REQUIRED READINGS
Martius Richmond Lechuga, SThL-MA
FAITH
What it isn’t
By Terrence Tilley
Misunderstanding Faith
Faith is one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. To display what faith is, we
begin by understanding these misunderstandings. Beginning with these confusions paves the way to
showing a more adequate understanding of faith.
Four kinds of misunderstanding of faith are common. The first reduces faith to believing things. The
second equates having faith with behaving morally. The third reduces faith to something that we feel
“deep in our souls.” The fourth misunderstanding equates having faith with being religious.
Each misunderstanding contains an important, but partial, insight about faith. If you now accept only
a “partial truth” about the concept of faith, this exercise should lead you to a better understanding of
what faith is.
FAITH AND BELIEF
The rationalist misunderstanding of faith is very common. This view mistakenly equates faith with
believing a proposition or claim, for example, “God created and sustains the universe.” This
misunderstanding can be found among both skeptics and believers.
Skeptical Rationalism
Mark Twain once put the skeptical position most aptly: “Faith is believing what you know ain't so.”
The skeptical rationalist sees faith as the enemy of reason and reasonableness. People of faith are
unreasonable—at least with regard to what they believe on faith. Or so the hard core skeptics like
Twain think. Skeptics find that persons of faith believe a proposition that makes a factual claim on
the basis of little or no evidence or argument. “They take it ‘on faith’ (and are fools to do so)”
expresses this skeptical viewpoint.
Of course, skeptics like Twain are right about something: “Blind faith” is indeed an enemy of reason.
But faith is never entirely blind. Typically, people accept claims “on faith” from people they have
reason to trust.
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The root of this misunderstanding is equating faith with having a belief or a particular set of
beliefs. The insight of this view is that belief is a component of faith. The confusion of this
view is thinking that faith is identical to belief.
To believe people in authority can be perfectly reasonable. We take things “on faith” from our
teachers, our parents, and even our political leaders. When my physicist colleague tells me that she
can prove “E=mc2,” I have to take it “on faith” that she can do so and that the claim is true. I would
not know the difference between a valid proof of that equation and a pile of mathematical gibberish.
I am not a physicist. But that doesn't mean I have blind faith in my colleague in physics. Rather, I
know that those who are “in the know”—the community of physicists—can tell the difference. And
unless she was lying or fooling around, my “faith” in what she says is really based in my trust in her
both as my colleague and as a competent physicist. My trust in her is not blind, but informed, at least
minimally.
Some people indeed do seem to have blind faith, at least sometimes. In 2003, President George W.
Bush insisted that the people of the United States should support his policy of invading Iraq. He
claimed that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, had hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Although little or no evidence was given for this claim—and it was later shown to be dubious, at
best—President Bush more or less asked the Congress and the American people to take it “on faith”
that such weapons existed. When no weapons were found, the Congress and the people had their
trust in him undermined. When we discover our trust has been misplaced, we lose our trust in the
person we trusted because we realize that we were betrayed by someone who abused our faith.
The difference between my trust in my colleague and my trust in the president is crucial. The
difference is not that I agreed with one and disagreed with the other—I didn't know enough really to
agree or disagree with them. The issue is this: her claim had independent support. The president's
did not.
In fact, one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is that scientific claims are accepted if and only
if another scientist can independently reproduce the experiment or analysis that warrants the claim.
For example, the 1989 proposal of “cold fusion”—that nuclear fusion could take place at
temperatures far lower than the temperature at which nuclear fusion “ordinarily” occurs—created a
great stir. But when other scientists could not replicate the results and found errors in the experiment
that led to claims about the possibility of cold fusion, the claim was discredited.
The conditions of secrecy that President Bush imposed made any independent checking of his
administration's claim by competent and independent investigators impossible. Weapons inspectors
from the United Nations had searched for years without finding any evidence for Iraq's having
weapons of mass destruction. Admittedly, Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, had stonewalled the search
frequently, but he never brought it to a halt. Rather than allowing the inspectors to continue to search,
beginning the war made independent verification not merely difficult, but impossible. In effect,
President Bush not only demanded that the Congress and the nation trust him blindly but also
seemed to ensure that the trust would remain “blind.”
Of course, one may accept a particular claim “on faith,” and that claim may well be true. Those who
get us to accept that claim may indeed be telling us what is true. Even blind faith is not necessarily
deceptive. Nor does blind faith necessarily lead one to error. But blind faith or blind trust is a con
artist's stock in trade. Blind trust makes one vulnerable to being deceived by those who claim they know
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something but offer no evidence. Blind faith accepts claims— whether true or false—without recourse
to reason. The skeptic's insight is correct: blind faith is finally irrational.
