Faith and Reason

A friend of mine, a follower of Jesus and a philosophy student, told me once that reading Kierkegaard had helped his faith which had been plagued by questions, I suppose scientific. He paraphrased, "Anything you can reason yourself into, you can reason yourself out of." I accepted that, and so when God confronted me with John 6:62-69 after I prayed about some confusing information brought up in one of my secular religious classes, I interpreted those life-giving words in light of what I'd accepted about faith and reason. In those bright and shining verses that nourish my soul, Jesus asks his twelve disciples if they too want to leave him. Peter answers, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6:68-69). For a while I thought that here was Peter making a choice and asserting faith in spite of reasoning that would tell him to run for it. But that's not the case at all. What Peter exhibits so beautifully is good, solid reasoning. His logic is pure and simple. Where's he gonna go? God worked in me with those verses, but not, upon reviewing my own faith, what I had thought. If my faith in Christ relied on my choosing to believe something that I thought would make me feel better, I'd have become a Taoist by now. My faith instead is hinged upon the unlikelihood of my being unconvinced that Jesus left behind an empty tomb and has been changing people's lives for 2000 years. If your faith is not inseparable from reason, from reality, then why keep it?

Unwavering Faith

Someone I love asked me during a visit how it is that my faith seems so unwavering. If she only knew. I felt suddenly guilty of being pretentious. There was a time, early on, when I wondered if my faith, no matter how much it grew, would always be just a step ahead of ravenous atheism, the voice in my head that said "Never underestimate the power of suggestion," or "You're talking to yourself." While those particular reservations have grown distant and ineffective, others have risen which are of course more relevant to where I am now. My faith seems to move in a frequency pattern, with wavelengths, and so to describe it as unwavering is inherently inaccurate. Each choice we make to believe or obey God brings us to a new set of choices to be made and consequently new doubts to overcome. With the right choices, we move from such questions as "How can people in Australia be raptured up?" and into questions like "Would God really ask me to compromise the security of my family in order to travel to a particular place or be involved with this political activity?" Faith wavers, and doubts change but remain the same, for there is always a part of us that would resist his divine work and cling to an easier way.