Faith - what it is and what it isn’t PDF
Preview Faith - what it is and what it isn’t
FAITH What It Is and What It Isn't TERRENCE W. TILLEY Founded in 1970, Orbis Books endeavors to publish works that enlighten the mind, nourish the spirit, and challenge the conscience. The publishing arm of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Orbis seeks to explore the global dimensions of the Christian faith and mission, to invite dialogue with diverse cultures and religious traditions, and to serve the cause of reconciliation and peace. The books published reflect the views of their authors and do not represent the official position of the Maryknoll Society. To learn more about Maryknoll and Orbis Books, please visit our website at www.maryknollsociety.org. Copyright © 2010 by Terrence W. Tilley. Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545–0302. Manufactured in the United States of America. Manuscript editing and typesetting by Joan Weber Laflamme. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to: Orbis Books, P.O. Box 302, Maryknoll, New York 10545–0302. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tilley, Terrence W. Faith : what it is and what it isn't / Terrence W. Tilley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-57075-879-9 (pbk.) 1. Faith. I. Title. BT55.T48 2010 210—dc22 2010002399 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Misunderstanding Faith Faith and Belief Faith and Morality Faith and Feeling Faith and Religion Conclusion 2. Defining Faith People of Faith The God(s) of Faith The Relationship of Faith Conclusion 3. Expressing Faith Understanding Faith Articulating Faith Conclusion 4. Living Faith Stories of Faith Symbols of Faith Practices of Faith Conclusion 5. Justifying Faith Assessing Faith Appraising Faith Conclusion Excursus Appendix: An Argument about Projection Theories Projections and Constructions Faith in the Light of Constructivism References Works Consulted Acknowledgments My indebtedness to the works of Paul Tillich (Dynamics of Faith), H. Richard Niebuhr (Radical Monotheism and Western Culture), and to my teacher, James Wm. McClendon, Jr., should be obvious. My other intellectual debts are captured in the references and works consulted and in the acknowledgments in my own earlier works, upon which I occasionally drew in composing this book. Dermot Lane and Phyllis Zagano have read and helpfully commented on some of the chapters. Maureen Tilley, Michael Barnes, and Jeffrey Coleman, my graduate assistant in fall 2009, read the entire text and made numerous contributions to improving the style, arrangement, and logic of the argument. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Erica Olson, and Catherine Osborne used the first two chapters with students in the required frosh theology course at Fordham, “Faith and Critical Reasoning,” and provided a number of insights that helped clarify the writing. My own first-year seminar students endured the entire text and through their responses made this a more readable book. Thanks go to them: Teddy Allen, Isabel Arissó, Claire Dugan, Nicole Casey, Courtney Congjuico, Megan Cookson, Holly Curtis, Lauren Duca, Danielle Eaton, Jessica Frasier, Bryan Healy, Genevieve Looby, Brendan Malone, Caitlin Kelly Nosal, Rachel Pincus, Melissa Neri, Eva Raimondi, Gabrielle Richter, and Kaitlin Shortell. Susan Perry, the patient editor at Orbis Books who shepherded this text to completion, has helped on numerous occasions. With all these debts, one would think there would be no mistakes left in the text! But I suspect there are errors and infelicities, and for them the author alone is responsible. Introduction As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, understanding the concept of faith has become increasingly important, yet increasingly difficult. Important because faith is a powerful human reality all too often ignored or misunderstood in our public discourse. Difficult because students and scholars, pundits and politicians talk a lot about faith yet fail to recognize the fundamental importance of faith in the lives of individuals and societies. The importance of seeking to understand the currents of faith was underlined by the late writer David Foster Wallace. The Kenyon College commencement ceremony in 2005 heard his version of this old story: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” Wallace deftly portrayed our situation with regard to faith. We are awash in seas of faith. Yet we often fail to recognize that each of us has a faith and that faith shapes all of our lives. We think that some of us live “without faith”; but, as we shall see, a human without faith is like a fish out of water. Wallace reminded the class of 2005 that higher education should enable people to think and live better, not just to get a better job. He showed how important it is to understand how our faith shapes our minds and hearts, our actions and relationships. In our increasing concern with developing “marketable skills” in our colleges and universities, even educated people may be like the young fish. Although we swim in seas of faith, we don't recognize how the currents of faith shape the course of our life. We do not even know how to ask “how's the faith” because we can't answer the question “what the hell is faith?” We cannot say what faith is because we also fail to recognize the gods that command our devotion. Most Americans claim to believe in God. Yet many of us spend one hour most weeks with God and the other 167 hours with other objects of our devotion—money, power, knowledge, prestige, and so forth. The point is not to decry such “idolatry.” The point is to recognize both what gods we actually have faith in and how that faith shapes our lives. Many people seem to reduce the multifaceted reality of faith to only one of its dimensions. Hence, Chapter 1 addresses the common misunderstandings of faith. Chapter 2 explores what faith is: a relationship to the gods or God that gives our lives meaning. We will see that even those who have no religious faith nonetheless have their own faiths. And, as we shall see, even atheists worship their own sorts of gods. