The Question of Faith part 1

Clark’s piece Does It Matter What We Believe got me to thinking.  What follows is an outgrowth of that wondering.  This is the opening piece of my wondering about the questions of faith and our role in them.

To some, the what of the questions of faith, is not as important as the question of where.  And to these same people, the what is largely an unimportant thing, provided the where of faith is properly placed.  This is a response to the divisive and factional nature of the christian faith.  This response is supposed to promote brotherhood among believers and put an end to the petty squabbling  that has dominated the nearly two millenia that is church history.  On some very basal level it accomplishes this, but only partially.  The brotherhood it promotes is however paper thin and it evaporates at the first sign of trouble.

It promotes a fellowship of the placement of faith and not a true brotherhood of belief.  This fellowship cannot exist in anything but the geographic setting of residence.  If it is probed beyond its surface driven geography, it collapses.  Celebrating placement of faith is of little functional value to the body that is the Church.  It is the equivalent of a celebration of mammalian status, which while important isn’t what the body needs.

A true brotherhood of belief is what is needed.  It is however a herculean undertaking.  It requires a corporate truth-seeking effort, and also demands that the components of division, (i.e. personal ego, and extra-biblical traditions) be set aside in order to truly seek Truth.  It requires the heart to become supple to the promptings of the Spirit of God, while remaining hard enough to hold firm to bedrock principles of faith.  It demands not compromise as some would assert, but rather a willingness to accept truth without regard to its personal import, impact, or imposition.  The difference may seem subtle, but it isn’t.  It demands we each accept truth we find inconvenient and distasteful, but true nonetheless.

It means a reordering of our faith perspective to hone in on truth.  Not as we have done in the past where the view of a sect or a faction or a denomination might believe it to be, but as God intended it to be.  Some look at the enormity of this task and run away from it in the belief that such a brotherhood isn’t possible.  They have settled for the flawed notion that a fraternity of geography is better than nothing at all and that it is all that’s possible.  And so they have accepted a minuscule unity and all that it entails, which isn’t much.

This is not what God had in mind for the faith with which we have been entrusted.  In fact, its not even close to the state intended by our creator.  We were intended to live in a dynamic community of faith whose unity was defined by its common belief, its common framework, and its common connection both with God and each other.  This unity has not been seen in any meaningful fashion since the first century.  As our faith ceased to be a movement of people responding to their creator, and became an institutionalized entity, our ability to be unified in our belief has waned.

This is the single largest impediment to a true unity of belief.  (In all candor, its an impediment to a lot more than just that, but that is beyond the intended scope here.)  The institutionalization of a movement, of our movement, hampers our ability to live in community, and restricts our ability to have a common framework, and belief system.  Small fights over the implementation of the institution, become huge nightmarish wars.  It was true with the first century church and it is true today.

They fought over the implementation of charity to widows, and ethnic arguments broke out, because one ethnic group’s widows were being overlooked.  The problem was resolved in typical human fashion.  Rather than work to change the heart of the people doing the work of this ministry, so that ethnic divisions didn’t continue, they chose to get more organized and in typical human fashion they created an institutional mechanism to facilitate the smooth flow of charity within the body.

Their choice was typical.  In many churches today when a problem arises, rather than roll up our sleeves and get to work, many churches create institutional adjuncts that function to serve or to study or to facilitate whatever ends up being the expedient  way out of the problem.  Sometimes the body uses terms like committee or ministry to explain the process they are using to handle the situation, but simply put they are using an institutional mechanism to avoid dealing with the problem.  This method of operation allows the institution to deal with the problem without anyone actually getting involved to deal with the problem.  It’s quick, it’s neat, and it’s painless, but it is not the method that Jesus used to deal with any issue.

Jesus didn’t defer the problem in front of him to a committee or the board of deacons.  He spit in the mud and fashioned new eyes for a blind man.  He touched the lame and they walked.  He walked into the abode of the dead and brought life to the lifeless.  We should in most cases shun the institution and work directly as a community, as a brotherhood, as a family to resolve whatever the problem happens to be.    We are equipped for that.  We are geared for that.  God putIt is only in doing so, that the answers to the grand questions of truth will become self evident.