But faith requires more than simply trust in a reliable object — it requires that such a trust proceed from the true nature of that object. Thus when we talk of religious or spiritual faith — and this is the faith of which we are most concerned — it is not simply sufficient that our trust in God (whom we understand to be completely trustworthy) will invariably bring results. Our trust must be consistent and harmonious with the nature of God to bear fruit. These conditions or constraints which dictate and direct the faith relationship I have called — for lack of a better term — the transaction of faith. To simply trust, while disregarding the true nature of God, is to practice mere wishful thinking or magical projection. And a trustworthy God in whom no genuine trust (or misdirected trust) is vested will likewise avail us nothing.

Faith is not an intellectual artifice … but rather aims at implementing true transformation

It is here in the transaction of faith where knowledge increasingly comes into play. Knowledge — while not a necessary precondition for faith (and sometimes an impediment to it) — can guide and direct it by providing understanding of the nature of God, and thereby influencing actions and attitudes which will place trust appropriately, leading to the desired — or better, desirable — outcome. For faith is meaningless without an outcome: we do not trust simply as an intellectual exercise, but rather to reach some definite end. Hence we have faith that God will give us strength and wisdom in difficult times; or that healing may occur; or that a proper decision be made; or that there be change in ourselves or others. Faith is not an intellectual artifice, erected to satisfy some desire to achieve cerebral cosmic congruency, but rather aims at implementing true transformation in ourselves, in others, and the world around us — a metamorphosis not achievable through our own efforts alone.

Given that God is transcendent and ephemeral, not given to inspection or investigation by the tools used to explore the material world, how then may we achieve some measure of knowledge about such a being? The answer, I believe, is threefold: by experience, by history, and by revelation. While any one of these may provide some insight regarding the nature of the God we seek to trust, each plays a role in reinforcing the other, and providing needed correction to the others. Any of these elements, set apart from the others, will quickly lead to distorted, incomplete, or erroneous conclusions about the nature of God and adversely affect the trust relationship with Him.

The importance of experience arises from the spiritual nature of man, who, unlike any other life form, has a mind, a free will, and the ability to perceive the immaterial, transcendent aspects of life in the cosmos. Thus the mind is free to interpret the events and occurrences of life, to abstract seemingly disconnected occurrences into a cohesive reality by inference, deduction, and reason. The will transcends the deterministic fatalism of nature without spirit, allowing change and choices, wisdom and foolishness. The spirit, competent as it is to perceive the intangible reality and richness of life, can soar at the beauty of a symphony, ache at the pathos in great art, marvel at the magnificence of a sunset, and most importantly reach for that which is beyond itself: love, relationships, passion, beauty. These three allow an experiential connection with the divine, Himself comprised of mind, will and spirit.

But experience alone is insufficient to fully understand God, for it is limited by the peculiar blindness of our self-referential nature, and the expansive essentiality of an infinite, timeless divine being who sometimes — or often, more accurately — acts in a manner beyond our limited spiritual ability to perceive or comprehend.

Furthermore, we are by nature communal beings, incomplete in ourselves but far vaster collectively in union with one another. And we, unlike God, live in time: we are born, live, and ultimately die; others have lived before us and will live after us. Thus we are changeable beings; we learn from our prior experiences, and those who have lived before us and with us. Thus history is the collection of man’s experience with himself and others, and provides an objective external point of reference whereby we may judge both experience and revelation. How does our own experience compare and contrast with those also seek God, or those who wish nothing to do with the divine? Does our understanding of revelation (of which more will be said later) compare favorably or unfavorably with those also believe, or who have gone before us believing — especially those closer to the origins of such revelation? As we observe the outcome and consequences of free choices manifested by others, does this not influence our own choices and awareness of the consequences arising from them? History represents a vast pool of experience against which we may judge our experience; tradition, as Chesterton once said, is the democracy of the dead: their lives cast votes for or against our own.

And so we come to revelation – perhaps the most challenging component of our knowledge of the divine. At one level, the idea of revelation is entirely reasonable: a divine being, immaterial and above time and space, wishing to communicate His mind and spirit to a material creation bound by the mortal and temporal, would most certainly provide some substantial and durable means of communication to His creation whom He loves and treasures. The integrity of such a communication would be jealously guarded over time, especially in light of the corrupted and rebellious nature of these created beings. While such a transmission of the will, mind, and nature of the divine would by necessity embody things quite strange and mysterious to man — constrained as he is by time and material nature, and corrupted by a rebellious tendency toward proud independence — it would nevertheless be sufficiently verifiable as divine in origin that man, through reason, history, and experience, could confirm its divine origin even within the finite limits of his nature and intellect. It is also reasonable to assume that man, driven by self-will and refusal to submit to divine authority, would produce clever forgeries of such divine communication which would support and portray the vision of a god created in man’s image — hence engendering a proliferation of scriptures claiming divine inspiration while having none.