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the expressions of faith using a variety of creeds, stories, symbols, and practices drawn from a variety of faith traditions. But we live in a world with multiple faith traditions. Thus, Chapter 5 offers criteria for evaluating faith in a world in which faiths are in serious, even deadly, conflict. Because evaluating faith is a personal task, applying the criteria necessarily is left to you, if you wish to take it up. We may be blind to the power of the faith that shapes our lives. This book is an exercise in learning how to see our faiths clearly so we can figure out how we can live well together in a world in which faith both unites and divides us. 1 Misunderstanding Faith Faith is one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. To display what faith is, we begin by understanding these misunderstandings. Beginning with these confusions paves the way to showing a more adequate understanding of faith. Four kinds of misunderstanding of faith are common. The first reduces faith to believing things. The second equates having faith with behaving morally. The third reduces faith to something that we feel “deep in our souls.” The fourth misunderstanding equates having faith with being religious. Each misunderstanding contains an important, but partial, insight about faith. If you now accept only a “partial truth” about the concept of faith, this exercise should lead you to a better understanding of what faith is. FAITH AND BELIEF The rationalist misunderstanding of faith is very common. This view mistakenly equates faith with believing a proposition or claim, for example, “God created and sustains the universe.” This misunderstanding can be found among both skeptics and believers. Skeptical Rationalism Mark Twain once put the skeptical position most aptly: “Faith is believing what you know ain't so.” The skeptical rationalist sees faith as the enemy of reason and reasonableness. People of faith are unreasonable—at least with regard to what they believe on faith. Or so the hard core skeptics like Twain think. Skeptics find that persons of faith believe a proposition that makes a factual claim on the basis of little or no evidence or argument. “They take it ‘on faith’ (and are fools to do so)” expresses this skeptical viewpoint. Of course, skeptics like Twain are right about something: “Blind faith” is indeed an enemy of reason. But faith is never entirely blind. Typically, people accept claims “on faith” from people they have reason to trust. The root of this misunderstanding is equating faith with having a belief or a particular set of beliefs. The insight of this view is that belief is a component of faith. The confusion of this view is thinking that faith is identical to belief. To believe people in authority can be perfectly reasonable. We take things “on faith” from our teachers, our parents, and even our political leaders. When my physicist colleague tells me that she can prove “E=mc2,” I have to take it “on faith” that she can do so and that the claim is true. I would not know the difference between a valid proof of that equation and a pile of mathematical gibberish. I am not a physicist. But that doesn't mean I have blind faith in my colleague in physics. Rather, I know that those who are “in the know”—the community of physicists—can tell the difference. And unless she was lying or fooling around, my “faith” in what she says is really based in my trust in her both as my colleague and as a competent physicist. My trust in her is not blind, but informed, at least minimally. Some people indeed do seem to have blind faith, at least sometimes. In 2003, President George W. Bush insisted that the people of the United States should support his policy of invading Iraq. He claimed that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, had hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Although little or no evidence was given for this claim—and it was later shown to be dubious, at best—President Bush more or less asked the Congress and the American people to take it “on faith” that such weapons existed. When no weapons were found, the Congress and the people had their trust in him undermined. When we discover our trust has been misplaced, we lose our trust in the person we trusted because we realize that we were betrayed by someone who abused our faith. The difference between my trust in my colleague and my trust in the president is crucial. The difference is not that I agreed with one and disagreed with the other—I didn't know enough really to agree or disagree with them. The issue is this: her claim had independent support. The president's did not. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is that scientific claims are accepted if and only if another scientist can independently reproduce the experiment or analysis that warrants the claim. For example, the 1989 proposal of “cold fusion”—that nuclear fusion could take place at temperatures far lower than the temperature at which nuclear fusion “ordinarily” occurs—created a great stir. But when other scientists could not replicate the results and found errors in the experiment that led to claims about the possibility of cold fusion, the claim was discredited. The conditions of secrecy that President Bush imposed made any independent checking of his administration's claim by competent and independent investigators impossible. Weapons inspectors from the United Nations had searched for years without finding any evidence for Iraq's having weapons of mass destruction. Admittedly, Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, had stonewalled the search frequently, but he never brought it to a halt. Rather than allowing the inspectors to continue to search, beginning the war made independent verification not merely difficult, but impossible. In effect, President Bush not only demanded that the Congress and the nation trust him blindly but also seemed to ensure that the trust would remain “blind.” Of course, one may accept a particular claim “on faith,” and that claim may well be true. Those who get us to accept that claim may indeed be telling us what is true. Even blind faith is not necessarily deceptive. Nor does blind faith necessarily lead one to error. But blind faith or blind trust is a con artist's stock in trade. Blind trust makes one vulnerable to being deceived by those who claim they know something but offer no evidence. Blind faith accepts claims— whether true or false—without recourse to reason. The skeptic's insight is correct: blind faith is finally irrational. But not all trust or faith is blind. Another insight we can draw from the skeptic's criticism is that one's faith can never be conclusively verified or falsified in the ways scientific claims can. We cannot have absolute certainty in faith. The beliefs a person holds on faith only rarely can be conclusively shown true or false. This does not make all faith irrational. Rather, it shows that real faith is a risk—one that one should take with one's eyes wide open, not blindly.
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