I looked up the word Faith in Hebrew yesterday to see how the word might have been used in the original biblical texts of early Christianity. What exactly, for instance, did St. Paul mean when he wrote “Faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love”?
There seem to be as many meanings for the word faith in Hebrew as in English. The term emuna refers to belief, the meaning that is most often understood when we use the term “Christian faith,” for instance. It is the only definition which until recently I ever applied to religious faith.
But there is another Hebrew word, emun, which means confidence or trust. It is what we mean when we say, for instance, that we have faith that someone will keep their word. We trust them.
The third Hebrew word for faith, mivtakh, is similar to emun and means loyalty or allegiance. It’s the meaning in the phrase “keep the faith.” In other words, stay loyal to your people, maintain your allegiance.
Neither of these last two words require adherence to a set of dogmas. They require rather something closer to what I think is conveyed by the term faithfulness.
From what I have read recently about the history of early Christianity, this is far closer to what Christians meant by faith. Until the 4th century, there was a high tolerance of dogmatic variability. Faith did not require Christians to all believe the same thing. It required that they remain committed to their people. And their people, for Christians, is the whole world. Neither Jew nor Gentile, neither man or woman, neither black nor white are excluded. Christian faithfulness is to the entire human race.
At the moment, though, what I find so liberating about translating the biblical term as faithfulness is that it greatly reduces my sense of alienation from Christians whose beliefs are different from mine.
Like so many others, my own family is riven with deep disagreements about Christian beliefs. And too often we have found it not only impossible to talk to each other about anything important. I have often felt like a hypocrite. I don’t want to disparage or criticize the belief of others, but I don’t want to pretend or even lie either. And so mostly I have felt alienated from those whose beliefs are so important to them and which I do not share.
But this doesn’t seem so terribly important if the essence of Christianity is not faith but faithfulness. Others might think it is, and of course, that remains a source of tension. But their beliefs which I myself cannot share no longer mean to me that I am an outcast from the people with whom I grew up and with whom I still share so much.
The difference between faith as dogma and faith as faithfulness is right now being faced by Maryknoll, the American missionary communities of priests, brothers, sisters, and lay workers of which I was a part. One of the priests of Maryknoll who has worked among the poor for more than 40 years has been excommunicated by Rome for his defense of the ordination of women, and the Maryknoll priests are currently in the process of expelling him from the community.
Many Maryknollers are appalled. For them, faith is faithfulness. Faith is doing what I have seen so many of them doing — welcoming those who may no longer be nuns or active priests , may no longer be believers at all but who care about the human community, who want to help, who are committed to building a fairer, more just and loving world.
I think in some ways these latter Maryknollers are fighting Rome for their faith on exactly the same principles that the early Christians fought against Roman tyranny.
That takes courage.
But they’ve given me a great gift. I won’t say so out loud because I’m sure to be misunderstood. But on their terms, I’m a Christian. And I will strive to be faithful to the people to whom I belong. And who belong to me.
Very interesting post – and I have thought of a few different responses that all might be taken the wrong way!
For me, faith is taking God at his word and – I was going to say trying it out? Practising what I think he says.
And, even though I am a bible believing evangelical – if someone can’t believe “everything” and they “throw the baby out with the bathwater” – sometimes I think that some of the bathwater was worth keeping anyway.
I hope that makes sense.
Sorry if I have misunderstood the post.
Comment by sanstorm — September 9, 2011 @ 10:25 pm |
Thank you for your comment. I do not have the sense at all that you have misunderstood my post. And it is such a pleasure to hear from someone who is not threatened by disagreement on a subject so important as faith.
“Trying it out” strikes me as terrific way to proceed. Not necessarily because God keeps changing his/her mind, but because we grow, we come to understand new things, achieve greater insights.
Given your evangelical and biblical commitment, I would be interested to know if you are comfortable with the possibility that the Bible is an inspired work and that the Hebrew people were God’s chosen people. But that this does not negate the possibility that there are other works that also are the word of God and that there are other peoples — all peoples in fact who are among God’s chosen.
