The first chapter of Luke contains two of the four appearances of the angel Gabriel (the other two being in the book of Daniel). The first is the announcement of the birth of John the Baptist, where Gabriel appears to John's soon-to-be father Zachariah the priest in the Holy Place of the temple in Jerusalem. The second is the announcement of the birth of Christ to Mary, which takes place in the town of Nazareth in the backwater region of Galilee. There is a lesson to be learned, I think, even in that--the two different settings. God sends the same angel (who is, if you read the accounts of him in Daniel, a very important and powerful angel: not the angel of birthday greetings) to one of the most sacred places in the Jewish faith (the Temple in Jerusalem) and one of the most common, everyday places in Jewish life (a town in Galilee). He is sent to a respected elder among the ordained priests who is, at the time, performing his religious duties. He is also sent to a young woman of negligible social standing (who's only distinction in society was to be her upcoming marriage to a middle-class carpenter from nowheresville, Luke 1:27) apparently minding her own business. God does not make any distinction here between the sacred and the common. If anything, He seems to favor the common more, sending Mary a greater message than was sent to Zachariah the priest.
But for now, I wanted to focus on the reactions both people had to the message. It has always struck me that both people questioned Gabriel (and, implicitly, God, since Gabriel was simply His messenger). Both of them ask Gabriel "How?" Yet they receive very different replies. Gabriel answers Mary's question kindly, but reacts to Zachariah's similar question with anger and strikes the priest mute as punishment. I always wondered why the reactions were so different. Was God cutting Mary some extra slack because she was to bear Christ? Was Zachariah held to a higher standard as a priest of God?
Now, though, I think the difference isn't in Gabriel's reaction, but in the questions themselves. Mary asks, "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34). Zachariah asks, "How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years." (Luke 1:18). At first, the questions seem almost identical. Both Mary and Zachariah are questioning the angel's announcement of birth on the basis of known biological facts which would prevent such a birth from occurring. Zachariah's wife, Elizabeth, is an old woman, past menopause and considered barren even before that. Her husband's no spring chicken himself. How could such a pair have children? Mary's situation is even more strange: she's a virgin, and unmarried. While her fertility would later be established by the children she bore Joseph (Matthew 13:55-56), at the moment--and for the foreseeable future--she was...well, lacking an important prerequisite to conception. Both of these births were biologically impossible and both Mary and Zachariah point this out as the basis of their questions.
But from there, the questions are different. Mary asks, "How will this be?" Zachariah asks, "How shall I know this?" In other words, the questions are: "How is this going to happen?" and "How do I know you're telling the truth?" One question assumes that the message is true and asks how it will come about. The other questions the integrity of the message itself. When I realized this, the difference in Gabriel's answer was clear to me. Zachariah has called into question his integrity as a messenger and, implicitly, the integrity of God who sent him. No wonder he winds up getting...err, giving the silent treatment. Mary on the other hand isn't questioning that what God has said is true: she's just questioning how it can come about in light of known biological facts. She isn't questioning the truthfulness of the message or of God, but is asking for more information about His methods. That is a question God may not always answer (Gabriel's answer to Mary isn't terribly specific on how the mechanics of a virgin conception will come about), but it is one that He respects and allows.
I think of this in my own life, reflecting on how I trust God in day to day things, big or small (such as, right now, my job search). Of course, my faith isn't always perfect. As I fill out application after application and wait day after day by my discouragingly silent phone it seems like God's direction in the area of employment is violating some economic "facts" about the scarcity of jobs and the desirability of a recent college graduate (which does not seem to be half as great as it was hyped up to be in college). I begin to question. But what sort of questions am I asking? Am I asking the sort of questions which relate to how God will bring something about, or the sort of questions that cast doubt upon whether or not He will? There is nothing wrong with asking questions of Him, but do I question Him in faith like Mary, or in disbelief like Zachariah? To be honest, I do way more of the latter than the former, and that's not something I want to be comfortable with.
I'll pray for faith, and questions, like Mary's.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
Pew Potato Faith
If you were to ask people out there what one of the key conflicts of our day is, many would say "Science vs Religion" or "Faith vs Reason." In fact, some people believe this is one of the fundamental conflicts of human history, stretching back at least as far as the Catholic Church's trial of Galileo. Some see it as one of the fundamental conflicts within human nature: whether to investigate and seek to understand some new phenomenon or else to conjure some unreasonable myth with which to explain it away. In this view, faith is defined as an irrational inherently unprovable belief that is contrary to the evidence (that is, contrary to science, for science is held to be the conclusions and procedures that derive from pursuing the evidence).
