“Is the measure of my faith restrained or contained by my knowledge and understanding of that which I put my faith in?” More specifically, is my faith and trust in God dependent upon what I understand of his character and nature, who he says he is, and whether I can trust his self-definition.
These two levels of faith are loosely termed conscious, and subconscious. Thomas Dubay writes in ‘Fire Within’, his examination of the contemplative writers St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, “The distance between creation and its Author is endless and it is faith alone on earth that can bridge the gap.” Christian anthropology operates on the basis that we are essentially mortal, yet we transcend nature and mortality. We are limited by our finite bodies which suffer from tiredness, sickness and death, yet we are also supernatural beings – we are not divine in any sense of the word, but we transcend the limitations of death, we are immortal spiritual beings. However, the limitations of our humanity mean that we don’t automatically understand why things happen, and our vision is limited, thus we don’t understand exactly what God is accomplishing in the diachronic metanarrative that we find ourselves a part of.
Faith is what Hebrews 11 famously defines as “being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.” It takes faith for us to live as finite beings, subject to the limitations of this world, because faith is what bridges the gap between us and the One who made us. Wayne Grudem talks about faith in his book ‘Systematic Theology.’ He points out that often ‘faith’ is seen as an irrational commitment despite evidence to the contrary, and suggests that ‘trust’ is closer to the biblical idea, writing, “the more we come to know a person, and the more we see in that person a pattern of life that warrants trust, the more we find ourselves able to place trust in that person to do what he or she promises, or to act in ways that we can rely on.” I believe that this is what I have loosely termed conscious faith – we see evidence, and this gives us a fallback position when we have moments of doubt. The more I come to know God – the deeper my relationship with Him, the more I am able to trust Him because he shows himself to have integrity. The issue of faith is that our faith does not shape the reality of God’s character and nature, rather it shapes our interaction with him. I trust God because of what I know of Him. My unshakable confidence comes from the logos, from the Word, from the fact that I believe that Scripture is the inerrant word of God that reveals him as he is – unchanging. Faith is rooted in Him rather than in me.
When I was younger, I had vague assumptions about God and his goodness, that he was able to provide, and that he answered prayer. As I’ve grown older, and simply through walking the Christian journey, I’ve seen evidence of these that has taken my trust from vague assumptions to specific examples. I quote the example of my temp job working at Lower Hutt hospital last year quite frequently – I had 11 weeks to work, and I needed a job that would pay well enough that I could save for my trip to Oregon which was going to last for 9 weeks. I expected to earn $15 an hour, but thought I would have to commute into Wellington City, costing time and money, and probably wouldn’t have one ongoing contract. However, about three hours after the internship I was staffing finished, I was at Starbucks about to start my shift and I got a call telling me that I had a job trial the next day in Lower Hutt. The amazing thing is that this job started the first day I had free and went right through to the last day that I was free. I was paid $18, far more than I expected, and I only had to drive five minutes from home and park for free on the street. In the future, I have faith that God will provide for me because of the way my needs were so specifically met.
Another example, which is a bit more of the ‘cheque in the mail’ story happened when I was doing the Forerunner Internship in Lower Hutt in 2005. Every week one of the interns was prayed for and prophesied over, and the first time it happened for me there was a lot of prophetic words about the nations, and I had an incredibly powerful encounter with God. I remember walking away and saying, hey God if that was really you, can you do something massive in the next couple of days to confirm this? Two days later I got a cheque in the mail for $500 from someone I’d done some ministry with before – and the cheque had been posted the day I prayed that prayer.
Follow the Rabbi – a reference recommended by my mentor – defines the difference between the way that Hebrews and Greeks viewed the area of faith in God. “Hebrews see faith as relational and personal. They express faith in terms of their relationship with God rather than as a rationalisation.” Comparatively, “Greeks see faith as intellectual. They express faith in creeds and doctrine, listing proof texts to support their belief.” Another major distinction is that Hebrews saw truth as unfolding and experiential, while the Hellenistic culture saw truth as static and unchanging.
I think that conscious faith is ongoing – that the more we see God’s faithfulness at work in our lives, the more we trust him. It was designed to come out of relationship with the Lord. Faith comes from relationship, but it also produces relationship… because faith comes from the knowledge of God, and also teaches us more about the character of the God that we set ourselves to follow. Faith is rooted and grounded in the fact that God continues to show himself faithful.
However, I have real issues with the presentation of faith as human-centric. Faith is not something that we can work up through hype – otherwise healing would be far more human-centric than it is God-centric. I’ve had prayer for healing for a number of different issues, my major one being my eyesight. The way that the subject of faith is often preached from the front, it seems like if I can just create enough faith, enough expectancy in my spirit, then God is bound to respond. The problem with faith being presented like this is that it leaves the issue in my hands, and then when I haven’t been healed, without a correct understanding of who God is and how he works, I can be left feeling insecure and disqualified. I trust God because of what I know of Him – but I know of Him because I have trusted Him.
I don’t have any really deep theology on this and in many ways its an area that does well without being torn to shreds and dissected by hours of debate at a hermeneutical hui (yes, theologians in New Zealand do actually have these.) The Bible is my ultimate reference point for faith, reminding me that I can trust in God. Scriptures like 119.168a – ”You are good, and what you do is good,” – remind me that God has not changed, and that he ultimately has my best intentions at heart. Numbers 23.19 points out that, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfil?” Malachi 3:6 begins with the clear (almost doctrinal!) statement that “I the LORD do not change.”
It’d be nice if every Christian could claim that they had ultimate trust in God – but the reality is that we are all at various stages of immaturity and every single one of us goes through a dark night of the soul. I’d suggest that while God doesn’t always cause these periods of confusion and silence, he allows them in order that we are forced to confront the realities of the barrenness and lack of trust that there is in our lives towards him. However, I believe that there is a deeper level of faith that goes beyond the questioning of why God allows bad things to happen. This ‘subconscious faith’ is my unshakable and unbreakable confidence that God is who he has proclaimed himself to be, and that I can trust him with whatever is going on in my world. The terminology is slightly rudimentary, but I think it makes the point.
It’s the reality that even when my world feels like its falling to pieces, God isn’t speaking about the decisions I have to make and my needs don’t seem to be being met, he is still good and I can cling to this faith even when my mind is consciously questioning why I trust in him. In my book assignment – which I’m trying very hard not to cover the same ground in this assignment, although I really talked about this whole area of faith in the last assignment – I highlighted that Reinhard Bonnke in his book ‘Faith’ points out that faith is based on what we know God has already done. We have to have present and future tense faith… but this is based on past tense faith. We trust in the immutability of God, and indeed much of our faith is based on his aseity, the fact that he is the source of his own being, he is ontologically independent. This negates the idea of panentheism, promoted by philosophers like Hegel who define that “without the world, God is not God.”
God is not dependent upon us – and this ‘wholly otherness’ is what gives us faith, because going back to Numbers 23.19, he is not flawed like humanity – he does not lie, or change who he is, or deceive. I trust in him because I know that he is infinitely superior. To summarise: I’d argue that my faith is not necessarily restrained by my incomplete knowledge of God… but that as I know more of him, my fallback position and my ability to remind myself of my experience with his faithfulness increase (which is really saying the same thing in a different way…)
