Testing
of Faith
The Testing of Your Faith
Periodically I get a note or email from a student going through a “Trying of their Faith.” Not because of some difficult experience s much as because of reading and learning that challenges what they thought they believed. Here’s a recent example note (and my response). How would you respond differently? (After all, one of these times it may be your son or daughter.)
Recent letter from a student
“Coach D”,
I dropped by your office last week and talked about how I felt like dropping out of school. Most of that came out of the faith trial that I have been having… I never thought college would be so difficult in challenging my faith in an intellectual way. For a while I have been almost faithless, not knowing what to believe. But, I realize that it was a kind of "trial that has come to test my faith and refine it." But I still feel like dropping out and giving up so if you have any wisdom for me I need to hear it.
(name
withheld)
To the student:
Sure…I know what you are experiencing... it is the "dying of your faith”—the dying of your inherited and unexamined faith, I hope. It is painful isn’t it? You may come to ask, “Are there no miracles?” “Is the Bible made up?” “Is everything I learned in Sunday school false?” “Maybe there is no a god at all?” You will see some of your cherished boats sink and wonder if your faith will survive.
Finally (I suspect) you will finally come to a line in the sand. You will draw that line—nobody else can draw it for you. It will be a line you choose to draw—a line you will refuse to cross. Here you will make a choice. You will stand at that line and say, "Here I stand." You will admit there are arguments against your position. You may even admit that those arguments are persuasive. You will know there are people smarter than you who can even undermine the resurrection of Christ, and there are books that do it so well that you could never go up against the author and survive. Yet even knowing this, you will choose by an act of your will to believe these important things anyway. For after all faith is sometimes a choice made by the will—a stubborn insistence to believe. Not that our faith is “not logical” but that it is “not provable.” And, when you have done this you will come to personal belief. You may have had "faith" before... but it may have been an inherited faith, or an unexamined faith. Then you will have a tested personal faith that you cam to by a personal willful decision.
I have had this experience too. For me it was mostly during seminary. I felt as if everything I was taught was going up in smoke. If I did not light a backfire the raging fire would engulf my entire faith. So I drew a line—actually a circle—at the Apostle’s Creed. I decided nobody would erode the Apostle’s creed no matter what. I refused to permit anyone to invade that circle. If a notion was contrary to the Apostle’s Creed I chose to disbelieve it. If someone even "proved" Jesus never was raised from the dead, or was never born of a virgin, I simply refused to disbelieve it. What was my choice? How can a person who does not believe the Apostle’s Creed call themselves a Christian? I decided that was a line I would never cross—I have chosen to believe everything inside that circle—not because I inherited it, but because I clung to those essentials and refused to erode that line.
Over time I enlarged that initial circle. It came to include the Nicene creed too, and of course the decisions of the other early church councils. I simply chose to believe the Holy Spirit guided the church to decide these things—even guided men that I discovered were not always very godly men in making these decisions. I continue to choose s to believe that God has guided His church to hammer out right beliefs and I can rely on them. They even chose over several hundred years to select the right books for our Bible—I accept those choices. After all, what was the alternative? Would I make up my own canon of Scriptures? I chose to accept these councils as the work of God’s hand. People might be able to argue against these decisions of the councils effectively... even try to persuade me to reject them, but I will refuse to unbelieve them—I have chosen then as my core beliefs. They are my circle of belief... where I stand.
This is what you are experiencing... And it is a sometimes-painful experience. But you will find that what remains at the end of this process is a firm and solid foundation—your "irreducible minimum." When you have found that, you will have discovered the only faith you ever (really) had. It is this foundation that will last for your lifetime—and it is this foundation you will be willing to give your life for.
So, hang in there... this process will burn away the chaff of your faith and uncover the pure seed... it will purify out the dross and leave the fine gold of a personal core faith... and when you have found this core faith—this “irreducible minimum” you will have found the only faith worth dying for. Or living for.
“Coach D”
So, what do you think? What would you add to my response?
So what do you think?
To contribute to the thinking on this issue
e-mail your response to Tuesday@indwes.edu
Other "Thinking Drafts" and writing by Keith Drury -- http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday