace of God. I intellectually believe that God calls me to places and states of being that I am as yet unable to go, although it is my heart's earnest desire to do so. My actions and my beliefs do not match, but I am trying, because faith (note: faith, not intellectual belief) tells me that in hope, in trust, in devotion to God in all my poverty I will grow and I will progress. That in all my regrettable human failings, God's Grace is more than sufficient to cover me. Paul covers this just fine in Romans chapter seven and on into eight:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (NRSV).

As for hypocrisy, forgive me for creating a taxonomy here, but hypocrisy must be broken into two parts, both of which are types of moral fraud. The first hypocrisy is the good old-fashioned kind, of which the world (often rightly) accuses Christians. In this form of hypocrisy, the speaker claims, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," while proudly doing otherwise because he doesn't think he will be caught, or because he thinks he has some special right to act in opposition to his claims. This hypocrisy is a blatant and public moral fraud, wherein claimed belief and action do not meet, and there is no intent to make them meet. The second hypocrisy is an inward moral fraud which says, "I believe such and such, and/or so should you," wherein the speaker believes he does, in fact, live according to the belief, but in actuality does not. While the first form of hypocrisy keeps the world from liking Christians, the second form keeps people from wanting to be Christian. After all, who likes somebody who is a phony on the outside, and who wants to become a person who is phony and self-deluded on the inside? I figure—nobody.

So. At this point, we have four possible methods for dealing with the tension between belief and action:

1. Pride: Allowing my own selfish will to determine what is believable to me.
   
2. Moral frailty: Believing, and wanting to act, but failing in human weakness.
   
3. Blatant Hypocrisy: Saying I believe but knowingly acting otherwise.
   
4. Inward Hypocrisy: Saying I believe, and mistakenly believing that I act according to my belief.
   

Like I said earlier, these are the four main methods I see, although they come mixed together in differing amounts within each of us. To my mind, number two is the truly Christian situation, and I want to note briefly that it begins to demonstrate the problem with thinking of "faith" as synonymous with "intellectual belief." Belief becomes null and void without action in kind, and therefore thinking in these terms can drive a would-be Christian crazy. It leads one to think, "Since I cannot act this way, or be that way, I obviously don't believe (read: I obviously have no faith), and therefore (yada-yada…) God will send me to Hell. But the fact of the matter is, faith is not wholly dependent on our ability to act or be a certain way, but rather in our desire and effort to do or be so. Faith is made perfect in the God in whom we have faith. Belief is often impossible because of our inability to act according to it, but faith is never confounded because God makes up for our frailties and therefore faith is not nullified by human weakness.

Almost done. Having read the previous paragraph, and accepting for the moment that there are people who have never been taught its idea, now consider the fifth method for dealing with "faith" as tension between belief and action. This is the ugly one I alluded to in my previous post on this topic. Sigh… here goes…

In this fifth method, the Christian thinks something along the lines of: "To please God, I must have faith, which means I must believe, which means I must act." I'm going to cut to the chase here and get it over with; the thing that has been bothering me for quite a while now. Consider this approach, this mindset, presented with the following combined articles of faith:

There is a God. There is a Heaven and a Hell. The saved go to Heaven. The unsaved go to Hell. Faith saves us. Lack of faith damns us. All worldly concerns are meaningless compared to gaining or losing salvation. Heaven is a better place to be than is Earth. Heaven is eternal bliss. Hell is eternal suffering. All children go to Heaven when they die. Few adults go to Heaven when they die. Murder is a sin and endangers your soul. Greater love has no man, than he give up his life for another [(by extension, his soul)]. The primary duty of a good parent, as much as it is within their power, is to lead their children to Heaven and save them from Hell.

And so I have to ask, what happens? As an answer, I give you—Andrea Yates. Now, please please don't misunderstand me. Ms. Yates' murdering of her children was an act of total insanity, embedded in what I can only call theological evil. Absolutely, without doubt. And I stand by that statement whether she was "clinically" insane or not. To murder, let alone children, let alone your own children, is pure insanity. And, it is an act of evil. However—and this is my point—in a state of being where one is fully devoted to his or her faith beyond all things, and where faith is viewed as synonymous with intellectual belief, and where it is recognized that to believe is to act, well… Ms. Yates' actions were positively, imminently, logical. What's more, in this (twisted, erroneous) view of faith, her actions were incontrovertibly acts of strong, resolute, unwavering faith on par with… well, Abram and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. This is terribly, terribly problematic to any Christianity (or other religion for that matter) that confuses faith and belief. The Yates case is, it seems to me, the reductio ad absurdum argument demonstrating in horrific, tragic consequences the dirty little secret of the brand of Christianity in which she was immersed: it is flawed at its very core.

Lots of times "in church," we are lead to think that when we cannot believe something, that if are not convinced beyond a shadow of doubt about an article of faith, that there is something wrong with us; that our faith is weak or flawed, that we are a bad Christian or not "truly" a Christian at all. This thinking is wrong, and for the (thankfully) rare individual who falls prey to it with a full commitment, tragedy results. Evil results. There is something wrong with a system that calls "good" what logically culminates in evil. It's not a system I can accept.

So. What's this mean? It means that we who are Christians are not supposed to be convinced of certain things. We are supposed to have times of doubt. We are supposed to be frail and weak. It is necessary that we be so, in order that God's Grace may always and forever be the one Thing which perfects our faith. The power is not in our faith, but in Whom we have faith. That's a story for another post, but I want to leave with this: the Yates story really, really stuck in my gut, on a number of levels. In a nutshell, the thought I couldn't get out of my head was that she managed to find within herself, after some break with all that is holy, the will to do exactly what her religion taught her that a fantastically faithful Christian would logically do—and it could not have been any more wrong. It made me think about the basis and history of my personal faith, let me tell you. And you know what? Here's my confession. Do I really, really believe there's a Heaven just like I've been taught? Nope. I don't. I don't, and I am so very glad I don't. But you know what else? I have faith that there's a Heaven (of sorts); I really, really do. And thank God, there's a huge difference between the two.

Part of my problem is that I'm a fool for a pretty face.

Or two.

Meet Sugar and Spice, our new dogs.