Jay: Does faith come from within us, or externally, from God? In either case, what is our responsibility for maintaining it? Is faith without works dead, as James said? Does faith naturally result in good works, or must they be striven for? Was Rahab’s placing of the scarlet cord in her window her “work” that supported her faith?
Was Jesus being metaphorical in talking of moving mountains by faith? Did he just mean that with enough faith, things impossible could be accomplished, and is that humanly possible? Was the Rich Young Ruler a (failed) case in point, in that it was impossible for him to give all his wealth to the poor? How impossible was it compared to this requirement for becoming a disciple of Jesus:
If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. (Luke 14:25-27)
Or this one, for following the law:
If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30)
Do these examples shed any light on our questions about faith? What do they teach us?
Donald: Does faith go beyond logic? Is it just acceptance of God’s will?
David: Daoism holds that the Dao (the Way, or what I think can be equated with God’s will) is unfathomable, “beyond logic.” Enlightenment is essentially the full realization of that. I see a Zen or Daoist Jesus in the examples quoted: A God of love demanding that one hates one’s family is beyond logic; committing serious self-mutilation rather than break the law is illogical (though not impossible for us.) The message as I see it is that we are mortal and thus have no hope of having divine attributes in this world. To the divine, mortality must seem as illogical as the divine seems to us. It is we who are illogical in the divine sense when we fail to accept the Way, God’s will. This does, of course, presume acceptance of the existence of the divine.
Don: The statement that God is the author and finisher of our faith suggests that faith is the gift of God. The statement that faith is “the substance of things hoped for” and “the evidence of things not seen” suggests that, through faith, we can sense what cannot otherwise be sensed—we can see the unseeable, touch the untouchable, hear the unhearable. Its sensoriness makes the gift of faith different from the gift of grace, and may be connected with the requirement that living, dynamic faith needs some sort of embodiment in a physical act. So it’s a gift that (unlike the gift of grace) comes with “some assembly required.”
Kiran: The parable of the seed suggests that soil (representing people) is changed by seed, no matter how fertile it is. Even barren rock will tend to be broken up a little bit as seed struggles to germinate on it and will eventually, albeit over many generations, be broken down into fertile soil.
David: That parable again supports a Daoist principle: “Non-action,” doing Nothing, passivity. The gifts of God—seed, faith, grace—are sown everywhere. The soil has no say in the matter. Soil is powerless to help or hinder seed in any proactive way. It can only passively accept the seed—the Way, the Dao, the will of God. I believe in divine Goodness, and the way I read it, so does Daoism. Ultimately, the Dao is a force for good, and we should accept that the Dao knows what it is doing and that we cannot know or influence what the Dao is doing. It is enough to accept that the Dao, that God, that God’s will, is good. We can rejoice quietly in that understanding without needing to take God’s will, the Dao, apart to see how it works.
Jay: Grace exists regardless of what we might do. But faith seems to require action, According to Scripture, it’s not enough to have passive faith. Even Satan believes in God:
What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless? (James 2:14-20)
David: But James follows this up with an horrendous example of a work that (he claims) proves faith:
Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar? You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected…. (James 2:21-22)
This is in the same league as hating one’s family in order to be a disciple of Christ. Abraham cannot have loved Isaac all that much! To me, a God who rewards such extreme disregard for one’s child cannot be the same God who, on the Day of Judgment, punishes our failure to care for strangers!
Donald: Faith seems almost beyond absurd, it is so illogical. We cannot be saved through good works alone (without faith) and we cannot be saved through faith alone (without works). But works are data-based, and faith is beyond data, as the story of Don’s cancer patient Elizabeth showed us. She was saved from cancer, and she died from cancer, by the dictates of data—by her doctors’ knowledge of her and her disease, not from her faith or her lack of it. We can’t make sense of faith. We just have to accept it.
Dave: Maybe the only way to explain it or understand faith is by the works that faith produces. It may be impossible to grasp the faith of the faith hall-of-famers except through their actions, their works. Works are the evidence of faith.
Donald: Can people do works without having faith?
Dave: Yes, but the faithful will know they have faith, by their works.
David: What are “works”? We tend to think of them as going out on missionary work, distributing food to the poor, and so on. We might undertake such work because we believe it is our duty to God to do so. But the works of the villains in the faith chapter—works supposed definitively to prove faith—tend to be of a very different nature: Killing one’s son, hating one’s mother and father, saving one’s own skin. This is incomprehensible to the human mind. One can only assume, if the Scripture itself is to be believed, that it is not incomprehensible to the divine mind of God. The message I get from these incomprehensible Scriptures is to forget about ever understanding faith and just accept whatever faith we are given.
Donald: To refuse a blood transfusion because of religious beliefs, when medicine has long proved their benefits, is irrational.
Mikiko: The Jehovah’s Witnesses base their belief in this Scripture:
You must not eat the blood of any sort of flesh, because the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood. Anyone eating it will be cut off.h God viewed the soul, or life, as being in the blood and belonging to him. Although this law was given only to the nation of Israel, it shows how seriously God viewed the law against eating blood. (Leviticus 17:14, New World Translation)
There are medical alternatives to transfusion, so it is not irrational to reject it.
