One of my church members, Dan, suffered a big health setback lately – and he already had plenty of physical challenges. But when I went to see him in the hospital, he said, with a smile on his face, “Jim, I’m in a medical decathlon. I’m entered in all the events! And I’ve decided to enthusiastically embrace the inevitable.” He’s looking forward to reading good books while on dialysis for hours on end, three times a week. He has been sorely tested, but he still has faith, inspiring all who visit him.
Dan has raw faith. It’s not faith in a set of beliefs so much as it is a faithful approach to living. I think Jesus had raw faith, too. Jesus didn’t base it on some delicate structure of dogma or belief in the historical factuality of certain events. His faith was a trust in his relationship with God, which led him to love and serve courageously.
Christian faith is the emulation of Jesus’ faith. It doesn’t depend on whether or not the resurrection was an historical fact. That’s a matter that can be argued, but faith is beyond all that. I believe that the story of the resurrection of Jesus is a powerful, life-changing myth. The story resonates with my faith, and inspires it, partly because I don’t have to accept it factually.
It’s okay to believe it literally. But the less our faith depends on belief in the unnaturally miraculous, the stronger our faith becomes. When the theory of evolution came along, it was a lot harder to take the Biblical creation story at face value. This frightened Christians who believed their salvation was at risk if they stopped believing that the world was created in six days. But their objection was more a sign of the weakness of their faith than of the godlessness of science.
Faith isn’t about facts. The facts in front of Dan are ones could lead to despair, yet the man still has faith. There are plenty of Christians who don’t think Jesus literally rose from the dead, and for many of them, their faith is even stronger because it has been liberated from dependence on the factuality of a highly implausible event. Raw faith, devoid of evidence for its validity, is the toughest kind of faith. It enabled Jesus to face the otherwise frightful facts before him on the cross.
“For we walk by faith, no by sight,” said St. Paul (2 Cor. 5: 7).
Christian faith is a positive approach to life, a willingness to love and serve, despite or even because of visibly hopeless circumstances. It’s the kind that remains, even if angels don’t swoop down to rescue us physically. It’s the kind that gets us through the emotional, financial, and medical decathlons we enter, whether we like them or not. It’s the faith that keeps us going -- even when we think we’ve lost it.....