Faith’s End
The Bible is littered with examples of faith. The Bible also includes contrasting examples of faith, some greater than others. The most famous lesser example is likely represented by Thomas who had to see in order to believe.
Jesus has to literally direct Thomas: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.” (John 20:27). Thomas’ type of faith is often characterized as what I’ve described above as lesser faith given only “because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29).
So then, what is at the core of every type of deep faith, whether it’s prior to seeing or after seeing as in Thomas’ example. Every Sunday each of us recite the first two words of the Nicene Creed, “I believe...” But, what does it mean to believe? The Nicene Creed, our testament of faith, essentially contains a chronological list of the
things we assert believing. But, what is the nature of that belief in the enumerated specifics? Every great theologian exhorts us to “deepen our faith”. To what end?
First, it’s likely a good idea to dispense with the routinely evident examples one might cite as faith. For example, “I have faith that the sun will rise” is devoid of the type of risk or reward which would lend depth to the concept of faith we’re exploring. So, it seems rather uncontroversial to assert that a predicate of (the our type of) faith is that there is some end or destination in mind which is either challenging to arrive at or even hardly understood.
To quote from Fr. Alexander in Great Lent, “When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going. Thus with Lent. Above all, Lent is a spiritual journey and its destination is Easter” (11). As with our example of the rising sun, Fr. Alexander is obviously not simply describing a date on the calendar marked “Easter”. He is describing a journey into something we might glimpse at from time to time if we are lucky, or a notional reality which could rise up in us in rare instances. But, fundamentally, the destination is not wholly known and not wholly us. There is an otherness to which and with which we must find communion through faith (to loosely quote from John D. Zizioulas’ work of a similar title).
More than one Orthodox Christian scholar has suggested that the best summary of all four books of the Bible is most succinctly encapsulated by St. Athanasius of Alexandria’s quote in De Incarnatione, that
“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (54:3).
This is, of course, perhaps the greatest chiastic convergence reality in our formed world converging with the reality of an infinite God and then back again, infinitely (to my lecturer, the inimitable Brian Greene, I would all add - across all time and space).
Returning then to the question of what the end or telos of our faith might be we find potential clarity and direction in the following ladder of a definition. Namely, that (deep) faith is:
● a revelatory process or journey
● initiated by a Zacchaean deep desire which when
● undertaken with deep humility like that evidenced in the story of the Publican and the Pharisee
● effects in us or brings us to a place (or, returns us as in the story of the Prodigal Son)
● which we could not have envisioned or achieved on our own.
As St. Athanasius makes so clear to us, faith transforms what was only potential into something actual by virtue of an intercessory power we name and recognize as Jesus Christ (another chiastic convergence, simply in his fullest name - man and Messiah in one name).
Faith smashes the idolatry and limitations of self. Faith is liberation. To me, faith sounds a lot like Christ.
To the sceptic or atheist who wishes to cling to only perhaps those easily demonstrable realities like the sun rising I would ask, even if you do not have faith in being yourself transformed, transmuted and transplanted, what would you say to Fr. Alexander’s loving scolding to all of us:
“...the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness” is to live as if Christ never came.
God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. ...this I believe. That is the journey and destination of my faith - an unknown outside myself which I could never achieve by my self.