"I do trust! Help my lack of trust!"*

*Mark 9:24, SV.  Curiously, this pericope doesn't appear in the Revised Common Lectionary.

  Well, something has to be left out, but make of that what you will.

So I came across this comment at Religion Dispatches, a comment I don't mean to critique or evaluate (that would be unfair, in this forum.  I've given a brief version of my thoughts there, and this post is for my thinking alone), so I'm taking it out of context and only in the pieces I want to use.  But reading it, and thinking about it later, I had something of a revelation about the difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists (whom I grew up among, if not with; my mother's family are all Primitive Baptists) and my own understanding of my religious faith.  First, excerpts from the comment:

One phrase from your article really stands out for me.

"Christian subculture whose influence far exceeds its numbers"

To me that leads back to the question of exactly what is Christianity? I think it is hard to pin down, and I suspect that is intentional. I see Christianity as divided into two major divisions, conservative and progressive. Conservatives believe everything from traditional Christianity, heaven and hell, Bible is God's word, Trinity, everything that you hear in church. Progressive Christians can see the problem with that, so they have made every belief optional. There might be no actual literal heaven and hell. The Trinity is more of a mysterious theological concept and is open to interpretation. The Bible can be questioned because of all the studies that show it should be. My question is exactly what does it mean to be a progressive Christian? The strategy seems to be never answer that because any answer could lead to problems.

I think it all leads back to that influence that you alluded to. Christianity is a continuous spectrum of belief or non-belief, and it supports itself in that when any part of the spectrum is under question the answer is always to shift to another part of the spectrum. All parts can question other parts, but as long as they don't destroy other parts the spectrum kind of holds itself together. They don't really have any need to destroy other parts of the religion because they have so many other non-believer parts of society that they can lash out against instead.

I would first say that Christianity, or rather living as a Christian, is itself a continuous spectrum of belief or non-belief, although I'd put it in the terms of the Scholars Version translation of Mark 9:24, and use the word "trust" instead of "belief."  The presumption of this argument in the quoted material is one sponsored by evangelical and fundamentalist theologians:  that belief or faith is a possession, a good one can own and keep or give away; or it is an attribute available to some and not to others.  Skills in word working or cooking or music are examples of attributes one might have; few of us are born a Mozart or a Schumann, so we recognize both the talent and it's rarity when it occurs.   More of us are saints, but few still; and sainthood tends to be a matter of living out a conviction, not acting on an ability.

If I can identify God as a set of specific characteristics; if I can, say, insist that God created the world and all that dwells on it, and the sun and the stars, in seven solar days and anthropomorphically walked on earth in the Garden of Eden and had to seek Adam and Eve there, if I can declare the Bible, a set of books written over centuries, "God's word" implicitly written by God as one text, if I can identify "traditional Christianity" with one set of assertions and claims irrefutable and inalterable (even Roman Catholicism is not so doctrinaire), then I have a set of ideas and beliefs I can possess.  I have things.  I have control over ideas.

Which raises two important questions:  1) (in keeping with this blog's informal motto)  Where are the people?, and 2)  is God a reducible thing I can so easily define, so easily describe, so casually possess?  I have known my wife for 45 years, my daughter for 25, my closest friends for over 50 years:  can I say with absolute certainty how they will and must behave in any given set of circumstances?  Or do they continue to surprise me, while never acting exactly contrary to the persons I know them to be?  But "traditional Christianity" teaches me God can act in only one way, without surprises, as predictably as the sunset and as reassuringly as the next day's sunrise.  I do not have that assurance even of my wife, and yet I know God better?  Any answer I could give about who my wife is would lead to problems, and a wise husband would never claim to be so sure he knows her so well.  Yet to have the same relationship to the living God is problematic and an indication of...what?  Insincerity?  A lack of faith?  Something other than belief?

If I can be wise enough to know my wife is a cherished individual deserving of the deepest respect for her individuality, for not being merely an extension somehow of me, why is that a failing when I come to describe my relationship to God?  And yet isn't that the basis of the criticism?  If I cannot claim to posses God, to be absolute about God, to limit God, then I cannot "believe" in God.  And is what that belief is?  Knowledge that God is as I say God is?  And when God is not, doesn't that shatter my belief?

But if that isn't my belief, why can't I be said to believe?  Maybe because my belief is neither my possession nor an attribute peculiar to me, like my love for my wife, which no one else on the planet is expected to share.  And yet we all understand what I mean when I declare that I love my wife.  Is my love for her a matter of belief, of everything you hear in modern culture?  Is my love for her an attribute, like musical talent?  In that case was I meant to love only her?  That's a bit simplistic, isn't it?  I mean, how convenient that of all the people in the world I should go to the same high school she did.  If it isn't an attribute, is it inevitably a part of who I am?  What, then, of the mutual friend who introduced us?  Was that introduction inevitably part of my character?    Is love will?  Or emotion only?  Or is it something other than both, something not exercised or aroused, but still subject to attention and intent?

And then what is "belief," what is "faith," especially if we understand faith as trust?

Conservative and "traditional" Christians treat belief and faith as matters to possess, items of spiritual and personal ownership.  My faith in God, my trust in God, is the same as my love of my wife and daughter:  it is because.  It is who I am and I can be no other way.  Does that make it an attribute peculiar to me?  No, it isn't a talent like my skill at certain small tasks (none of which are valued enough by society to be remunerative, the way we usually gauge talent).  It is a conviction, an activity, like my trust.  It is not an acquiescence toward "believing what you know ain't so."

My love for my wife (or my daughter; different kinds of love, to be sure, but still we use the same word for each relationship) is not a matter of will or emotion.  I don't force myself to love my family, and my love for them is not a matter of a persistent emotional state (indeed, my emotional states in my '60's are not at all what they were in my '20's.  I see this most distinctly with a 25 year old daughter still in my daily life.)  How do I explain my love for her, except, in part, as trust?  I trust her, not just physically or materially (she won't empty the bank account, say, or destroy my possessions) but humanly.  I don't know how more accurately to put it:  I trust her emotionally, but the trust is deeper and more significant than that.  And my trust is that I know that, in all things, she can be trusted.  I can trust her with me.  If that is not faith, I don't know what it is.

I don't have faith in her attributes, in her statements of love for me, or in what I expect her to do or in who I think she is.  If traditional Christianity rests on doctrines and statements about God and particular interpretations of scripture (all reading is interpretation; it's unavoidable.  Of course, we interpret each other's actions and words, too.  Again:  it's unavoidable.), then those are things I can, and must, possess, in order to "believe" in the sense implied (and commonly accepted) by "traditional" Christianity.  But that is not Christianity, and "progressive Christianity" some other nature of thing with, confusingly, the same label (like my love for my wife, my love for my daughter, and my love of coffee and theology and philosophy; all very different matters described by one word.  How we manage to say anything at all is a mystery.).   No, there is no one Christianity, and even to say it is all connected by a belief in the Trinity is to rely on the ambiguity (again!) of the word "belief."  I can recite the Trinitarian formulas in the creeds and confess the Trinitarian recital of the baptismal vow, but do I "believe" as a fundamentalist Christian does?  Probably not, right down to how we both use the word "believe".  But does that mean I'm refusing to answer because my answer would lead to problems?  Or does that mean you (the generic "you," let the reader understand) are asking the wrong questions?

There is, after all, a strong strand of wisdom in the Scriptures, and so in Christianity; and wisdom is not strong on giving definitive answers, largely because those answers tend to lead to problems, and not to wisdom.

I understand.  Help my lack of understanding.  Somewhere in there, is where the people are.