A Crisis of Faith?

I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8 NASB

Faith – (I apologize.  This is long)

Are you familiar with the common sentiment that the Christian world is having a crisis of faith? Pundits point to the divorce rate, suicides, sexual immorality, financial malfeasance and lack of moral backbone in society and politics under the rubric “Crisis of Faith,” as if the Christian world has somehow stopped believing in God. At the same time, traditional denominations are waning while mega-churches rise, preaching a message of inclusion, harmony, safety and power. The masses flee liturgy for coffee bars and comfort. How powerful is the human desire to belong! I am not sure that this trend is any less a “crisis of faith” since it demonstrates that the traditional understanding of our relationship to God is now apparently inadequate. But it is not erased. Packing 50,000 hungry souls into an arena simply shouts that the method has changed. The message has not. It’s still about understanding what God can do for me before I can do anything for Him.

Frankly, I don’t think this is a crisis of faith at all. In fact, statistics confirm that the vast majority of Americans believe there is a God. No crisis of faith with them. God is there, all right. It’s not His existence that is in crisis. It’s our desire to do what He wants that’s waning. We think that we don’t know how He works, what He really wants or how to get it. But the preachers certainly tell us. Faith has never been in short supply. Why? Because faith is my desire to have God fit my view of the world. For most believers, faith is creedal. For the West, it is based on having the correct information about God. Yes, there are plenty of statements about the need for relationship and there are plenty of people who feel God’s presence and who claim the importance of that relationship. But if we examine the idea of “faith” in Scripture, we might be shocked to realize that information and relationship are not the crucial terms of the biblical text. In fact, our view of “faith” doesn’t show up in the Bible at all. Our view has been inherited from other sources.

We don’t have a crisis of faith if faith means believing the right things. There is more than enough of that faith to go around. We have a crisis of trust. That is the biblical word. Not “faith” but “trust.” There is a difference and the difference is absolutely crucial.

Mircea Eliade studied the patterns of ancient, tribal religions. He discovered some crucial elements about the difference between ancient man’s view of God and the world and the modern evolution of that view. Listen to his remarks:

“ . . . religious man assumes a humanity that has a transhuman, transcendent model. He does not consider himself to be truly man except in so far as he imitates the gods, the culture heroes, or the mythical ancestors.”[1]

“One becomes truly a man only by conforming to the teaching of the myths, that is, by imitating the gods.”[2]

“The perspective changes completely when the sense of the religiousness of the cosmos becomes lost. This is what occurs when, in certain more highly evolved societies, the intellectual élites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of the traditional religion. The periodical sanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. The gods are no longer accessible through the cosmic rhythms. The religious meaning of the repetition of paradigmatic gestures is forgotten. But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity.”[3]

Eliade’s insight is important for us. Modern man has stripped the universe of the transcendent. He lives in a machine; a machine that requires only continued rational investigation in order to be ultimately controlled. This machine doesn’t feel one way or the other about the presence of the human engineer. Consequently, the engineer knows that any feelings about meaning, worth, hope or destiny are simply psychological projections onto the inanimate machine. One way Man copes with the desacralized universe is through religious experience, and, as Aldous Huxley noted several generations ago, those men with weak rationality often opt for the crutch of religion in order to cope with an impersonal world.

Opting for the religious crutch, however, does not mean that people like this have a biblical “faith.” It generally means that they find comfort in a belief system of propositions that tell them they are (or will be) safe, they are (or will be) right and they are (or will be) vindicated. What they desperately want is proof that what they wish to believe is actually true. Entire theologies are built around fulfilling this desperate need and huge populations embrace these theological affirmations because proof means certainty and certainty means I can stop worrying about my life and rest, confident that what I believe will come to pass. The Greek philosophers had a word for this – elpis – “hope,” human desires projected into the future. By the way, the Greek philosophers thought of this as not much more than pipe dreams. They knew that in a machine universe hope is simply unfounded wishes.

That’s why the Bible is not a book about hope. It’s a book about trust. And, by the way, it is not about trust in me, or you, or us. It is about trust in YHVH. He alone is finally trustworthy. He alone is the only one who fulfills promises. Trust means that you and I can count on Him to do what He says He will do, every time.

The implications of the shift from hope to trust are profound. First, trust is a personal dynamic. I do not trust in machines. I trust in persons. The logic of trust is based on relationship interactions that provide grounds for commitment. I trust you because we have history, connection, agreements, contracts, ties of some sort and you and I share common cultural values that endorse trustworthiness. It’s very unlikely that I will trust someone I don’t know from a culture that doesn’t appear to share anything in common with me. Trust is personal! To trust God is to trust in a personal universe of His making. God is not an engineer in the machine.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, trust assumes continuity. If you make a promise and later break it, I don’t trust you anymore. If you make a promise and subsequently change its terms and conditions, I don’t trust you anymore. Trust means that the promises you make you keep. God makes promises. He keeps them. If He were to change His promises or fail to keep them, I would have no reason to trust Him. The biblical idea of faith is directly tied to God keeping His promises. Therefore, when I say biblically that I have faith in God, what I mean is that I trust Him to keep His promises.  And He trusts me to do what He asks.  It’s a two-way street (actually, it’s a multi-lane street as hesed demonstrates).

What are those promises? Ah, now we see why most religious believers have a different version of “faith.” For most believers, what matters is that I assert that I know God keeps His promises. In other words, I agree with the statement, “God keeps His promises.” But I don’t actually have to do anything about those promises. God keeps them. Not me. God keeps them regardless of what I do because they are God’s obligations. Unfortunately, this is not a biblical idea. God’s promises almost always involve my commitment. “Accepting a tenet of faith is not difficult; the hard part is accepting the attendant consequences.”[4]

Read Deuteronomy. Promises with conditions. Read Isaiah. The same. Read David’s psalms. Blessings—and conditions. All through the Bible God instructs me to trust Him and do what He says. Why? Because He does what He says He will do. The promise is secure but the results usually depend on what I do. Greek faith is agreement with the statement. Hebrew faith is doing what is asked. You and I can agree all we want, but nothing will happen until we do what is asked.

There is no crisis of “faith” in Greek terms. Everyone agrees. So what? The real crisis is doing what He asks. That step is singularly absent in most societies, and unfortunately, in most religions. Let me mouth the creeds. It’s comforting to know them. But they have no significance at all unless I am doing what He asks. Simply ignoring what He asks us to do because He first asked some other ethnic group seems a bit parochial, doesn’t it?

“Questions of Faith are not philosophical, sociological, or psychological; they are intensely personal. Everyone has to find his or her own way of dealing with them.”[5]

“It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.”[6]

Topical Index:  faith, crisis, Luke 18:8

[1] Ibid., p. 100.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Adin Steinsaltz, Simple Words, p. 78.

[5] Ibid., p. 82.

[6] Deuteronomy 30:12-14 NASB