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Gela
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Monday, 4 March 2013

Faith from the Son of God building Chaplaincy Confidence

The Rev. Lindsay Johnstone, Chaplain, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney


With the dynamics of chaplaincy in public institutions we may easily come to feel dependent, vulnerable, and even restricted. This may be more restraining if, despite the undoubted pastoral value of CPE, we allow ourselves to become unhinged from any agenda other than that indicated by the patient, resident, inmate, student or other client.

Hopefully, the chaplaincy context, when viewed Biblically, can highlight the real nature of faith, authority, commission and expectancy that relates to all Christian life and pilgrimage. This paper looks at the nature of faith. This discussion is not intended to indicate how any pastoral conversation would proceed, but rather to look at some underlying theology in the mind of the chaplain.

Our initial exercise of faith is donated to us – our faith is of or from Christ. This is true also of the faith by which we continue to live as believers.
           
There are three types of faith, which we may call existentialist, natural and supernatural.

Existentialist Faith, a “leap of faith” is a personal decision to be committed to something, even though the thing trusted is believed to be meaningless and to have no rational basis. This is a type of stupidity.

Natural  Faith is faith merely to believe what we pick up with the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. This is a valid type of faith for everyday living within the created order.

It is not, however, the faith that saves. “Seeing is believing” is a description of natural faith.

Supernatural Faith is faith by which we are able to believe the promises and instructions of the Scripture. This type of faith is supra - rational, but it is not irrational, as God would not contradict the laws of nature that he has created. It is just that natural faith is not the faith that saves. This type of faith, referred to in Galatians 2: 20 and elsewhere is discussed later in this paper.

The place of the apostle Thomas in the resurrection account in John 20 illustrates the difference between the latter two types of faith. “Because you have seen me you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (verse 29). Verse 30 indicates that faith in Christ is the response of people who have received the testimony of the Gospels, that Christ has risen from the dead.  Jesus taught that people who depended upon a sign to decide whether to believe would not be given one. A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.(Matthew 12: 38f)

Does this mean that God will never use a vision or a dream to evoke a faith response?

We know from Acts 9 that Paul was given a vision of the resurrected and ascended Christ as a prelude to his conversion. Here, again, Paul was not seeking such a sign. In fact, he would have expected that no such thing would be possible, because in his mind (until that time) Jesus was no more than a blasphemer! The visions in the New Testament come as a surprise to people not expecting them, not as a reward to the arrogance of cynical people seeking them!

The many accounts of Muslims being converted to Christ after receiving a vision of our Lord would seem to indicate a sovereign work of Almighty God to break down presuppositions against belief.

Although God will never use signs to pander to “seeing is believing”,  it is also a fact that God sometimes does miracles anywhere, of healing, or provision, or protection, in any religious or non-religious context - and often these will lead people to commit their lives to Christ. Sometimes God has another purpose, but the result will either be to break presuppositions against faith, or else profoundly to encourage folk who are already living “by the faith of the Son of God”! Baroness Caroline Cox (a member of the House of Lords who regularly visits and reports on countries where Christians suffer acute persecution) reported an incident in July 2000 as told to her by an Indonesian pastor regarding an attack on villages by extreme Islamicists.  About 3,000 believers claimed they heard a loud voice proclaiming from a mountain top, “Be not afraid, I am with you always”, and about a dozen claimed that they actually saw the figure of Christ. They escaped danger in half the time their journey would normally have taken.

If a patient claims to have had a vision or a dream impacting their relationship with Christ, they should not be argued with. They may be telling the truth. A pro-active way forward, depending upon their willingness to talk and listen, would seem to be to encourage them in applying the Scriptures to their walk of faith.

The faith by which we repent and receive Christ’s imputed righteousness is itself a gift from God, and it is the Holy Spirit who reveals and enables this life of faith. Galatians 2:20 –“the life I now live I live by the faith of the Son of God”, The frequent translation “the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God” is not supported by the Greek, the transliteration of which would be either “the faith which is of the Son of God”, or else “the faith which comes from the Son of God”. The 1611 KJV (AV) and the Braid Scots Version are faithful to this nuance. We were saved by that faith, and we are supposed to keep living by that faith. Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak… So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.(2 Corinthians 4: 13,18). Of course, the saving faith that comes by “hearing”, results from the Holy Spirit’s joint work of revelation and illumination.

From Ephesians 1: 13-23 we understand that when we became Christians, we were sealed by the Holy Spirit who came to indwell us. That Holy Spirit has infused us with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. That power enables us to understand and live by the Word of God. Ephesians 5: 18-25 exhorts us to keep being filled with the Spirit and parallels Colossians 3: 16 where we are encouraged to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly. When we read Ephesians 5: 18-21 and Colossians 3: 16-17 together, we may conclude that we are encouraged by faith to draw on the already indwelling power of the Holy Spirit to apply the precepts of the Scriptures in our lives. The command to be filled is not an exhortation passively to plead (and wait) to be “(re)zapped” or “rebooted” in a new way from outside by the Holy Spirit. Rather we are urged actively and continually to apply the power of the already indwelling Spirit to enable us to appropriate the Bible in our ingoing Christian life.

