Here’s a pointed question from a reader. Jared writes,
In your book Can I Believe?, you suggest taking one’s beliefs as a sort of “best guess for now” and being open to changing based on new information, because without the openness to change, it becomes a sort of fanaticism instead of faith. I have been wrestling with how to reconcile this with the “JESUS, ALL FOR JESUS” mentality that evangelicals tend to demand.
There is also the evangelical emphasis on relationship with Jesus, which tends to make being a Christian more of a commitment to a person—which strikes me as more like a marriage vow or an oath of allegiance to a king, which traditionally haven’t been “best guess for now, open to change later” situations. Do you have any thoughts on this?
In fact, I do.
Believing and Believing
Let’s notice right away that we don’t have a verb in English that derives immediately from the noun “faith.” There is no such thing as “faithing”: we believe—or we trust, or we confide in.
This particular use of “believe,” furthermore, is (confusingly) different from the other common use of that word that has to do with knowledge: “I believe that’s true.” We normally say, of course, “I think that’s true.” But when we use the construction “believe that” we are in the realm of asserting what we take to be knowledge—or, at least, what we take to be likely knowledge.
“Are you sure you left the back door unlocked for Millie to come in later?”“Well, I believe I did . . . . “
This use of “believe” is on the spectrum of “what we think we know—more or less.” The other use of “believe” is the one having to do with faith.
Faith also, however, connects with knowledge. We believe someone’s testimony, or we believe in something or someone, because we think we have adequate grounds to do so. “Doug’s a good guy, so I believe him.”
The two senses of “believe” thus frequently show up together: “I believe that this is the correct screwdriver for the job because Doug said so and I believe (in) Doug.”
Here is how faith works in everyday life. You sit down on a chair—you put your faith in it—because you think you know certain things about it: that the chair is intact, that it can bear the weight of your body, that no one puckishly sawed through one of its legs so that it would collapse under the next person who sat in it, and so on.
Likewise, you trust a babysitter to care for your precious offspring because you know certain things about her: she comes from a good family, she is great with the kids in Sunday School, and two other parents vouch for her.
We trust, we believe, and so we live—we risk—on the basis of what we think we know.
Believing as Relationship
My correspondent Jared asked about relationship in regard to faith and knowledge. So let’s get to the most important of such relationships: marriage.
The greatest risk, the greatest step of faith, we take in a normal human life (outside of religion: we’re getting to that) is to get married. We venture to get married, however, because we think we know what we need to know to do so: about marriage, about the other person, and about ourselves.
(We’ll pause for a show of hands from the married people: How many of you knew as much as you now think you should have known before you decided to marry that person at that time? [Pause for rueful laughter.])
Now, suppose at some point during the marriage that evidence appears that might indicate a wife behaving oddly, even badly. Maybe she’s working late—a lot. Maybe she seems evasively nonchalant about where and how she’s spending the extra hours. There are grounds for suspicion.
We would not admire a spouse who, at the first sign of such as-yet-unexplained behaviour, immediately filed for divorce. Loyalty is a virtue, and so is the common sense that there might be a benign explanation for her actions. Maybe she’s working overtime to pay for a vacation with her husband. Maybe she’s doing all she can to keep it a surprise.
Perhaps, however, the marriage is in fact on the rocks. Maybe through an affair, maybe through abuse, or maybe through neglect amounting to abandonment. (There is more than one kind of infidelity—literally, unfaithfulness to one’s vows.) There would come some point at which we would no longer admire a spouse who kept looking on the bright side and ignoring the accumulating mountain of damning evidence.
We would instead counsel him to face the facts and take the appropriate action. If he can work to save the marriage, good for him. But if his wife has truly ended it, then he is wise to acknowledge that reality.
Religious commitment is similar, and especially in the Christian religion. Giving our life to God is pictured in the Bible as indeed a form of betrothal: Israel to Yhwh in the Old Testament and the Church to Christ in the New.
Is Jesus My Everything?
It is always the case that we know only a fraction of what there is to know about marriage, our beloved, and ourselves when we declare our marriage vows. But getting married isn’t a fractional proposition. “Well, I would peg my knowledge of the relevant information at about 60%, so I’ll commit my life to my spouse at about 60%.” No, getting married is binary: “I do” or “I don’t.”
Likewise with the Christian faith. When you sign up, you sign up as your whole self. Conversion is about adopting a new way of life with a new God and a new community of likeminded God-followers.
Just as you can’t be 60% married, it makes no conceptual or practical sense to be 60% committed to the Lord. In this sense, the absolute language of both love songs and worship songs is appropriate, with all the extremes of “everything,” “all,” et cetera.
Let’s take a moment to clarify something important here. Christian hymnody, like Christian preaching, often speaks in this “love song” register. “You are my everything, I need nothing other than you, I give you my all.” We invite unnecessary confusion when we transpose the lovely, loving extravagance of love poetry into theological and ethical propositions.