For myself, I find the insistence that we (and there are many “we’s” in this world) are the only people in the world chosen by God and the only ones with the “real truth” reminds me of a spoiled child stamping his foot and shouting to his sibs that he is mom’s favourite. Most good parents, in my experience, have as many favourites as they have children. They love each one uniquely, speak to each one differently, tell them different things, even sometimes make different rules for different children.
I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. In any case, thank you again.
Comment by Terry Sissons — September 10, 2011 @ 1:19 pm |
It’s struck me that the problem with believers is not their faith but their lack of faith. That and a lack of imagination.
They lack faith because they cannot bear the uncertainty of not knowing — not knowing how the universe started, why bad things happen to people, what causes the thunder. If they had faith, they would say,I don’t know the causes for any of these things but, hopefully, someday I or my children will. Instead, they insist on producing a First Cause, Sin or an angry deity in the sky.
They lack imagination because they can’t imagine anything better than any of those solutions on their own. The people who do come up with something better they denounce as godless materialists and burn them at the stake.
Comment by pianomusicman — February 24, 2012 @ 2:48 am |
I have reached a similar conclusion. Years ago I thought that the kind of rigid unyielding belief so often accompanied by an attempt to impose it on others was a function, at least in part, of intelligence. But I have met too many intelligent, educated people who are also rigid and unyielding, and too many seemingly less-intelligent or educated people who are not. Now, like you, it seems to me to be more a fear of uncertainty, and possibly a failure of what you call imagination and I usually call creativity.
I do appreciate that we all need a certain amount of predictability and at least provisional certainty to function at all. I expect things to be where I last left them (most of the time anyway),I expect the car to work the same way on most days. I expect familiar people to be – well, familiar, etc.
I have also begun to wonder not only what determines our individual tolerance for uncertainty, but in particular what my own limits are. Somewhere, I suspect, there is some terrifying unknown, probably somewhere around the edges of death, that could frighten the life out of me. Perhaps. I hope not. I hope by then I will fully have come to accept what I now believe about the great mystery of which we are all a part. But I fully expect that what I think of as “me” will not last the final hurdle. And I am inordinately attached to myself, if absolutely not to the idea of sitting around for eternity in some changeless perfection called “heaven.”
Comment by Terry Sissons — February 24, 2012 @ 2:54 pm |
As I tried to express in “Faith,” we live by that virtue, literally–and I mean literally. Reality is a model in our minds. Our sight is a construct of our brain, produced after calculations that would fry our best computers. And it produces that vision serially, seamlessly, non-stop in such a way that we, like other sighted animals, don’t even feel the effort involved (as opposed to “thought,” which can be downright painful). Yet, we fully subscribe to this model, as we should, because it works so well and, frankly, there ain’t no alternative.
Odd, isn’t it that we should be swimming in a sea of secondhand “reality” so comfortably and yet find it so difficult to live with uncertainty.
Comment by pianomusicman — February 24, 2012 @ 6:03 pm |
Yes, we swim so comfortably in this second-hand reality. And yet it is so hard to recognize our own contribution to what we perceive. It just seems to us most of the time that I see/hear/taste/smell/feel what is out there because that is what it *is*. The failure of imagination, as I think you would call it, is that we can’t imagine how that reality might be experienced differently if we had different senses — as many other living organisms actually do. Just living with a dog that can hear sounds I can’t is challenge enough. Then there are bees that can see colors we can’t, and whales & dolphins that can hear… Etc. I find this realization that it is absolutely impossible for us to separate the Knower from the Known to be totally fascinating. It’s like turning over a diamond that keeps reflecting new light every time I look at it. And occasionally it’s utterly refreshing to talk to someone to whom I don’t have to explain.
Thank you. You’ve turned the diamond a couple of times for me.
Terry
Comment by Terry Sissons — February 24, 2012 @ 8:55 pm |