Having up to this point been focused primarily on how I used to see the nature of faith (i.e. as emphasizing “believing the right things”), as well as on some of the things I learned about that way of seeing (i.e. it’s fairly recent origins in Christian thought, resulting primarily from the impact of the Reformation and the Enlightenment), what I’d like to now turn my focus towards is some of the other ways of seeing faith, all of which (in many respects) are much older, all of which were instrumental in helping me through my own crisis of faith, and all of which have radically impacted how I have come to see things since. 

One helpful way I found to see the difference in question was by looking, not so much at how faith itself began to be understood, but at how its opposite began to be understood. In short, instead of being understood in terms of a lack of trust, commitment, loyalty, or allegiance towards God (i.e. ways of living), the opposite of faith began to be understood primarily in terms of doubt about the nature/existence of God (i.e. ways of thinking). That is, to have doubts was, ultimately, to have little faith – and since faith is what God most wants from us, to doubt was, in a very real sense, to sin against God. Indeed, there was a time in my own life where I began to feel guilty for doubting or questioning many of my beliefs, as if in doing so I was in some way sinning or engaging in an act of rebellion against God. An experience that I imagine many others have once had themselves (or perhaps continue to have today), and an experience born out of a way of thinking about faith that was so deeply embedded for me that it was almost impossible to think that faith could have meant anything else. 

To unpack some of these alternative (yet by no means new) approaches to faith I came to discover, I begin with a way of seeing faith that perhaps had the greatest impact of all – a way of seeing faith, not as “believing the right things,” but rather as “trusting God.” Although it is true that I had always seen trusting God as a key element of what it meant to have faith, the weight to which I gave to “believing the right things” largely overshadowed, and in many ways infiltrated, this particular element – often making it less about “trusting God” and more about “trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God”. In short, trusting God essentially became no different than trusting my beliefs about God. But that’s not what I mean by “trusting God” in this post. Rather, this way of seeing faith as “trusting God” that I discovered, and which has had an enormous impact on me ever since, is much different in nature than that. This way of seeing faith as trust sees faith in more of an existential manner than a cognitive manner.

One way of understanding this way of seeing faith is envisioned by the idea of floating along the surface of a deep body water – as soon as you begin to tense up or panic, you begin to sink; but as soon as you just lay back and relax, you begin to float. Seeing the vastness of the water as a metaphor for the vastness of God, faith (on such a view) is akin to trusting in the buoyancy of God – that vast sea of being in which we all “live and move and have our being,” as the apostle Paul once put it. Or, to switch metaphors, this way of seeing faith is about trusting in God as our rock and fortress, the one upon whom we rely, our safe place, and our foundation. But again, by “trusting in God” as being all of those things I don’t mean trusting in our beliefs about God being all of those things (although that could also be true), but rather trusting in God as being all of those things (whether one believes those things about God or not). I realize this distinction can be hard to understand for some (especially if it’s not something one has thought about before), so allow me to give a thought experiment that might (hopefully) help flesh it out a bit more clearly. 

Imagine that you have just woken up inside of an emergency room with a doctor quickly approaching you, syringe ready in hand and preparing to administer an injection, with no idea why you’re there or how you got there. Imagine further that you have a fear of doctors, let alone unknown doctors in unknown hospitals preparing to inject you with unknown chemicals. Given your circumstances, you come to realize that you are in a bit of a predicament and likely in need of serious medical attention, yet you are nevertheless becoming increasingly anxious as the doctor continues to approach. You are anxious, not only because you have a fear of doctors, but also because you haven’t the slightest clue who this doctor is (if they’re even really a doctor) or what it is they are about to inject you with (i.e. you lack a belief about the nature and trustworthiness of both), yet you realize that if you don’t receive the injection you might be in serious trouble. At this point you basically have one of two options. On the one hand, you can choose to resist the doctor’s advance and protest against the injection they are about to administer (in which case, at least in our example, they will comply with your wishes – although much to your demise). Or, on the other hand, you can choose to trust the doctor by relaxing and allowing them to administer the injection that will ultimately save your life.

Imagine now that you decide to go with the second option. As such, you decide to relax and trust the doctor (i.e. you, in an important sense, decide to basically do nothing). Yet, in doing so you aren’t trusting the doctor in the sense that you’re trusting your belief that the doctor is, for example, your healer (remember you lack a belief on the matter, although you no doubt hope that is the case). Rather, in doing so you’re trusting in the doctor in the sense that you’re trusting in the doctor as your healer (regardless of whether you actually believe that the doctor is, in fact, your healer). In other words, and to bring things full circle, in doing so you’re exercising faith in the doctor – but faith, not understood in terms of belief, but rather trust. And that is the type of faith that I have in mind here – a type of faith in which believing that the doctor is your healer (or that there is a God who loves you) is compatible with, but not necessary for, you to have faith in the doctor (or in God). This is not a perfect analogy of course (those are very hard to come by philosophically), but I hope it at least gives somewhat of a glimmer into what I’m getting at. That is, just as trusting the doctor on the basis of certain beliefs you might have about them may be common and even ideal (though not necessary), so too having faith in God on the basis of certain beliefs you might have about God may likewise be common and even ideal (but not necessary). In short, there is room for trust, and therefore faith, even without belief.

Perhaps one last way of illuminating this way of seeing faith (and like I did with my earlier view of faith) is to look, not only at the meaning of faith itself, but also at the meaning of its opposite. In doing so, the opposite of this way of seeing faith isn’t “doubt” (as was the case when faith was equated with belief), but rather “anxiety.” Like the patient in the previous example, to behave anxiously by resisting the doctor is, ultimately, to lack faith in the doctor (regardless of what one believes). Or, to use a more biblical example, just as Jesus would exhort the crowds to not “worry” while chiding them for having “little faith” whenever they did, this view too sees a life full of anxiety as, in many ways, a life of little faith. Indeed, it was this particular element of seeing faith as trust that really rocked me during my crisis of faith. For if one can measure their degree of faith by the degree of anxiety in their lives, then I had about zero faith – absolutely ridden with doubts and plagued with worries of what would happen if I couldn’t resolve them, I had been trying to climb my way back to faith by striving to shore up as many of my beliefs as I could (i.e. acting out of anxiety), when it finally dawned on me that all I needed to do was relax.

All I needed to do was just let the doubts and worries go, to stop trying to hold onto them and fix them, and to just give them over to God. This was monumental for me in that, unlike trying to regain my faith by constantly striving to convince myself of things I no longer believed to be true (which, if even possible, takes an enormous amount of effort), this way of regaining my faith was essentially effortless. Instead of continuing to fight, all I had to do was put my sword down; all I had to do was lay back and let the buoyancy of God carry me; all I had to do was let go – and oh how easy and freeing it was to finally let go! I can still remember the moment I laid it all down, just like it was yesterday, the overwhelming weight lifted off my shoulders, the overwhelming feeling of no longer having to gasp for air as I began to float calmly back atop the surface of the water, and the overwhelming sense of freedom and relief that poured into my heart as a result – the sense that I no longer needed to struggle, that God was with me, and that everything was going to be okay.

This way of seeing faith then, far from being a mere theoretical observation, was a monumental discovery that truly changed my life in ways unlike I have ever experienced before. Yet, as monumental as it was, it wasn’t the only way of seeing faith that had an impact on me. In my next post I will attempt to give an overview of yet another way of seeing faith that influenced me greatly along my journey.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.

Cheers,