Examined Christian Faith 'Faith part 2' 3.11 What is Christainity

Originally I was going to cover the topic of faith in two posts, however it has occurred to me that the only way to do that would be to write an extremely long second post as the second level or sense of faith is probably the most difficult subject matter I will have tackled in this series.  So perhaps it would be best if I set the table first and before we attempt to digest it.  Some time back in this series I touched on the matter of humility, and that the first step towards achieving it was to realize that you are proud.  If that is our starting point then the next step would be to seriously attempt to practice Christine virtues.  Not for a day or two, not even a week, because just about anyone can do so for a week or so, rather try two months, or even just one.  Because by then you will have failed miserably at it and quite probably fallen lower then your original starting point.  It is here that a person discovers some truth about themselves.  

The undeniable truth is that no one knows just how bad he or she is until they have tried with all their might to be good.   There seems to be a body of thought running amok in this country that god people do not know what temptation means.   Try the above experiment and you will quickly realize what a lie that is. 

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.  You do not know how strong the current in a river is by swimming with it, you must swim against it to understand its power.   You never know how strong a bully is until you decide to fight him.   A person who gives in to temptation after 10 minutes can in no way comprehend what it would have been like an hour or two later.  That is why bad people (or more politically correct, good people who do bad things) know very little about badness.  They have chosen to live a sheltered life of always giving in to temptation.  You will never find out the strength of the evil impulses in yourself until you try to fight them; and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation is also the only one who knows to the full and final extent what temptation means. 

The main thing that we learn from making a serious attempt to practice Christian virtues is that WE FAIL.  I think everyone who has a vague belief in God, has the idea of an exam, or a bargain (God if... then I will…); however one quickly learns that he or she will always fail that exam (God does not grade on a curve).   We are simply incapable of acing the test; there is simply nothing that we can do that would enable us to put God in our debt.  If you still have that idea floating around in your head, I encourage you to try to practice all the Christian virtues for a month or two that should be about 4 to 8 weeks longer than needed to blow the idea into bits.   Some when they realize this thinks that Christianity is a failure and give up, for some reason they seem to think that God is very simple minded.   In fact one of the things Christianity is designed to do is to blow that idea up.  God is waiting for the moment that you realize that there is no way you will ever earn a passing grade on this exam; there is nothing you can do that will put him into your debt. 

It is only after you realize this that you make another discovery.  Everything you have, every faculty you possess – your ability to think, move, feel, see, smell, taste, everything has been given to you by God.  Even if you devoted every second of every day of your entire life to exclusively serve Him you could not give him anything that was not already His.  As it is Christmas time, the next time you are doing something for God or giving something to God, think of it like this; Think back to when you were a small child and you wanted to get your father a present for Christmas, you approach your dad and ask “Daddy, would you give me $10 to buy you a Christmas gift with?”  Of course your father does, and he is pleased with the gift that you give him.  It is all very nice and touching, but only an idiot would think that your father is ahead $10 on the gift.  

When you have made these two discoveries then and only then can God really get to work within you.  If is after this that your real life begins.  Now that you are at last fully awake, now you are ready to examine faith in the second sense. 

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Next Post in this series 'Faith part 3' 

Examined Christian Faith 'Faith' 3.10 What is Christainity

Faith, you have heard the word countless times, but just exactly what do Christians mean when we use the word “faith”.   Generally speaking the word faith is used on two levels, and we need to examine both of them, today the first level and on my next post the second level, or sense.

On one level, faith simply means ‘Belief-accepting, that is regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.  That is fairly simple, however what does perplex a great many people is that Christians regard faith on this level as a virtue.  The argument is that how can faith on this level be a virtue – what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements?  

Obviously, a sane person accepts or rejects any statement, not because he does or does not want to, but because the evidence in support of that statement seems to be either good or bad.   If the person is mistaken about the correctness (goodness) of the evidence that supports the statement that would not make him or her a bad person, only a not very clever one.   Likewise, if the individual thought the evidence in support of a statement was poor and faulty, but attempted to force him or herself to believe the statement in spite of the evidence, that would only make them stupid.  Almost everyone would agree with that conclusion.

Now this is what most people do not see and what most assume is that once a person makes up their mind and accepts a thing as true, they will automatically go on and on believing it is true, until some reason shows up to reconsider  it.  The assumption is that the human mind is ruled by reason.  But we all know that is far from the truth. 

Emotions tend to crowd out reason, as is evident in the lives of all those around us.  People lose faith in all manner of things (their spouse, their company, their friends, and their leaders) not so much because of reason, but rather because of emotions and the imagination that emotions spark.   The battle that is waged in each of us is the between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.  

When you think about it you will see it playing out in your life and those of others.  For instance, A man knows by experience, and by evidence that a particular beautiful woman he knows is a lair and cannot be trusted, yet when he finds himself with her, his mind loses it faith in that knowledge and he starts telling himself “this time it will be different” only to once again make a fool of himself and tells her something he should not have (you know how the story ends).  His senses and his emotions destroyed his faith in what he knew to be true.  