But not all trust or faith is blind. Another insight we can draw from the skeptic's criticism is that one's
faith can never be conclusively verified or falsified in the ways scientific claims can. We cannot have
absolute certainty in faith. The beliefs a person holds on faith only rarely can be conclusively shown
true or false. This does not make all faith irrational. Rather, it shows that real faith is a risk—one
that one should take with one's eyes wide open, not blindly.
The Risk of Faith
The classic expression of the risk of faith is Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a committed
Roman Catholic. He argued roughly as follows: Either God exists or God does not exist. If God exists
and one lives a life faithful to God, one's gain is infinite: eternal life in heaven. If God does not exist,
and one lives a life faithful to God, one's loss is finite: some temporary joys and pleasures on this
earth. If God does not exist, and one lives a life free from religious strictures, one's gain is finite: some
temporary joys and pleasures on this earth. If God exists, and one does not live a faithful life, one
incurs an infinite loss: the loss of the eternal love of God. Given finite loss or gain versus infinite loss
or gain, one ought to wager on God's existence because that is the only wager that has the possibility
of gaining an infinite benefit at finite cost. The cost of the other wagers is finite, and the benefits of
the other wagers are finite at best, infinitely negative at worst. Therefore, the wise bet—the one with
least to lose and the most to gain—is to wager one's life on God.
Few today think such a wager is either convincing or valid. Pascal evidently assumed that the only
real god is God (that is, “god” with a lower case “g” is a common noun, but “God” with an upper case
“G” designates the god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Chapter 2 will spell out the importance
of recognizing this difference). Assuming God is the only god cannot be taken for granted. There are
many possible gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans had many gods. On which should one wager?
One of theirs? Some other god? Why only gods who might seem infinite? Also, the possibility of
measuring finite versus infinite seems impossible. How can one compare what is “not finite” to what
is “finite”? We know how to compare oranges and apples with regard to their sweetness or color, but
how can we possibly compare something finite (bounded, limited) to something infinite (unbounded,
unlimited)?
Over the centuries, philosophical debate has raged over what the Wager argument was and what it
meant (the interpretation here is merely one of many). Some even find it a prime example of a
misunderstanding of faith, the voluntarist misunderstanding discussed later in this chapter. So what
good is such a disputable and dubious argument?
The Wager argument underlines the fact that faith—whatever faith one has—is a risk. There is no
apodictic certainty in matters of faith. And what each of us risks is our life. In the early days of
network television, the comedian Groucho Marx hosted a quiz show called “You Bet Your Life!”
Exactly. Faith involves a bet or a risk one takes—whatever one's faith, one bets one's life.
Now someone might say that we should avoid having faith, avoid the risk of faith. However, Pascal's
Wager shows that even the person without faith in God or (seemingly) any god has values. One
without religious faith may most highly value money, fame, power, success, one's family, or one's
nation. The Wager shows that whatever finite good one most highly values is uncertain. Our wealth
may crash in a depression, our fame may be fleeting, our power overpowered, or our success
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undermined by bad luck or even our enemies. The Wager reminds us that we live for something.
Hence, no life is without risk because what we do live for may not be worth betting our life on.
We may try to gain certainty in belief by relying on an inspired book. But which book? Why prefer
the Hebrew Bible over the Christian Bible or the Qur'an or the Buddhist Tripitika or other sacred
texts? The answer that some religious people give is, “Because God inspired (or revealed) the book.”
But that misses the point. The point is to acquire certainty about the reality of a god who allegedly
revealed or inspired the text.
However, one cannot gain certainty about which god—if any—exists by assuming that a particular
sacred text was revealed by that god. Such reasoning is so viciously circular that it borders on self-
deception. Such reasoning is like having a card in one's hand that on one side says, “The Bible is true
because God revealed it; for proof, see other side,” and on the other says, “God is real because the
Bible tells me so; for proof, see other side.” The same argument applies to proving the reality of YHWH
from the Hebrew Bible, the Trinity from the Christian Bible, or Allah from the Qur'an. Such
“arguments” are, bluntly, worthless to give certainty to one's faith.
In short, in a world with multiple faith traditions, including traditions like scientific materialism,
secular humanism, and various forms of atheism that seem to reject any and all gods, we cannot avoid
this fact: life is a risk. No matter what we most highly value, we may be wrong. “You Bet Your Life!”
tells a profound truth. No faith I know of is perfectly reasonable and without risk.