Many atheists and all "New Atheists" seem to accept and promote this definition of faith. A lot of church-goers do to, leading them to avoid looking into evidence concerning their own faith and allowing their Christianity to remain something that's detached from reality and from their daily lives: a cherished dusty old tradition that they put on every Sunday morning.
The problem with this kind of faith is that it isn't Biblical. Nowhere in the Bible does God ask us to suspend or disavow rationality so that we can have faith in Him. There are no rebukes in the Bible for seeking to examine the evidence in the world to understand it, and Christ's chiefest enemies were not the Greek philosophers of His day who made the earliest advances in modern science, but rather the Jewish religious authorities.
On the contrary, in the Bible faith, evidence, and reason are all seen as things that are intrinsically linked. In the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah, God repeatedly calls for reasonable rational arguments, critical thinking about beliefs, and a faith in Him that springs from an understanding of the world rather than arising as a substitute for it. The Bible especially contrasts this with the belief in idolatry which it portrays as inherently and (at times) hilariously irrational. But this focus on evidence-based faith didn't disappear with the coming of the New Testament. If anything, it intensified. Luke summarizes the purpose of his gospel as this: "that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." He intends to impart that certainty not through rote repetition of myths and calls to disavow rational thought but by his efforts to "compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us" based upon the testimony of those "who from the beginning were eyewitnesses" (Luke 1:1-4). In his first letter to the Corinthian church, Paul exhorts the church to believe in the miraculous resurrection of Christ based first and foremost on the testimony of nearly five hundred living eyewitnesses. He later encouraged the belief by stating the logical consequences of rejecting it--implicitly expecting that Christians would be logically consistent in their beliefs. Christ often challenged His disciples' lack of faith, calling them "oh you of little faith" but in the places where He does so He attempts to correct their "little faith" by confronting them with some sort of evidence. The fact that God makes flowers beautiful even though they are short-lived is used as evidence to bolster faith in God's ability to provide for people as well (Matthew 6:30 and Luke 12:28). The fact that a word from Jesus calms a storm is used to provide faith to counter fear in the face of nature's fury (Matthew 8:26). The fact that Jesus was observed to be walking on the water without any trouble at all is used to counter Peter's fear of drowning while attempting to join Him (Matthew 14:25-33). In Matthew 16:8-11 Jesus launches into a diatribe reminding the disciples of the specifics of all of the miracles they've witnessed so far to bolster their faith in God's ability to provide despite them forgetting to pack a lunch.
So Biblical faith is based on evidence and springs from it. Biblically, we are not to believe in God just because it feels good or because someone told us to, but because He is the most rational explanation for the evidence we see in the world. We are to believe the claims of Christianity not contrary to the evidence but because of it. Day to day we are to put our faith in God and trust Him for everything in our lives because we have seen Him come through and reward that faith before and have reason to believe He will continue to do so.
This leads to a faith that is not logically disconnected from the world, but a faith that is an intrinsic part of how we understand the world around us and interact with it. As a consequence, it's a faith that demands to be more than something we only apply on Sunday mornings. It's a faith which (because it is based on evidence and real life experience) we can and must apply to our everyday lives.
To be sure, faith does involve an element of the unknown. It's a matter of taking an informed risk based on the evidence for one's belief. The Corinthian Christians could not go back in time and witness Christ's resurrection for themselves and neither can we, but they could place their faith on the word of a large body of eyewitnesses and take the risk of preaching and hoping in the resurrection as a consequence. The disciples couldn't peer forward in time and see that Christ was going to make sure they didn't starve when they forgot to pack bread, but they could place their faith in His ability to provide and accept the risk of not worrying where their next meal would come from based on the evidence that Jesus had previously had no problem providing gratuitous amounts of food seemingly from nowhere. So also we, when faced with life decisions may have no way of knowing that following God will lead to a good end, but our past experience with Him and the evidence of His faithfulness compels us to accept that risk and put our faith in Him yet again--and through taking such risks and having our experience prove our faith true, we grow stronger in our faith. Only in taking that risk can we gather more evidence with which to strengthen it. As a book I'm reading (A Dangerous Faith by James Lund and Peb Jackson) puts it,
Many atheists and all "New Atheists" seem to accept and promote this definition of faith. A lot of church-goers do to, leading them to avoid looking into evidence concerning their own faith and allowing their Christianity to remain something that's detached from reality and from their daily lives: a cherished dusty old tradition that they put on every Sunday morning.