From man’s perspective, however, the task of verifying the divine origin and veracity of such divine transmission of knowledge would prove formidable indeed, for each of the forgeries would lay claim to divine origin and assert their righteous dominion over the mind and morals of man. Even the genuine article could be easily misinterpreted, perverted from its purpose in drawing men toward the divine to nefarious ends, corrupted, if not in essence, then in application, toward the ends of man’s self-aggrandizement rather than submission and service to God.

It is here that both history and experience step in to affirm and confirm the veracity of of the divine communication. History brings to the table its tools of archeology, language analysis, manuscript scholarship, and correlation with actual historical events. It also brings the testimony of tradition: what those who had close proximity to the origins of the documents understood to be their source and message. Experience brings a different perspective: what was, and is, the impact of such divine transmission on the lives of those who have embraced its message and morality? The experiences of lives transformed; relationships healed; intractable evil mastered and defeated; great works of mercy and grace accomplished: these bear testimony to a power transcending that of mere mortality, a power for good, a power arising from divine goodness. The spark of the spiritual nature of man may be fanned to flame by the divine wind transmitted through the true logos.

Thus the transaction of faith — reliance on the trustworthy divine, made more secure by the knowledge gained by experience, history, and revelation — brings the feeble faith of the foolish in contact with the utter reliability and power of divine wisdom and grace. It is from this fountain that faith draws its capacity to transform those who trust by the power of God who is both good and utterly trustworthy.

Leon Moisseiff had unshakable faith in the reliability of his newly-completed masterpiece. He would have had no qualms whatsoever trusting its dependability in any weather conditions. Yet had he stood upon his own creation on November 7th, 1940, his faith would have been fatal. The object of his faith was unreliable, and the strength of his faith irrelevant.
 
 

Faith has become the diametric of reason … practiced only by deluded fools who reject the graceful catenary and steel-plate certainty of scientific rationalism.

Faith is an idea frequently voiced, but little understood. It is commonly mentioned in the pejorative sense in today’s secular society, where it has become a proxy for belief in the unbelievable, the unprovable, the superstitious and the mythical. Faith has become the diametric of reason — unreasonably so, as we shall see — practiced only by deluded fools who reject the graceful catenary and steel-plate certainty of scientific rationalism.

Yet faith–not love–makes the world go ’round. You exercise faith when you place the key in the ignition and start your car. You have faith when you flip a switch, expecting light to rush forth from a fixture, or music from stereo speakers. You have faith that your coat will keep you warm and dry; your plane will stay aloft; your surgeon will bring you through a heart bypass. The atheist has utter faith in his reason, that belief in God is beyond logic and therefore must be rejected. Such faith is nothing more than trust: a confidence that the object is reliable, the tool is trustworthy, its behavior predictable, its nature dependable. In the physical realm, such trust may be based in part on knowledge — one can study the flow of electrons and principles of resistance which make a light bulb glow — but such erudition is entirely optional, and rarely grasped by those who rely on its behavior. The object of faith may be entirely reliable yet utterly beyond our comprehension — or, as Leon Moisseiff discovered to his great dismay, deeply understood yet profoundly unreliable.
 

We want to understand before we trust – and labor under the pretension that we cannot trust until we understand …

It is in the realm of the immaterial and the spiritual where faith comes most under scrutiny and is the subject of much skepticism. Such skepticism is of course most profound in the materialist, the agnostic, or the atheist — but each of us has a strong strain of suspicion about that which cannot be weighed, measured, seen, or felt. We want to understand before we trust – and labor under the pretension that we cannot trust until we understand, until such trust is “reasonable” to the input of our senses or the perceptions and insights of the mind.