In sober truth, we need more than just the Lord to live. Moreover, we shouldn’t give the Lord all our attention and loyalty. We need oxygen and water and food, for instance. We rightly give our attention also to our families, to our churches, and to our neighbours in mission. (Genesis 2 has the Lord recognizing that, even with God’s company and the companionship of the animals, it was not good for the first human to be alone—without a peer.) No, God isn’t literally “our everything”—even as we gratefully accept our sustenance from the hand of the Lord and we obediently serve others in the Lord’s name.
Nonetheless, when we say our vows in a service either of marriage or of baptism, they are absolute: “all for you.” Such language, such commitment, is appropriate. Indeed, you can’t be a proper spouse or disciple without such wholehearted affirmation.
Faithful, not Fanatical
Still, we must steer between hesitant skepticism—not fully committed—and stubborn fanaticism—committed no matter what. Fanaticism we might define, then, as insistence against compelling contrary evidence.
Maintaining a belief in a scientific theory (such as a flat earth) becomes fanatical when the evidence against it combined with the evidence for a contrary theory (a round earth) is vast—and should properly overwhelm alternatives. Maintaining a belief in the fidelity of one’s spouse in the teeth of a record of hurtful behaviour is not noble, but pathetic. And maintaining a religious commitment despite powerful and unanswered intellectual, moral, and experiential grounds to the contrary isn’t faith—it’s fanaticism.
Biblical faith is never fanaticism. Quite the opposite.
Israel’s Ten Commandments begin with the reminder that Yhwh is the One who brought them out of slavery in Egypt and so it simply follows that Israel should obey God’s instruction. Paul argues in I Corinthians 15, echoing the logic of Peter’s first sermon on the original Pentecost, that if God did not raise Jesus from the dead, then the Christian religion goes to pieces. But since God did, then commitment to Christ is valid.
In sum, we Christians want to invite our neighbours to consider thoughtfully the claims made in the Bible about God and particularly about God in Christ. We want to assure those neighbours that we are asking them to make a reasonable investigation into the truth of the matter. We are not asking them to leave their reason at the door and just plunge into some new spiritual experience, but to bring their whole selves into a new relationship with the true and living God.
We therefore need to assure them that we are not ourselves fanatics, people who ignore, suppress, and even punish those who raise good arguments against our doctrines. We are not psychological cripples who cling to a delusion to avoid dealing responsibly with reality.
We are not asking them to defy their reason, to commit to a religion and put their good sense on ice as they do. We believe Jesus to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
So we invite all comers to bring their best questions, their deepest doubts, and their gravest fears to him. We also simply and rightly acknowledge, as we hope our neighbours will similarly acknowledge, that if a better religion and a better deity appears, any prudent person would be wise to trade up. That’s what we’re asking them to do in conversion. We need to be willing, at least in theory, to do the same.
Commitment versus Certainty
For apologetic purposes, that is, we need to affirm that it is sensible for anyone to recognize problems with one’s worldview and to consider improving or even replacing it—and that we ourselves are at least theoretically open to that. We cannot ask our neighbours to be consider a change we ourselves are not open to considering.
Within the church, we do emphasize total commitment. Again, that’s appropriate to the kind of relationship we have with our God. But let’s be clear that our total commitment, our faith, rests on what we are convinced is reality, what we think we know.
As human beings, and unlike God, we don’t know most things we think we know for certain. Now, we can feel certain. We can be totally committed to believing this or that concept, principle, or person.
Certainty in this technical philosophical sense, however, means that I know that I couldn’t possibly be wrong, confused, deluded̛. Outside of self-evident propositions (such as “All bachelors are unmarried”) and states of mind (I can be certain that if I am feeling pain, I am in pain), we can’t claim certainty for what we think we know. (Think of the radical uncertainty depicted in The Matrix.)
That’s okay, though, since we routinely live without certainty. We don’t know for certain that our bank won’t cheat us, or that our dentist isn’t trying to kill us, or that our car’s brakes won't suddenly fail. But we don’t, and shouldn’t, spend any time worrying about such things.
We believe Christianity is true (philosophically), and we believe in God (relationally), because we think we have grounds good enough to justify that faith. (Those grounds, by the way, aren’t just arguments, but experiences, too. Take a look at Can I Believe? for a survey of the various grounds, in fact, that have convinced people that Christianity is the true path of life.)
If those grounds shift, however, then the commitment made on those grounds might well have to shift, too. That’s just what it means to have faith, rather than practice fanaticism.
It is the general human condition that we make most of our decisions in life on the basis of what we take to be well-grounded faith. Faith in authorities and institutions, faith in textbooks and teachers, and faith in each other.
This is true even when it comes to making big commitments in life, and especially the biggest: marriage and religion. We shouldn’t be dismayed by this allowance of our human limitations. For the Bible itself declares that we walk by faith, not by sight.
So let’s just be honest and clear about the nature of faith—with ourselves, with each other as Christians, and with our neighbours whom we hope will join us in following the Lord.
FURTHER ON FAITH:
Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant (Oxford University Press, 2020).
“Faith,” in The New Lion Handbook of Christian Belief, ed. Alister McGrath (Lion, 2006), 20-55.
Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford University Press, 2002).
