Father Bob Maguire on death and faith.

Great interview in the the Age today with Father Bob Maguire,

Cutting through Bob's larrikin answers you can see there is of depth and honesty yo his answers::

So what happens when we die? ''I'm buggered if I know,'' he says again. ''You know this is not all there is when you listen to music, you see the sunset or the sunrise. Or you look in the eyes of a baby. We become fascinated with our own image and likeness and we try to preserve that environment so we're safe, like the church is trying to do now.

''But we have an instinct there is something else going on. You can either call it faith, you can call it hope, you can call it imagination, you can call it what you bloody well like. All I know is I am optimistic.''

 

The missing torch bulb....

Image via Wikipedia

A while ago in Church a young teenager wanted to get up and encourage others in the congregation about a miracle which had occurred recently in his life. 
He got up and proceed to tell the congregation how his maglite torch bulb had stopped functioning during the night. The globe had blown. He went to sleep with the torch under his pillow and low and behold when he woke in the morning found another bulb next to his pillow. He immediately replaced the bulb with the blown bulb and the torch was restored. A miracle!
The unfortunate thing about the story is that the maglite he showed everyone has a spare bulb built in. What can you say when everyone is in awe and wonder and definitely encouraged by a young teenager sharing his faith.

I couldn't help thinking how many other stories of 'faith' are out there, which are really about applause and adulation, yet lack credibility and honesty. Maybe miracles should be a private thing and shared only in the most intimate of moments. Then people like myself can't judge.

Marcus Borg, The heart of Christianity: Ch2 Faith the way of the heart

 

The heart of Christianity: Ch2 Faith the way of the heart

This chapter starts by defining how most people inside and outside the Church define 'faith' : 'believing a set of Christian beliefs to be true.' To be a Christian there is a need to affirm the 'right' beliefs to be true. This form of beliefs turns belief into a head matter instead of a heart matter.

Borg goes onto mention four meanings of faith::

Faith as Assensus: faith as belief as just mentioned. A recent phenonemon with the advent of enlightenment and beyond. What happens is questionable things are true. Doubt
I like what he writes latter on in the chapter about Assensus, 'We cannot give our heart to something that our mind rejects'

[Comment, after reading this It gave me great clarity of my own life, I had been looking for the assensus and bypassing my heart, occasionally the heart was touched but not often.]

Faith as Fiducia: Instead of believing in a set of propositions about God, it is just trust in God. Borg an illustration from Kierkegaard 'faith is like floating...If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float.

Faith as Fidelitas: faithfulness or even better fidelity. Not faithful to some sort of doctrine or creed but to God. A faithfulness to God and also what God loves.

Faith as Visio: A way of seeing the whole, seeing it as 'what is', nourishing, bringing us into existence and a giver of our abstinence. Filled with beauty and at times 'terrible' beauty.
The way that I look at it as 'If all things turn out for the best' and a trust in this.

[comment:: This for me Vissio is the most difficult to understand, I'm still not sure I get it.
This part of the chapter was a bit of a revelation for me. One of my constant struggles was with faith as 'assensus'. I think if people had an understanding of these broader definitions of faith then the amount of 'doubt' would be reduced.]

Borg dosn't  write that we need to eliminate altogether the idea of assensus; it is still a very important part of what it means and defines Christianity to be. Borg gives his own broad 'Assensus' of what it is to be a Christian these are::

Being a Christian means affirming the reality of God
Christian faith means affirming the utter centrality of Jesus
Christian faith means affirming the centrality of the Bible

[Comment: I like the broadness of this, it is what I can affirm]

 -Borg goes onto discuss the word 'Credo' the giving of ones 'deeper self' not just intellect.
-premodern understanding of faith is a relational understanding of Christian life.

I like the last paragraph it sums up what it means to be a Christian

...the central meaning of faith. Given the premodern meaning of "believe," to believe in God is to belove God. Faith is about beloving God and all that God beloves....'

Post Function...

Recently I went to function where the majority where evangelical leaders of the extrovert variety, with lots of name dropping. It was on many levels a struggle. Those who know me, know that I am fairly introverted, these sort of events just make me feel I want to curl up even more. The other was the realisation that I've moved on from their understanding of Christian faith.

This event crystallised much in my mind some of the faith differences

It seems that a huge aspect of evangelical faith is the relationship with God and the Great Commission. It seemed the coincidences of life always in conversation pointed to God and a relationship. That there is often a non-deliberate and deliberate invitation for others to follow, to become Christians.

vs

The Kingdom of God is what I work towards, social justice, compassion, ecco-responsibility, simplicity and peace, for me my relationship with God is a buy product of these thing. If God speaks, it is through these things. If people follow and get on board that is a buy product.

