At the end of October, a number of Protestant churches will
take some time to remember the Reformation, celebrating Reformation Sunday on
the last Sunday of the month. It was on
October 31 in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the doors
of All Saints’ Church in Wittenburg, Germany, an act that challenged traditions
of the Roman Catholic Church and began the movement known as the Protestant
Reformation. The summary of Luther’s
thought (which he derived from Paul) which I was taught in seminary is “We are
justified by grace through faith apart from works for the sake of Christ.”
I could
spend a long time unpacking that statement (and anyone who wants to unpack it
with me is more than welcome to shoot me an email), but more recently I have
been pondering the nature of faith. For
much of my life, I understood faith as the acceptance of a series of
ideas. If I believe the right things
about God and Jesus and the Trinity, then I have faith. If I can say the Nicene Creed without
crossing my fingers, then I have faith.
Yet the more I have grown to explore the faith, through seminary and
through ministry, the more difficult it becomes to say that I truly understand
these ideas.
Other
Christians see faith as an acceptance of the literal truth of scripture. If you believe the Bible is historical fact,
then you have faith. Unfortunately, this
view tends to get mired in trying to defend itself against the findings of natural
science, archaeology and astronomy, or simply ignores them because if any part
of the Bible is questionable, the whole structure of faith is weakened.
Often we
end up treating faith statements as statements of fact, giving them much more
certainty than they can have. We want
our beliefs to be as firm as the law of gravity rather than as undefined as the
fate of Schroedinger’s cat. One of the
reasons that many Christian traditions are in decline and that Christianity is
in decline as a whole in the United States and Europe is that we have tried to sell
the mystery of faith as empirical knowledge.
We have lost the ability to admit that we believe in a God that we do
not fully understand and cannot prove. Even
God refuses to be defined, telling Moses in the book of Exodus that God will be
called “I am who I am.”
We have faith in ideas that do not
necessarily make sense. Orthodox
Christianity believes that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, but
leaves the how of that relationship open-ended.
So many great debates in Christian theology break down into fancy
variations of “It is what it is.” Jesus
is fully human and fully divine because Jesus has to be fully human and fully
divine.
I think
the fear for many Christians is that we do not want to be deemed nonsensical in
a society that is supposedly shaped by rationality and critical thinking. We want what we believe to make sense and,
when those beliefs are challenged or questioned, we blame the questioner for
being unable to see what is plain truth.
So as we
approach Reformation Sunday, I suggest that we Christians continue to need to
reform (I’ll let representatives from other faiths speak to their own
traditions). Our reformation can
continue with the admission that faith does not make sense. We need to stop pretending that our faith
story is logical or rational. I may well
get some emails on this point because it goes against some pretty long-held
views. Yet if we can do this, it might
give us the humility to listen to other people’s doubts without judgment and
other faiths’ stories without arrogance.
When we stop trying to make faith
rational, we can begin to see it from a different perspective. Faith is not rational, but it is
beautiful. Faith is not an instruction
manual for life but a way of being in the world. The stories of the faith are like walking
into an art museum and looking at paintings from many, different periods. Some might be obvious representations of
fruit and flowers. Some might be complicated
swirls of color and texture. Some might
be absurd pictures of images that cannot exist in reality. Yet they are all representations of the
artists’ vision and each of them can help us think about how we perceive the
world around us.
The vision shared in the story of
Jesus is a hopeful one where love is greater than hatred and hope is greater
than fear. It is a challenging vision
where the poor are lifted up, the last will be first and the first will be
last. It is an absurd vision where enemies
are loved, power is found in weakness and life is found in death. The next step in our reformation may begin
when we stop trying to defend a rational faith and instead embrace and live out
and find life in this beautiful vision.
