Sermon Library
“Faith and Belief”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
April 25, 2010
Service Theme: Easter IV – 2010
Source: Hebrews 11: 1 - 3
Easter IV – 2010 April 25, 2010
Faith and Belief
Hebrews 11: 1 - 3
Has anyone ever heard of the amazing Charles Blondin who lived in the later part of the 19th century? He was a famous tightrope walker and in 1859 he became the first person to cross a tightrope stretched over a quarter of a mile across the mighty Niagara Falls. He walked across 160 feet above the falls several times, each time with a different daring feat – once in a sack, on stilts, on a bicycle, in the dark, and once he even carried a stove and cooked an omelet on the middle of the rope. On one occasion though, he asked for the participation of a volunteer. A large crowd gathered and a buzz of excitement ran along both sides of the river bank. The crowd “Oooohed!” and “Aaaahed!” as Blondin carefully walked across one dangerous step after another – blindfolded and pushing a wheelbarrow. Upon reaching the other side, the crowd’s applause was louder than the roar of the falls! Blondin suddenly stopped and addressed his audience: “Do you believe I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?” The crowd enthusiastically shouted, “Yes, yes, yes. You are the greatest tightrope walker in the world. You can do anything!” “Okay,” said Blondin, “Who will get in the wheelbarrow?” But no one volunteered, not one. Later in August of 1859 his manager, Harry Colcord, did ride on Blondin’s shoulders across the falls.
Faith Versus Belief
People believed, but did anyone actually have the faith to get into the wheelbarrow? We often consider belief and faith as either synonymous or similar, but there is a definitive difference between belief and faith. Belief is an assertion. Faith is a venture. Dr. Harvey Cox, Professor Emeritus from Harvard, states that “faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what theologian Paul Tillich called ‘ultimate concern,’ a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the ‘heart.”
“Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. ‘I don’t really know about that,’ we say,’ but I believe it may be so.’ Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity, but they are more propositional than existential. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live. Of course people sometimes confuse faith with beliefs, but it will be hard to comprehend the tectonic shift in Christianity today unless we understand the distinction between the two.”
“The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1864 – 1936) dramatizes the radical dissimilarity of faith and belief in his short story ‘Saint Manuel Bueno Bueno, Martyr,’ in which a young man returns from the city to his native village in Spain because his mother is dying. In the presence of the local priest she clutches his hand and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer, but as they leave the room, he tells the priest that, much as he would like to, he cannot pray for his mother because he does not believe in God. ‘That’s nonsense,’ the priest replies. ‘You don’t have to believe in God to pray.’”
The priest in Unamuno’s story recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief. He might have engaged the son who wanted to pray but did not believe in God in a theological squabble. He could have hauled out the frayed old ‘proofs’ of the existence of God, where upon the young man might have quoted the equally jaded arguments against the proofs. Both probably knew that such arguments go nowhere. The French writer Simone Weil (1909 – 43) also knew. In her Notebooks, she once scribbled a gnomic sentence: ‘If we love God, even though we think he doesn’t exist, he will make his existence manifest.’ Weil’s words sound paradoxical, but in the course of her short and painful life – she died at thirty four – she learned that love and faith are both more primal than beliefs.”
Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle engaged in disputes about beliefs, not necessarily about faith. Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Judaism and Christianity is not a history of creeds. Rather, it is the story of people of faith. It is a story of essential trust. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs. It is also the history of equally faithful people who questioned, altered, and discarded those same creeds.
Three Periods of Faith and Belief
Harvey Cox writes that the nearly two thousand years of Christian history can be divided into three uneven periods. (1) The first might be called the “Age of Faith.” It began with Jesus and his immediate disciples when a buoyant faith propelled the movement he initiated. During this first period of both explosive growth and brutal persecution, their sharing in the living Spirit of Christ united Christians with each other, and “faith” meant hope and assurance in the dawning of a new era of freedom, healing, and compassion that Jesus had demonstrated. To be a Christian meant to live in his Spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work that he had begun.
(2) The second period in Christian history can be called the “Age of Belief.” Its seeds appeared within a few short decades of the birth of Christianity when church leaders began formulating orientation programs for new recruits who had not known Jesus or his disciples personally. Emphasis on belief began to grow when these primitive instruction kits thickened into catechisms, replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him. Constantine, in the beginning of the fourth century, however, officially created the Age of Belief. The Nicene Creed became stone and Bishops became officers. The ancient corporate merger triggered a titanic makeover. The empire became “Christian,” and Christianity became imperial. Christianity, at least in its official version, froze into a system of mandatory precepts that were codified into creeds and strictly monitored by a powerful hierarchy and imperial decrees. A belief system was in place. This Age of Belief lasted roughly fifteen hundred years, ebbing in fits and starts with the Enlightenment and later secularization of Europe.
