Faith is ultimate concern. Ultimate concerns are essentially personal; they differ from person to person. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Usually when we discuss whether faith conflicts with truth, we contrast faith with reason, and ask whether they exclude each other or whether they can be united in a “reasonable faith.” If the latter is possible, how are the elements of rationality and of faith related to each other? Reason gives the tools for recognizing and controlling the reality we experience, and faith gives a direction in which this control might be exercised.
Reason is identical with the humanity of man in contrast to all other beings. It is the basis of language, of freedom, of creativity. It is involved in the search for knowledge, the experience of art, the actualization of moral commands; it makes a centered personal life and participation in community possible. If faith were the opposite of reason, it would tend to dehumanize mankind. (Paraphrased from Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, Harper Torchbooks, 1957, pps 74 – 75.)
“We speak of three different types of faith. The first is faith in the form of admiration that you have toward a particular person or a particular state of being. The second is aspiring faith. There is a sense of emulation – you aspire to that state of being. The third type is the faith of conviction.” The Dalai Lama, The Path to Tranquility, Penguin Putnam, 1999.
One of the things about growing up as the eldest of three boys is that you learn to equivocate. Now, that’s not quite the same as lying, or maybe it’s just a fancy word for the same thing. Little brothers help you learn to dissemble, which is next-door-neighbor to lying but can be effective if you talk fast enough or loud enough…..sorta’ like a Yankee. The difficulty, of course, comes when your parents value honesty as much as they value the immaculate conception, which is to say, in my case, a lot. Trying to walk that extremely narrow line between partial truth and outright falsehood gets tougher and tougher as you mature.
I did grow up with two little brothers who are absolutely responsible for my learning not to present the full, unadulterated, impeccable truth. When I bopped one of them on the head for some offense, real or pretended, and he then ratted on me to my parents, it took some pretty swift invention on my part to avoid punishment for hitting the little twerp.
Little brothers can also make you learn to shave the truth. I learned to imply, without making an outright statement, that my brother had eaten the forbidden last piece of pie, when in truth he had not gone near it. Early on, I loved Jessie’s chess pie more than I feared punishment. My daddy, you see, had brought home from the war a one-and-a-half-inch-wide woven Navy belt. You had only to feel that thing on your backside a time or two after getting caught in a lie to acquire a genuine and profound respect for honesty.
My mother, a school teacher both by training and temperament, knew the importance of frequent repetition to learning. She also was an early, white, female “Jesse Jackson” in her love of easily-remembered phrases. One that is deeply engraved in my brain, both from hearing it and from being made to repeat it, is “say what you mean, and mean what you say.” I felt then, as I feel now, that that was harder than “always tell the truth,” because no one ever knew what “truth” was anyway, but the injunction, “say what you mean, and mean what you say,” makes it awfully hard not to be perfectly honest.
So…..that’s my upbringing. Why, you are beginning to ask, is he subjecting us to this dull recitation of his boring history? And particularly, why here in a service of corporate worship?
Well, part of the answer lies in my belief that an occasional, limited confession is good for each of us. Another part lies in my love of this place and its people. A final part lies in my conviction that a prime place to face the unknown and to ask unanswerable questions is here, at this traditional hour, as we gather in the intention that we will meet, or be met by, God.
In that spirit, and hopefully with integrity, I want to talk with you in the next few moments about what of “faith, reason and honesty” I find at Wedgewood Baptist Church.
Many persons struggle with the essential elements of Christian dogma. They have great difficulty with questions like “is the resurrection of Jesus an actual happening?” How can, or does, a person like that sing “Christ Arose” on Easter morning, if he does not understand that to be true?
Does God exist? Everything here, especially in worship, is designed to answer that question with a resounding “YES,” and yet I must be honest and say that until I come to know what God is, I am not sure that God is. How does a person with that question in his or her heart join you in the doxology, extolling God as father, son and holy ghost?
How do we answer “Thanks be to God,” when a worship leader proclaims “this is the word of God” … if we believe that the bible is a book of wonderful myths and stories, fictional, and largely selected by men in order to support the beliefs of one group over others? What is the truth of the powerfully normative ceremony we call “the Lord’s Supper”? As an aside, let me point out that when we Baptists of the South want to extend the mystery and talk like Episcopalians, we call it the Eucharist…..a properly elegant word. Most of us long ago gave up on the idea of ingesting the body and blood of Jesus, but if a person is full of skepticism about the practice of communion, is it wrong for him or her to take a place in the circle we form around the table? If what some believe to be a wonderful and moving mystery seems to others to be contrived artifice, how do we reconcile that difference?
Questions like these have been, and are still, very, very challenging…..especially in the context of a belief that I should always “say what I mean, and mean what I say.” What is the nature of faith? And why do many persons find it so hard to accept the church’s faith statements? Why do they resist saying aloud the Apostle’s Creed? Is it honest to admit that “I do not know,” and is it loving to share in others’ practice of their faith? What is the relation between Faith,
Reason and Honesty?
Paul Tillich, that marvelous German theologian who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1933 until 1955, writes that Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. It is, to him, the most centered, personal act of the human mind. Faith, for Tillich, is a matter of freedom. The act of holding to a faith is an act of unconditional, infinite and ultimate concern. If “faith is a belief in things not seen”, how can reason be involved? For Tillich, or for any of us, is “blind faith” something to be admired, or something to be avoided? If one tries to make an ultimate concern, i.e., an article of faith, out of something about which he is not sure, how does that square with the admonition to “say what you mean and mean what you say”? Tillich would question even its possibility.
Here’s a faith statement I can make: one of the most basic ultimate concerns is to be true to oneself, as Polonius advised Laertes in the famous scene from Act II of Hamlet. “To thine own self be true, and it follows, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” It may be too harsh to say that persons who make a statement of blind faith are not being true to themselves, but I submit that, for whatever reasons, they are not comfortable saying, “I just don’t know.”
Faith, Reason and Honesty…..as I try to work out for myself the best understanding of the great questions of life, I find that I am most comfortable, most at peace, when I say, “I do not know.” That agnosticism, that admission of not-knowing, is the closest I can get to an honest faith statement that is not at odds with my reason.
Further, it is okay not to know. We should not have any anxiety about not knowing, partly because it’s true that no one else “knows”, either. Some, perhaps most, Christians are able to make faith statements that are meaningful and significant for them personally, and we celebrate the joy that is opened to them thereby. But it is all right if we cannot, in honesty, join in those statements of faith.
And yet, we come to worship regularly…..to ask questions, to seek answers, and to long for understanding. We sing, alongside those whose faith is certain, hymns and anthems whose lyrics we do not understand. This is a place of faith. The Dalai Lama and Billy Graham are persons of faith. Jimmy Carter and Franklin Graham are persons of faith. Ann Graham Lotz and Mother Teresa are each examples of persons of faith. Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat are both persons of faith. Not all persons of faith think alike, and open, accepting churches like Wedgewood have persons with varying faith understandings. That is their strength….and a large part of their joy. I am a person of faith…..faith that words are important, faith that questions matter, faith that dogma tends to be error, and an abiding faith that Jesus’ instruction about loving one’s neighbor is the best way for all people to live.
And so, I close with a request that you hear my open confession. I acknowledge that what we do not know except by faith is, for me, best met with an honest admission of ignorance. Perhaps that sort of concern with honesty is my ultimate concern…..one which is composed both of faith and of reason. Perhaps it is true that we cannot have our cake and eat it too, but we can say what we mean, and mean what we say. And so I urge you to examine your faith with reason and honesty, for an unexamined faith, like an unexamined life, is not worth living.
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