Yet the countless small acts of faith which allow us to move through life are far less frequently grounded in knowledge than they are in experience. We do not think twice about starting our cars, because we have, a thousand times before, turned the key in the ignition and had the engine roar to life. We cross the suspension bridge without hesitating because millions have done so before us — or more proximately, because the cars in front of us are passing over safely. Such experience may be personally acquired, or may be derivative: we trust the surgeon to remove our gallbladder, not because we have directly evaluated his skills and performance, but because others have trusted before us: his reputation about their satisfactory outcome has been imputed to us. Because others have trusted before us, and their trust has been rewarded, we find ourselves inclined to trust as well.

It is common for the skeptic to argue that spiritual or religious faith is “believing things for which there is no empirical evidence.” But contained within this erroneous definition is the very seed of its fallacy: it demands of the spiritual and immaterial realm that it be subject to the measurements, the rules, and the limitations of the material, and presumes the non-existence of anything beyond the empirically determinable. The skeptic and the materialist are boxed in; their world is small indeed, allowing for nothing but that which the eye may see, the hand might touch, the mind may comprehend in its finite measure and the incompleteness of its intellectual grasp.

G.K. Chesterton, in his typically lucid and insightful way, described this straight-jacketed state of mind in his book Orthodoxy:

… [T]he materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. … The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. … The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Reason set adrift from the divine logos floats like an airtight bottle on a sea of confusion. It fashions tightly-woven arguments from false premises and faulty knowledge. It rejects the unprovable while proving the irrational. Reason may even conclude that its very foundation does not exist: that truth is a cultural artifact, that there are no absolutes. Such is the basis of the postmoderism which currently infects the lofty heights of academia, an insidious virus now replicating rapidly in the intellectual slums of public education and the irrational irrelevancy of college classrooms.

Furthermore, reason detached from the transcendent — the same reason upon which the materialist and the skeptic rest their insubstantial security — must itself be the subject of skepticism. For in the purposeless, deterministic world of random chance and unordered events, who is to say that reasoned thought and scientific inquiry is anything but the random neural energy of an accidental life-form, no more connected to cause and effect than the spark which shuffled amino acids like cards into something we now call “life”?
 
Again, Chesterton states the problem succinctly:

[The] peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

Faith embodies the confidence in that which we do not necessarily understand, but have found to be experientially reliable. One can, almost surprisingly, have a profoundly misguided or erroneous understanding of a trustworthy object — and still that object will remain trustworthy. Cro-Magnon man, magically transported by time machine to the twenty-first century, might well believe that switching on a light is black magic or the work of the gods — but when he flips the switch, the bulb will still emit light. Thus faith depends, not merely in the confidence that its object will be reliable, but on the inherent reliability of the object itself.

Thus the poles of faith are opposite yet complimentary: there must be trust, even without understanding, and the object of trust must be reliable and dependable. This dialectic is at the heart of religious faith: the trust in something unseen and poorly understood, which nevertheless proves experientially trustworthy, because its object is utterly reliable. It is here that reason and faith coalesce: reason, guided and given purpose and boundaries in the transcendent, points to that which exists but is beyond our capacity to comprehend with intellect alone. Faith beckons us to span this intellectual chasm with the bridge of trust, drawing us to experience that which we lack the means to grasp without it. Reason may block us from faith, constricted as it often is by self-imposed constraints — or reason may confirm and reinforce that which we experience by faith. Trust in the transcendent transforms us, expanding the limits and restrictions which we arbitrarily place upon reality.

The man of faith sees an effect, and attributes its cause to the transcendent, while open to the possibility that the cause may be random or material in nature. The skeptic has no such freedom: the cause cannot be the transcendent, for the transcendent does not exist. His viewpoint is “reality-based” only insofar as the reality he trusts excludes the transcendent. The man of faith can afford to be wrong, and may often be so; such is the process of growth in the unseen world. The skeptic cannot be wrong — for if he is, his worldview is utterly demolished.

There is, however, another aspect of faith which must be met, if this trust is to bear fruit in deepening our experience and our understanding of the transcendent. This is the transaction of faith: the trust must be grounded in and bounded by the nature of that which is trusted. A light will not illuminate by flipping a switch unconnected by wires; a car will not start by placing your house key in the ignition, or your car key in the door. The nature of the object demands that the action based on trust be within fixed parameters dictated by the object’s design or character.

There is more to be said about this transaction of faith, integrating reason, experience, and revelation into a working dynamic which broadens our horizons far beyond the restrictive limits of the material and intellect constrained by its finite vision.

Such thoughts must await another post on another day — which I trust will be soon forthcoming.