This exact same thing happens in regards to Christianity.  Suppose that a person once reason’s and decides that the weight of evidence supports Christianity.   But what to do when (and there are always ‘whens’) he or she wants to tell a lie, wants to cheat on their spouse, wants to make a little money that isn’t exactly fair and honest, when wouldn’t it be convenient if Christianity wasn’t true; here in these moments when emotions rise up; in these times when his or her wishes and desires carry out an attack on their reason.  

Faith in the sense I have been addressing is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.   It is only a fool who thinks their moods and emotions will not change, they always do.  Everyone has moments of doubt, when all of Christianity seems entirely improbable.  Just as those who are atheist have moments (probably much more then moments) of doubt when Christianity looks terribly probable (doubt however that they would admit it).  This is the rebellion of moods against your reason, against your real self.  That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you lead your emotions they will lead you.   You can not be a sound Christian, or atheist for that matter, if your beliefs are really dependent on what the weather is like, what is happening to you, or what you feel like.  Like an athlete you must train the habit of faith. 

First, recognize that your moods change; second, if you have accepted Christianity, then you must deliberately think about some of its main doctrines everyday.  That’s whey daily prayer, reading scripture and going to church are necessary parts of the Christians life, not because it means you are not a Christian if you do not, but rather, because it helps to steady your mind when your emotions come calling. In a world such as ours, we have to be continuously reminded of exactly what it is we believe.  Like anything else we must be fed.  

If you examined those who have lost their faith in Christianity (or anything) rarely is it the result of it being reasoned out of it by an honest argument.  More often it is a slow fade from light to dark. 

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Examined Christian Faith 'Hope' 3.9 What is Christainity

The second of the three Theological virtues is Hope.  The continual looking forward towards the eternal world is not escapism or wishful thinking, but rather one of those things a Christina is meant to do.  It does not mean that we are to ignore this world and leave it as it is, you will find that if you study history that the Christians who did the most for the present world were those who thought most of the next.   From the Apostles themselves to the great men of the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave trade, to those American Christians who engaged the world bringing the truth of Christ; all left their mark on Earth precisely because their minds were occupied with the next.  

It is because Christians today have largely ceased to think of the next world that they have become so ineffective in this.  Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”; aim at earth and you will get neither.  That seems a strange rule, but you can see it at work in other matters as well.  For example, Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your primary objectives you start imagining there is something wrong with you, you feel aches and pains that were not there before.  You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more – food, games, work, fun, fresh air, etc…  In the same way we will never save civilization as long as our civilization is our main object.  We must learn to want something else even more.  

Most of us find it extremely difficult to genuinely want “Heaven” at all – except as it means we get to meet our friends and family again who have died.   There are two reasons for this, the first is that we are taught to fixate on this world, the second and more important is that we do not recognize the real want for Heaven in us.   Most people, if they have really learned to examine their own heart, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.   There are all measures of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite live up to that promise.  The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some trip to a foreign country, or first take up some project that excites us; are all longings which no marriage, no travel, no completed project can really satisfy.   There was something at the beginning that we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which fades away under the glare of reality.  I think you know what I mean; the spouse may be a good spouse, the hotels 5 star, the scenery may be beautiful and: computer programing may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.  

There are three ways to deal with this fact, two that are wrong, and one right way.  The two wrong ways will need little explanation as we see it played out in the lives of all those around us, the right way however may need a bit of an explanation. 

1.    The Fool’s Way – He puts the blame on the things themselves.  He goes his entire life thinking that if only he was with another person, took a more expensive vacation, or whatever it happens to be; then this time he really would catch the mysterious something we are all chasing.  Most of the people in the western world are this type.  They spend their entire lives going from woman to woman, man to man (via divorce courts), from city to city, hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is “the Real Thing” – only to be disappointed once again. 

2.    The Way of the Disillusioned ‘Sensible Person’- He decides that the entire thing was an illusion, something one feels when one is young.  But when you grow up, you‘ve given up chasing the rainbow’s end.  So he settles and learns to not expect much, and to repress the part of himself which used to seek his deepest dreams.  If life was finite, this would be the best approach, but suppose infinite happiness really is there waiting for us?  Suppose one really can reach the rainbow’s end?  In that case it would be tragic to find out the moment after death that by our supposed ‘common sense’ we had stifled in ourselves that faculty of enjoying it.

3.    The Christian Way – Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hungry – there is such a thing as food, a duckling wants to swim, there is such a thing as water.  Humans feel sexual desire, there is such a thing as sex.  The only logical conclusion then is that if I find a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable and logical explanation is that I was made for another world.  If none of the pleasures of this world does not satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  It means earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, rather only to arouse it, to hint at the real thing.  

If that is so, then I need to take great care to never despise, or be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other hand to never mistake them for the something of which they are but echo, a mirage to the living.  I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true home, which I will not find until after my death; I must never let it get buried under the sand, or tossed aside in the clutter of life; I must make it the main object of my life - to press on to that home and to help others that I encounter on my way, to do the same. 

Hope is the pursuit of Home.

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