"So Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God..."

[My apologies to my friend if this looks very similar to a letter that I wrote him.]


I've been reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, very slowing mind you. It's a bit difficult to process. Its a discussion of the realities of faith using the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac. I kept thinking about a comment my friend said when his father died about how we say "just have faith" and how useless that phrase is.

Kierkegaard says that we treat faith as if it were something that we start with. In reality, we don't understand faith, just as we don't understand love. I think we say "just have faith" when what we are really saying is "just know the right answers about God and everything will feel right". We make it into a game of memorizing all of the right answers, of constructing a finite image of who God is and what he does, because its safer than the unknown. Anyone who questions our consensus must obviously be lacking in faith. We speak of faith as if it were something we pick up off the ground and put in our pocket, like it was a bus token. We think of it as well defined, finite, either possessed or not.

Yet faith is something to spend a lifetime attaining. Abraham, 'the father of faith', had already left the land of his people and land. He grew old through the years that he believed that God would give him a son. He believed God when he was too old to have children that He would make him a father of a great nation. He had already proven his faith over and again. But he was an old man when God told him to sacrifice his son, the manifestation of the fulfillment of God's promise of a nation. "I believe Lord, but help my unbelief", as the man said to Jesus.

To act upon unexplainable but foreseeable understanding is no real faith. It is when what is demanded of us is so totally outside, or even contrary to, our understanding and experience of who God is that we balk. How could God promise a nation through a son and then take the son back? It's contrary to logic, reason, understanding. It doesn't align with any known characteristic of God. God does not lie, he does not deceive. He is good and just.

So this is what I am coming to. All of my life, I have thought about faith as trusting, based on my understanding of God that I presently have, in God's ability to work all things for the best despite my lack of understanding. But Abraham trusted God based on a level of intimacy that he had yet to attain. Even when it seemed as if that higher level of intimacy might prove his present knowledge of God to be false. Faith is not a test, but a lesson. An instruction that leads us into deeper, fuller, more complete knowledge of God. It takes us beyond mercy and justice, free will and selection, love and wraith, beyond every apparent contradiction to a place where we know in full even as we are fully known.

I am reminded of a discussion on the reason why Jesus waited three days before going to see Lazarus, his dear friend. Was he cold hearted, uncaring for the suffering of his friends? Was he eager to show off his latest magic trick? His friends knew that it was well with in His power to heal Lazarus. They had seen him heal countless times before, and this is why they asked for him in the first place. But had he gone to them and healed Lazarus, the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Healer would have been the extent of their intimacy. Jesus wanted to reveal to them himself as the Conqueror of Death. He wanted to show them who he was. That is why he had to wait through the 3 days of anguish.

So the question is not: Do I believe that God is in control? The question is: Do I really want to find out that God is not who I thought he was? That's a pretty big bubble, and it took a long time and a lot of anguish to arrange it. Do I really want to discover that love & justice, right & wrong, and truth are not really at all what I thought they were? Because if I have faith, then I will discover these things. It will change everything. Everything. My desires, my purposes, what I hold dear. The rosy picture that I have of myself in the light of my present understanding of God. What did the revelation that came because of faith cause the disciples to do? Become martyrs. What did faith cause Abraham to do? Leave his country and to be prepared to give up not just his son and his promise, but his god.

So this is what "having faith" really means, to be prepared to give up what you know as God in order to know the real thing.