(3) Then Professor Cox declares; “Now we stand on the threshold of a new chapter in the Christian story. Despite dire forecasts of its decline, Christianity is growing faster than it ever has before, but mainly outside the West and in movements that accent spiritual experience, discipleship, and hope; pay scant attention to creeds; and flourish without hierarchies. We are now witnessing the beginning of a ‘post-Constantinian era.’ Christians on five continents are shaking off the residues of the second phase (the Age of Belief) and negotiating a bumpy transition into a fresh era for which a name has not yet been coined. I would like to suggest we call it the “Age of the Spirit.”
The Age of the Spirit
Dr. Cox lists many reasons to define this new time as the Age of the Spirit. One reason is that the concept of the Holy Spirit as part of the Trinity has not lost ground, but gained ground as centuries have passed by. Second, increasing numbers of people who might once have described themselves as ‘religious,’ but who want to distance themselves from the institutional or doctrinal demarcations of the conventional religion, now refer to themselves as ‘spiritual.’ They often say, ‘I am a spiritual person, but I am not religious.’ This statement and phrase is, indeed, the religious or spiritual hallmark mantra of the new Age of the Spirit and the twenty-first century. Third, people are associating their religion or spirituality with nature and the universe. Earlier Christian leaders of the past such as Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to name just a few, have understood God within nature and not against nature as was done during the Age of Belief. Even prior to the Age of Faith, the Hebraic writers and Psalmists found deep and synergistic comparisons between God and nature.
The Bigger Picture of Faith
I appreciate looking at the big picture of life and faith. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I am so appreciative of Harvey Cox who seems to be interested in a similar world view – the big picture. What is really interesting is that, as he looks at the big picture of Christianity, he makes a correlation between the initial Age of Faith with the current Age of the Spirit.
A New Spirituality
There is a new spirituality going on today as we enter the Twenty-first century. Part of this new spirituality, ironically, includes a particular and precise investigation of the first century of Christianity. I have often wondered about this. Thanks to Professor Cox, he clarifies why this is going on; why the new interest in early Christianity is being specifically associated with the New Age of the Spirit. Both are more interested in the Age of Faith versus the Age of Belief.
It is almost too simple, but this juxtaposition has hit me right between the eyes when I wasn’t looking and made me realize, but of course that’s it. People are more interested in the original and historical Jesus today because they perceive this to be more applicable to their lives today in pursuit of the Age of the Spirit. It is the 1500 years in between which has slowly and deceivingly eroded the Spirit of Faith and the real Spirit of Christ.
“As Christianity moves awkwardly but irreversibly into a new phase in its history, those who are pushing into this frontier often look to the earliest period, the Age of Faith, rather than the intervening one, the Age of Belief, for inspiration and guidance. This should not be surprising. There are striking similarities between the first and the emerging third age. Creeds did not exist then; and they are fading in importance now.
Personal Phases
These three broad sweeping phases of Christianity are most helpful to me and now I hope to you, as well. One other interesting perspective is that Dr. Harvey Cox then applies these three phases of Christianity to himself personally. He was baptized and felt he was then a Christian and followed the faith, plain and simple. When he got to college, however, he met an Episcopalian who wanted to know what he really believed. He also refers to others in College who were Catholics, Methodists and Presbyterians. They seemed to all want to know exactly what he believed. The Episcopalian wanted to know if he believed in “substitutionary atonement?” This was a challenge to him, yet also helped him to define the essential difference between a deep and sincere faith and a superficial and obligatory belief. He later met others who had a very personal and sincere faith and whose lives were beginning to create a difference in how they lived and not just how they believed.
Where Are You?
I hope these major phases of Christianity seem to make some sense to you as we all keep figuring out how faith, belief and Christianity fit into our society and lives today. I also hope you might be motivated to look at your own phases of religion or spirituality. Did you see yourselves as being in a simple and trusting faith when you were young? Did you get caught up into believing that you had to have certain beliefs when you grew older and in which you question today? Are you currently looking for something far different than what you have been traditionally taught as well as having a growing and even unexplainable desire to know more about faith and spiritual experiences that will make more sense for you today than in the past?
You may very well be the people of the new “Age of the Spirit.” The experience of the divine is displacing the theories about it. No wonder the atmosphere in the burgeoning Christian congregation of Asia and Africa feels more like that of first-century Corinth or Ephesus than it does like that of the Rome or Paris of a thousand years later. Early Christianity and today’s emergent Christianity appear closely akin. I think of the song the Age of Aquarius. Today the song is the Age of the Spirit. All it takes is a little faith. I suggest we all get in. Amen.
Gregg Anderson, Aspen Chapel, Aspen, Colorado http://www.aspenchapel.org