The problem with this kind of faith is that it isn't Biblical. Nowhere in the Bible does God ask us to suspend or disavow rationality so that we can have faith in Him. There are no rebukes in the Bible for seeking to examine the evidence in the world to understand it, and Christ's chiefest enemies were not the Greek philosophers of His day who made the earliest advances in modern science, but rather the Jewish religious authorities.
On the contrary, in the Bible faith, evidence, and reason are all seen as things that are intrinsically linked. In the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah, God repeatedly calls for reasonable rational arguments, critical thinking about beliefs, and a faith in Him that springs from an understanding of the world rather than arising as a substitute for it. The Bible especially contrasts this with the belief in idolatry which it portrays as inherently and (at times) hilariously irrational. But this focus on evidence-based faith didn't disappear with the coming of the New Testament. If anything, it intensified. Luke summarizes the purpose of his gospel as this: "that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." He intends to impart that certainty not through rote repetition of myths and calls to disavow rational thought but by his efforts to "compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us" based upon the testimony of those "who from the beginning were eyewitnesses" (Luke 1:1-4). In his first letter to the Corinthian church, Paul exhorts the church to believe in the miraculous resurrection of Christ based first and foremost on the testimony of nearly five hundred living eyewitnesses. He later encouraged the belief by stating the logical consequences of rejecting it--implicitly expecting that Christians would be logically consistent in their beliefs. Christ often challenged His disciples' lack of faith, calling them "oh you of little faith" but in the places where He does so He attempts to correct their "little faith" by confronting them with some sort of evidence. The fact that God makes flowers beautiful even though they are short-lived is used as evidence to bolster faith in God's ability to provide for people as well (Matthew 6:30 and Luke 12:28). The fact that a word from Jesus calms a storm is used to provide faith to counter fear in the face of nature's fury (Matthew 8:26). The fact that Jesus was observed to be walking on the water without any trouble at all is used to counter Peter's fear of drowning while attempting to join Him (Matthew 14:25-33). In Matthew 16:8-11 Jesus launches into a diatribe reminding the disciples of the specifics of all of the miracles they've witnessed so far to bolster their faith in God's ability to provide despite them forgetting to pack a lunch.
So Biblical faith is based on evidence and springs from it. Biblically, we are not to believe in God just because it feels good or because someone told us to, but because He is the most rational explanation for the evidence we see in the world. We are to believe the claims of Christianity not contrary to the evidence but because of it. Day to day we are to put our faith in God and trust Him for everything in our lives because we have seen Him come through and reward that faith before and have reason to believe He will continue to do so.
This leads to a faith that is not logically disconnected from the world, but a faith that is an intrinsic part of how we understand the world around us and interact with it. As a consequence, it's a faith that demands to be more than something we only apply on Sunday mornings. It's a faith which (because it is based on evidence and real life experience) we can and must apply to our everyday lives.
To be sure, faith does involve an element of the unknown. It's a matter of taking an informed risk based on the evidence for one's belief. The Corinthian Christians could not go back in time and witness Christ's resurrection for themselves and neither can we, but they could place their faith on the word of a large body of eyewitnesses and take the risk of preaching and hoping in the resurrection as a consequence. The disciples couldn't peer forward in time and see that Christ was going to make sure they didn't starve when they forgot to pack bread, but they could place their faith in His ability to provide and accept the risk of not worrying where their next meal would come from based on the evidence that Jesus had previously had no problem providing gratuitous amounts of food seemingly from nowhere. So also we, when faced with life decisions may have no way of knowing that following God will lead to a good end, but our past experience with Him and the evidence of His faithfulness compels us to accept that risk and put our faith in Him yet again--and through taking such risks and having our experience prove our faith true, we grow stronger in our faith. Only in taking that risk can we gather more evidence with which to strengthen it. As a book I'm reading (A Dangerous Faith by James Lund and Peb Jackson) puts it,
Faith in God is much more than sitting through a church service each Sunday. We are more than "pew potatoes." Our faith must be active: "Seek me and live" (Amos 5:4). We're not watching at TV show or attending a concert; we're participating in a great hunt. We are called to pursue a dangerous faith, living every thought, every activity, and every moment at risk for the Lord. ...It is an intentional stretching of long-held beliefs. Only here, on the precipice between the comfortable and the unknown, will faith truly thrive. Only here will you discover the ironic truth: the more you risk and trust God, the closer you move to His heart--and the safer you become.We do not take such risks blindly, but the very fact that they are not blind compels us to take them.
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