Into the Wardrobe

Postodave and I have had a fruitful discussion in some personal messages and so I am posting my comment which started our discussion on this topic, so that we can recreate this discusion in a public thread (four or five posts). Since these were personal messages I cannot simply post his responses for him.



One can believe something is true and call it knowledge if one lives ones life accordingly. But past experience teaches us that even things which we know and live our lives by may some day be rejected in favor of something better. Thus living a life of faith means that like the faithful stewards we do the best we can and commit ourselves to knowledge without participating in the delusion of certainty. Knowledge is founded on faith and NOT on wilfullness, so faith does not mean that we must ignore everything that TRULY contradicts what we think we know to be the case. Discerning when this is, is of course not easy and so again we must simply do the best we can.

However, as Christians we are consoled that our salvation does not rest on our correctness of our knowledge and therefore our faith in this knowledge does not have to extend to judgements about who is going to heaven or hell on this basis. In fact I believe that the Bible prohibits this in Romans 10:6-7 and that this may indeed be the one unforgivable sin somehow connected to blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and I think it is also connected to the concluding words of the parable of the unforgiving debtor in Mathew 18:35. I sum it up in an understanding of what it means to fear a God who is more loving, good and reliable than any human being and that is a realization that God CANNOT be manipulated or bound by any action or belief of ours. Our salvation must rest on faith in Him and not on any delusion of certainty.

I tend to think as religious faith being more akin to the idea of faithfulness" than the way it is sometimes used - to indicate choosing to believe something unknowable without any good reason and even if it is stupid. Rather, It is related to commitment, an orientation of the will or love, and a certain openness of heart.

A comparison might be marraige. No one is expected to marry someone without thought, getting to know the person, and concluding that he or she will be a good and true spouse. If the person turns out to be unsuitable, it is sensible not to marry him!
Having married the person, however, changes things. It requires trust, an attempt to fix any problems in the relationship, or perhaps live with them. It may require consciously willing love one does not feel. It requires living for another person, who is no longer really separate from oneself. However, it does not mean that if you find out your spouse is a bigamist, or a philanderer, or a murderer, that you should ignore it or turn a blind eye. These things would clearly require some kind of action.

On a slightly different note, I remember having a lecture in university on some Muslim philosopher, I can't remember who. He thought that our place in heaven depended on our knowledge of God, so philosophers would be closer, others further away. I always thought this was stupid, because the difference between something infinite like God, and our knowledge of him, which is finite, is always infinite. And in any case, God's knowledge of all people is perfect, which is surely more important.

I like what St. Thomas Aquinas has to say about

"...[O]ne should reply that 'certitude' can convey two things. One is a firmness of adherence, and in this sense faith is more certain than any understanding or knowledge, since the first truth, which causes the assent of faith, is a more powerful cause than is the light of reason, which causes the assent of understanding and of knowledge. But 'certitude' also conveys the evidentness of that to which one assents, and faith does not have certitude in this sense, whereas understanding and knowledge do..."

I couldn't agree more with your comments about the sluggard. Once when I was agonising, and it was agonising not just noodling, over some doubts and questions my spiritual director said to me, 'Where is you discipline?'. And I learned that the real answer to some deep questions is often 'go and do some housework!' or 'spend some time with your children!' My spiritual director reminded me of the rule of St Benedict which splits the day into time for prayer, time foe work and time for study. Of course some people need to give more time to thought and study but not I suspect you and I Mitch. Usually for me its more prayer and more action. Of course for some people it's relax more and frivel a bit, but that's not me either!

There is no question that we all need a balance of work, prayer, study/thinking ,leisure, and that it can be hard to find the right balance. Overall I think most Westerners spend too much time in leisure. Work and contemplation and prayer get shortchanged. There are those who don't put their faith into action, but there are also many who see no place for contemplation and prayer and see all meaning only in works.

Which is to say, I think what is really being discussed is the old question of faith vs. works. Are both required for salvation, or are works separate things, though the natural product of faith?

I would say that all knowledge, except perhaps that of our own being, is in some sense "faith" since the foundation, the law of non-contradiction, is an assumption or article of faith (though I also think we are biologically predisposed to believe it.) But generally, thinks like "1 + 1 = 2" I would consider a matter of knowledge, along with anything else that is a logical 'certainty.' I would probably even place the existence of God in that category.

I think that faith that needs to show itself through actions is special to us because those are the kinds of places where sin can appear, where we don't do what we know we should. In the case of, say, my faith in the existence in black holes, since there is no action for me to take, the possibility of me sinning is not that likely, unless I lied about my belief for some reason.

Mitch: the sluggard, the man of accidie, or sloth, is also the man suffering depression or despair. These are also sinful, but more nearly the nature of involuntary sin, more like illness, and less like vice. Sluggard, while one legitimate translation, lends a blaming tone that is not quite complete.
Faith is also fidelity, and a certain stubbornness is right, particularly in the face of obstacles which are not counterarguments, or arguments at all. We are all susceptible to a category error here: if I feel this bad, if this sorrow can be, then the Christian faith can't be right. However, the first does not say anything about the truth of the second.