The Flesh of Faith

(Part 2 of 2)

Bend the mind with me for a bit, and let’s pretend Christian theological authority was established beyond reasonable doubt to the entire world. All the philosophical, scientific, and historical debates would have been definitively settled. Leaving aside questions as to whether this is possible or even desirable, would this be enough to convince the world that Jesus lives or to bear witness to the Resurrection?

I don't think so. And here is the problem with study uncomplimented by action, bones without flesh: We risk intellectualizing the faith experience, making the Christian faith to be a type of brain teaser, a matter of curiosity, a skeleton like the ones we see in a chiropractor’s office. There is no college offering a Ph.D. in faith, but we like to pretend that we have it. It’s possible to sit in the pews, acting like some kind of rhetorical taxonomists in a laboratory, counting bones and classifying data. That’s a Scotsman’s argument. God-of-the-gaps. False Dichotomy. False Continuum. Did we know that a mustard seed is not the smallest seed on earth? Did we know that our hymns contained competing eschatology?

We can take refuge in intellectual blither, nullifying any convicting power we might have wrested from a sermon by consistently reducing it to a clinical thought experiment. We can distance ourselves from the grittiness of the Christian faith because we are consumed by technicalities.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship says that while there may be different ways to get Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount right, there is one sure way to get it wrong: To not obey it.

Jesus didn’t say much explicitly about damning or redeeming us by our thoughts, but our lives follow the grooves of our thoughts. In fact, Jesus makes the connection so close as to be inseparable: Lusting (thought) is adultery (action). It is only that thought is upstream from action, and to follow a heretical or sinful action back to its source traces back to a skewed thought. This is true unless someone is acting under the influence of a mind-altering substance, such as alcohol, which only highlights the point.

In a well-respected Anabaptist periodical recently, an article criticized the younger generation’s emphasis on “understanding” at the expense of themes like “obedience” and “faith.” As part of this younger generation, I stood to attention.

There are two things I took from the article: One, that understanding often comes from obedience, and not vice-versa, and to reverse the two is to put the bowl in the pudding. Like the difference between learning the abstract formula of the Pythagorean rule or helping to figure and cut a set of rafters, which actually applies this mathematical principal, our Christianity is made tactile by a hands-on faith, which often results in understanding after we’ve obeyed. It’s a type of kinesthetic theology, if I may coin a term: Theology learned by experiencing it with our five senses.

The author’s second criticism is that “understanding” is not biblical language and therefore waters down the seriousness of theological disagreement to a “misunderstanding” or a “perspective,” while biblical terminology like “faithlessness” and “disobedience” gives us a handle to deal with things biblically. This understanding talk is the beginning of relativism.

There’s a unique perspective. (Wink, wink.)

But I see the point. Corroborating this, C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity points out that to gain virtue one must begin to pretend he has that virtue. When you are tempted to anger once again, you pretend as if you were not angry. This is not hypocritical; this is an act of aligning the will with what we know to be virtuous. This is obedience and therefore faith.

Obedience is a crucial act of humility, showing our desire to follow God by crucifying the flesh or our own agenda. Do you notice how by demanding we “understand” a virtue, mandate, or command before we act upon it, forward motion stagnates, and we are made more vulnerable to competing and potentially heretical thought? Essentially, by obedience we admit our own ignorance, and by putting the unity of the church above our own ideas, we recognize our own limitations. This is faith.

People I’ve met who are in the throes of doubt are studying less from curiosity than desperation. By investigating their faith, they begin to see everything they do not know. Doubt happens. And to tell people who are struggling with doubt to suck in their gut and believe already is not only ruthless but also unfair. How does one suddenly stop doubting, especially at the command of another?

But to obey amid doubt is heroic. It is okay to not know, and to know we don’t know. To not obey? Not as much.

Let me clarify that not all obedience is subservience. Certainly, we would never encourage anybody to submit and obey to a rogue religion such as Jim Jones’s People’s Temple or David Koresh’s Branch Davidians. And working backward from that extreme, there must a tipping point when it is time to allow our beliefs about the Word of God to move us to depart from one group of Christians and join another, or to abandon practices and beliefs we held to before. But leading up to that threshold, it is an act of humility and faith to work within our respective cultures as best we can, as long as we can, and as peacefully as we can. In the end, it is a hallmark of true followers of Jesus to be willing to leave father and mother, houses and lands for the Kingdom, and we had better be willing to do it.

Somedays, in my more clear-headed moments, I can imagine a world where the pursuit of God achieves its purest form, the marriage of a life committed to truth with a life committed to service. I like to imagine woodcutters leaning up their saws to talk about the problem of pain. A world where theology professors volunteer in soup kitchens on Saturdays, and bishops wash the dishes. I can imagine a carpenter pulling a Bible from his lunch box.

I can imagine the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while suffering in prison under the Third Reich, writing the unforgettable line, “When God calls a man, He bids him come and die.” The parallel is close to a a phrase in a song I have helped sing: “Come and dine, the master calleth, come and dine.” I can imagine a cook preparing food for the family and seeing in the meatballs and mashed potatoes a symbol of lived faith. Nobody needs to be commanded to eat, and few arrive at the table to philosophize about the process of eating. We might ask for the recipe after the meal, or even discuss the food as we eat it, but we know that talking or thinking about food does not fill our stomachs. Everyone knows that we must do it.