Its not as straight forward as a 'personal relationship' but then I think people, myself once included, think that it will be like a human to human relationship, 'personal'. It in reality not the case. Its one of the reasons I've changed my understanding of Christianity.

Faith

One of my favourite theologians at the moment is Marcus Borg. This is an excerpt from a sermon which he gave and is on the Church of Christ gadfly blog::

The Hebrew word for faith in the Old Testament is emoonah. What makes that word interesting is that it’s the sound that a baby donkey makes when it is calling for its mother. To appreciate that, you have to say emoonah so it sounds like that.…I sometimes think to myself, if you say it soft, it’s almost like braying. The point being that faith in the Hebrew Bible is like a baby donkey calling out or crying for its mother. There’s something kind of wonderful about that. There is an element…I don’t know if you want to say of desperation in it or not, but there certainly is an element of confidence also that the cry will be heard.

What I really want to emphasize…are the four meanings that faith has come to have in the Christian tradition. The first of these four is, I am convinced, a modern distortion, even as it is probably the most common meaning on the popular level. The other three are ancient and traditional and wonderfully complementary. You can have them all, but let me begin with the modern distortion.The modern distortion of faith is the one I think I learned growing up around the middle of this century. Faith as believing. Faith as believing the doctrines of the Christian tradition, faith as believing that there is a God, faith as believing that Jesus is divine, faith as believing that Jesus died for your sins, faith as believing that…and then fill it with almost anything. Faith as believing certain statements to be true.

There are a number of reasons why I say that’s a modern distortion. First of all, try to imagine what faith was like before the Enlightenment, that great period of Western history that began in the 17th or 18th centuries. Prior to the Enlightenment, in Christian culture of the Reformation or the Middle Ages and so forth, nobody had any trouble believing that the Bible came from God, that the Genesis stories of creation were true, that Jesus walked on the water and so forth. It didn’t take faith to believe any of that, that was simply part of the taken-for-granted understandings of people living in western Christendom. It’s only when those things started to be questioned that suddenly faith came to mean believing what otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. And faith came to mean what Bishop Robinson called some 35 years ago, believing 49 impossible things before breakfast.

It makes a lot of sense Borgs understanding of 'Faith'. The 'modern day' understanding of faith is something which I always struggled with and is easily equated to doubt.  I think Borg is pushing on something which is a lot more freeing than doubt. Doubt as I've come to understand it is seasonal, but this 'Faith' is forever.

Faith, hope and doubt

One late, late night shift, I was having a conversation about Christianity and its claims of 'no other way than Jesus'. I find it easy to talk about the existence of God, but the argument of an exclusiveness of Christianity is flawed. It is a loosing battle.

The issues is one of history, archeology and culture. All three reveal religions that are much older than Christianity, with just as much validity in the eyes of the secular.

Christianity also relies on history, archeology and culture, but its main foundation is the 'Bible'. The Bible has an amazing story, of how it came to be collated and surprisingly its final composition is relatively recent. 

It is interesting the Wikipedia's definition of fundamentalism::

Fundamentalism refers to a belief in a strict adherence to a set of basic principles (often religious in nature), sometimes as a reaction to perceived doctrinal compromises with modern social and political life.

^{Richard Dawkins from the same article goes on to include::}

...clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence.

^{One argument which I see as disturbing is the correlation between violence and fundamentalism. Supermarket Monkey quotes a 'Dr Becks'}

If statistics are to be believed, a great deal of the violence in the world is due to ideology. True believers are dangerous. Doubters, by contrast, tend to be pretty peaceable. Their self-suspicions tend to throw cold water on the violent impulses inherent in ideology and belief. Doubters will have softer more empathic hearts because the answers they seek are not yet within their possession. The answers are still "out there" to some extent. Thus, the doubter leans into the world with a hopeful expectation.

For me doubt comes easily. But then again so does hope. It is hope the engine room for my faith. It is hope which drives my belief of the narrative of the Christian story. It is hope which pushes aside the hard questions of belief and the ugly side of doctrine. Yet tempered with doubt....

Faith of little children

One of the things about becoming a parent is that you often learn more about yourself. At times I can be incredibly selfish, impatient etc etc.

Jemima been the older sister can be a bit rough at times. One time she was a little bit to rough and Jo was left pushed over and crying. Jemima was sent to her room to think things over.
Almost immediately Jo stopped crying and bolted to Jemima's room yelling "Mima, Mima"
It amazed me how quickly she forgot and forgave.

Matthew 11:25
 
²⁵At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. ²⁶Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.