True supernatural faith will enable us to apply the promises of Scripture without depending upon purely natural evidence of the results. We walk by faith and not by sight. That means, among other things, that when what we pray for does not immediately manifest in visual results, we shall persevere in believing the promise rather than limiting the meaning to what we have already seen!

In conclusion, we are not limited in our ministries by the agendas of institutional administrators nor by political expediency. We have the powerful resource of the Holy Spirit to enable us by faith and not by sight to apply the Sword of the Spirit in relating and in speaking as opportunity arises

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    1. Hello,
      Thank you for your thoughtful article. I do, however, wish to tease out the notion of existentialism and your definition of existential faith.
      ‘Existentialist Faith, a “leap of faith” is a personal decision to be committed to something, even though the thing trusted is believed to be meaningless and to have no rational basis. This is a type of stupidity.’
      The ‘leap’ of existentialism is a vehicle rather than a destination. Existentialism is a way of believing rather than the belief. Existentialism is concerned with authenticity, absurdity, angst, despair and dread and also with the supernatural in-breaking of God. Existentialism challenges the notion that humans are primarily rational beings who apprehend the world solely through propositional truths. Existentialism is a philosophy over and against positivism and rationalism, not faith.
      Fredrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, and Martin Heidegger are existential thinkers who postulated/perceived that there was no God. There were, however, Christians who operated within the existential thought world included Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Karl Barth. Soren Kierkegaard argued that rational thought was suitable for regular objects but inadequate to comprehend God, Karl Barth argued that humans cannot think their way to God – humans are utterly dependant on God’s supernatural in-breaking and revelation.
      Existentialists, Kierkegaard and Barth are conversational friends, not foes, when it comes to supernatural faith.

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  2. Post Script
    Ecclesiastes is a fairly existential book, but the ultimate absurdity in the history of the world would surely have to be: God submitting himself to the angst, despair, dread, shame and scandal of the cross on behalf of people who did not logically, and were unable morally, to deserve such a sacrifice.

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  3. I found your writing very helpful. The heading may just as soon read 'Faith from the Son of God building confidence in life' because your points are central to every condition we face in life.
    your comment:
    ~'The visions in the New Testament come as a surprise to people not expecting them, not as a reward to the arrogance of cynical people seeking them!'~ ... says to me that, in life we may not know what is best for ourselves, or what to ask for, but that it is in allowing the Faith of Christ to activate and direct us in our actions that we shall see Him move. And again, the experience that Baroness Cox has conveyed of the minority group in Indonesia.

    I think people often associate 'faith' with an outcome, but as you point out here the outcome is not so much for us to plan to achieve, as it is for us to be allowing God to reveal His outcome for us.

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  4. Kate, thank you for your comments.

    As a vehicle, existentialism had no navigation system.
    Ecclesiastes reveals in part the futility of life apart from the Creator.
    Paul referred to people for whom the preaching of the Cross was foolishness, but within absolute reality, it could never be described as stupidity for God the Son thus to save the undeserving. It arises out of the love of God to save the lost and the wisdom of God to fulfil his eternal agenda.
    The content of true faith is authenticated by the meaning of Scriptural texts and is not measured by feelings or temporal results, nor by any subjective motivation.

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  5. Thanks for replying Lindsay,

    I think that you are using existential in the way that Karl Rahner used existential. That system it is tied to mid-20th C Catholic liberalism very focused on the subjective experience of faith.

    My concern is that existentialism has far wider significance for the people for whom we seek to care, and for that reason alone we need to work hard at comprehending this system of thought. Post-modern thought is based on significant threads of existentialism and to that extent it is the air that most people breathe. I think it is helpful to acknowledge that the Bible is no stranger to this way of thinking, and scripture itself employs existential ways of comprehending and forming people; to nudge people to deeper levels in their faith. These more ‘existential’ Biblical books and concepts provide, for us, bridges into peoples’ thought worlds.

    Many who speak of the ‘leap of faith’ use it describe an ultimate action of submission, and they ‘throw’ themselves on the mercy of God as revealed in Scripture, others speak of times of deep darkness and hopelessness they experience the in-braking of the Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. It is true experience alone does not constitute faith, but as God reveals himself through Scripture people do experience God in their lives.

    But we may have to beg to differ on this one!

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  6. To focus more on supernatural faith, I have continued the discussion on existentialism by private email.

    Saving faith is a gift. Some pre-Reformation theology taught that "to do whatever lies within you" (Latin "facere quod in se est") would be accepted by God as merited and then he would condescend to reward the person with grace and the ability to persevere in a path of merit to be saved.

    The Good Shepherd lifts us out of the darkness of our pre-conversion searches and places us on a path that we did not discover. The fruit of this faith is that it leads to "change of mind" (repentance), including of our former belief systems that are inconsistent with his revelation.
    The new path of supernatural faith is actively followed by drawing on the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit along with appropriation of the Word of God.

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