David: My Daoist way would reject the Scripture and accept the science and therefore the transfusion. But others choose a different way, and I must accept the Witnesses’ faith in their way. I must respect Mikiko’s view that blood transfusions are wrong. It seems there is more than one Way! Is there more than one God?!!
Jay: We tend to blend multiple concepts into a single word. Grace, faith, and belief are used interchangeably. But are they really the same? If faith is the substance of things unseen and evidence of things hoped for, then particular beliefs may not fit the concept. If faith is simply belief, then belief in what? We tend to make the “what” something specific.
Donald: The words “belief” and “faith” share the same root and are essentially the same.
Jay: My point is that faith or belief in “things unseen” is very nebulous. We are expected to believe in something beyond our comprehension—in God, the Dao, whatever we want to call it. But we abhor a data vacuum and soon start to fill it with concrete, comprehensible concepts.
Dave: The concept in which we believe is a divinity of Good. We can’t hope to comprehend that divinity, but we can and some do have faith in it. That faith is manifested in Good works.
David: Isn’t that the faith of the criminal on the cross? He recognized that Jesus was Good. Perhaps he received grace as a result of his faith, though I can’t see Jesus denying grace to the other, unrepentant, criminal either. Faith is the acceptance of a Good God, but the works of the faith hall-of-famers do not seem to me to manifest that faith. To Rahab, a Good God was any god that would save her and her family.
Don: In several instances, Jesus told people whom he healed “Your faith has made you whole,” and in Ephesians Paul said “By grace are you saved, through faith.” So there seems to be an action component to faith, that links to grace. Several members of the faith hall of fame are pretty shady characters. Think of Abraham, a man who would offer up his son Isaac. What I find interesting is what was the faith of Isaac through his ordeal? There is no mention of his trying to avoid his fate. What was the faith of Jephthah’s daughter, who made no apparent attempt to dissuade her father from murdering her, or to run away. She simply asked time to mourn her virginity.
Perhaps the stories are about the passing-off of faith from one generation to the next. I don’t know. Gideon put faith into his frightened soldiers. Barak gave Jael faith enough for her to drive a tent peg through the head of his enemy Sisera while Sisera slept in Jael’s tent, thinking she was his ally.
The gruesomeness of these acts aside, there seems to be something in the product, the growth of faith, they seem to represent. The fig tree story is about a tree that failed to pass on its vitality. There seems to be a common thread to all these stories that revolves around the passing on of faith.
Kiran: The disciple Peter denied that he would ever deny Jesus, yet he did so, three times. His final awakening to his weakness is what strengthened and enabled him to begin sharing his faith. Paul had done good works, but only for his own faith community, before his encounter with God on the road to Damascus. After the encounter, he was able to share his faith with the whole world, even at risk of ostracism by his own people. When he was awakened to his shortcomings by Jesus, the Rich Young Ruler could not muster up as much faith as Peter and Paul did. We can do works without faith; without accepting our own true nature when made aware of it and then accepting God’s will alone. But they would not be true, godly, works.
Chris: What are the “things” that are “not seen”? Are they the same “things” that are “hoped for”? What were the faith hall-of-famers, who died “without receiving the promises,” getting for their works? Since they did not get what they promised, salvation from the flood was not the thing promised to Noah, nor was the conception of a child the thing promised to Sarah. If the things promised are not a reward for the works, why do the works? Is the “thing” the heavenly “better country” they desire—the “city” promised by God? Is faith about what we want, or about what is already available? Is it our individual choice to see it or not see it? We equate faith with a desired human outcome. Perhaps we should equate it with what has already happened, what is already there for us.
Don: Is the faith chapter really about keeping hope alive? Does it suggest that the opposite of faith is not doubt but hopelessness? That the members of the faith hall of fame each found a way to perpetuate the message to keep hope alive? Judges speaks to the loss of hope, and implies that hope should be kept alive:
All that generation also were gathered to their fathers [i.e., had died]; and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel. (Judges 2:10)
Somehow, Isaac had hope; somehow, Jephthah’s daughter had hope.
Dave: But hope can only be kept alive in a benevolent God, not a malevolent one.
David: Who was left out of the faith hall of fame who should have been included? What about the three Hebrew worthies, for example? They had supreme faith and were hoping for nothing except that God’s will be done. They had to have supreme faith in God, to want His will to be done even while acknowledging they had no idea which way His will would bend.
Don: The faith chapter acknowledges that its list is not exhaustive. But it seems to me that the absence of the Hebrew worthies, and of Daniel, provides a key to understanding the faith chapter, in that they were virtuous and had no doubts about God, while nearly all of the hall-of-famers were more-or-less villainous and had strong doubts.
Chris: Shady as they were, the faith chapter specifically says that God was “not ashamed to be their God.”
Donald: Faith seems to be a step beyond hope.
Don: Faith subsumes hope: “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for.”
Jay: Faith seems to produce results, whether voluntary or involuntary. Yet it also seems (from Scripture) to be impossible for us. Does the impossibility depend up whether we choose our faith or God’s?
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