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,

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.