Faith Is A Perturbing Thing

The other day, while we were having lunch, my sister read me her favorite Soren Kierkegaard quote, which she was putting into her sermon for this Sunday. It goes like this:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I like that. I like it a lot.

It reminded me of my own favorite Kierkegaard quote. Or, rather, not a quote exactly, but a long passage, a few pages in an essay called "How to Derive True Benediction From Beholding Oneself in the Mirror of the World."

Part of that goes like this:

Think of a lover who has now received a letter from his beloved-- as precious as this letter is to the lover, just so precious to thee, I assume, is God's Word; in the way the lover reads this letter, just so, I assume dost thou read God's Word...

I assume then that this letter from the beloved was written in a language which the lover did not understand... He takes a dictionary and sits down to spell out the letter, looking up every word so as to get at the translation...

Let us suppose that this letter from the lady-love not only contained, as such letters generally do, the declaration of an emotion, but that there was contained in it a desire, something which the beloved desired the lover to do. There was, let us suppose, a great deal required of him, a very great deal... he was off in a second to accomplish the desire of the beloved. Let us suppose that in the course of time the lovers met, and the lady said, 'But my dear, I didn't think of requiring that of thee; thou must have misunderstood the word or translated it wrong.' Dost thou believe that the lover now would regret that instead of hastening at once to fulfil the desire of his beloved he had not first entertained some misgivings, and then perhaps had obtained a few more dictionaries to help him out, and then had many misgivings, and then perhaps got the word rightly translated, and so was exempted from the task-- dost thou believe that he regrets this misapprehension? Dost thou believe that he is in less favor with the beloved?...

So the lover... understood how to read in such a way that, if there was a desire contained in the letter, one ought to begin at once to fulfil it, without wasting a second...

Think now of God's word... 'But,' thou perhaps wouldst say, 'there are so many obscure passages in the Holy Scriptures, whole books which are almost riddles.' To this I would reply: 'I see no need of considering this objection unless it comes from one whose life gives expression to the fact that he has punctually complied with all the passages which are easy to understand.' Is this the case with thee?

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The day after my conversation with my sister, I was reading Karen Armstrong's The Case For God, and came to a few pages on the meaning of the word "faith."

A major theme of Armstrong's book is that our modern, Western notion of "faith" is something very new. To many people, "faith" means "belief," in the sense of an assent to an idea. One believes that the earth is round, and that there are six chairs in the dining room, and that Christ died for the sins of the world. While the faith may spur action, it is the "belief," the "acceptance" of the idea, the intellectual assent, that counts as faith.

But, according to Armstrong, earlier generations of believers didn't see it that way, wouldn't have even grasped that concept. To earlier believers, intellectual assent to a set of "facts," believing in a certain set of details, had little or nothing to do with faith.

Armstrong follows the language of faith through the Greek and the Latin into modern English.

"Pistis," she explains, the word that now appears as "faith" in our New Testaments, meant "trust, loyalty, engagement, and commitment." Those are words that imply relationship, and a certain disposition.

In Latin, "pistis" become "fides" as a noun, and "credo" as a verb.

"Fides," the noun, is best translated as "loyalty."

"Credo," the verb, is derived from "cor do," which can be translated as "I give my heart."

"Opinar," the Latin for "I hold an opinion," was specifically and deliberately never used in place of "pistis."

Later, in the King James, "credo" and "fides" became "believe" and "belief." But "belief" meant something a little different in the King James days. The word "bileven," from which it was derived, meant "to prize, to value, to hold dear." "Belief" meant "loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty."

"Belief," Armstrong claims, started to mean "intellectual assent" only in the late 17th century, and then primarily when used by scientists and philosophers. Theologians didn't start using the word that way in large numbers until a couple of hundred years later.

I find all of that very, very interesting. It allows me to see the New Testament in a very different way.

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So I've been thinking about Kierkegaard and Armstrong off and on throughout this week, during those rare moments of silence, and I've felt a little challenged by what they both have to say.

I don't know where I'm going with this, exactly. The words still have to kick around for a while, they still have to settle somewhere.

But what I'm thinking is this:

There's no salvation-- however you want to define that-- in holding an idea.

What matters is the action, the transformation, the "being," that spills up and out of that idea. What matters is how that idea becomes lived, becomes tangible. Intellectual assent-- no matter how beautiful the idea-- is nothing. What matters is the orientation of one's life, the way we live it day to day.

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.

That's tough stuff.

As I've said before,

The land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there.

Really, really tough stuff.

Because it would be an awful lot easier to live here as I lived there, and still get that "salvation" bit thrown in.

So this is stuff that I've got to think on for a while. Not to find some mental trick to get out of it, but to let it really work it's way in, to let it take hold.

Kind of sucks, doesn't it?