FAITH AND MORALITY
Most days as I leave work to catch the bus home, a street preacher bellows across the street from the
bus stop. The substance of his message each day is basically the same: The world's morality is going
to hell in a handbasket (the topics change from day to day—most of the immorality is, of course,
sexual). If you accept the world's morality, you are going to hell. To avoid the eternal punishment
consequent on living an immoral life, “turn away from the world's lure and turn to Jesus by accepting
him as your personal Lord and Savior.”
Although the preacher's approach is simpler, he has inherited a view that was very strong in
nineteenth-century literature. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov, the
character Ivan Karamazov thought that without God everything is lawful. In Matthew Arnold's
Literature and Dogma, religion is defined as “morality touched by emotion.” When the Roman
Catholic (First) Vatican Council named “faith and morals” as the topics on which the pope of the
Roman Catholic Church might exercise infallibility, it assumed the linkage. Clearly, our street
preacher's proclamations have been informed, however distantly, by this nineteenth-century
concept that having faith means living morally. Faith is seen as intrinsically connected with morality,
or as the (only) root of morality.
That there is a connection between one's faith and one's actions seems obvious. If I say I have faith
in Allah, and yet enjoy pork and port, one may wonder what sort of faith I have, whether my saying I
am a Muslim is just a sham. If I am a Roman Catholic, I may differ strongly with one or more of my
fellow Catholics about the fundamental morality of free-market capitalism. Yet we typically see our
shared Catholic faith as normatively shaping our moral views—each just thinks the other is mistaken.
If my actions or practices do not in some way fit my profession of faith, they may show my faith to be
the faith of a hypocrite.
The ordinary connection of forms of religion with moral practices is shown by the oddness of some
phrases that combine faith with practices: “Buddhist butcher,” “Methodist wine expert,” “Baptist
bootlegger.” There may be actual people these phrases describe. Yet these are odd phrases,
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oxymorons. Their oddity is connecting a specific faith tradition with a specific practice that does not
really fit with the behavior ordinarily expected of a member of that faith tradition. These oxymorons
show that some patterns of conduct are not appropriate for members of specific religious faith
traditions. One's faith is or should ordinarily be connected to one's moral choices and practices,
encouraging some choices, discouraging others. There is a connection between faith and morality.
The problem is seeing clearly just what the connection is.
The Moralists’ Error
Equating faith to morality is confused in a very particular way; this is the moralist misunderstanding
of faith. Morality has to do with acts of will, with choices. Faith may shape our choices, but it is not
identical to them. Our faith is not merely morality, even though there are usually links between faith
and morals. That was the insight of the nineteenth-century writers noted above. It is a confusion to
equate the two.
Our moral choices are voluntary—if they are involuntary we are not morally responsible for them.
My choice to have a dry martini is voluntary. It may be an amoral, immoral, or moral choice,
depending on a host of circumstances. If I am an alcoholic, one might think that my choice to drink is
not voluntary. Of course, the disease or vice of alcoholism disposes me to drink. But that vice or
disposition does not force me to walk into a bar and order a martini or into a liquor store to buy a
bottle of gin.
My choice to go to church is voluntary. If I am a person of the Catholic faith, one might think that my
choice to go to a Catholic church on some Sunday is not voluntary. Admittedly, my faith commitment
may dispose me to go to church, but it does not force me to do so. I still have a choice in the matter.
Yet if I never went to church or went out of my way to avoid going to church, such a pattern of
behavior would raise questions about my faith. Am I a hypocrite? Is my alleged Catholicism really a
sham? At least, I would have to be able to explain why my odd behavior is compatible with my faith.
Indeed, people have debated extensively about whether particular actions or attitudes are
compatible with a particular faith. Can I drink alcohol if I am a Methodist? (Some say no, but others
are more lenient.) Can I dance or play cards on the Sabbath if I am a Southern Baptist? (The answer
depends a lot on what kind of Baptist one is.) Can married Roman Catholics use contraceptives to
limit the number of babies they have? (The teaching authority of the Catholic Church says no, but a
vast majority of Roman Catholics say yes.) The understanding of which acts are compatible with a
faith tradition is not simple but complex; it is not static but may change over time; it is not universal
but may shift with race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other factors.
Our dispositions include our tendencies to make certain choices rather than others. We can have
dispositions or tendencies that we rarely, if ever, act on. Our moral dispositions are our tendencies
to make certain choices rather than others. Our faith may dispose us to make certain choices rather
than others, and thus function as one of our moral dispositions. But our faith is identical with neither
our choices nor our dispositions.
Our dispositions lie at the heart of our morality. Yet how our dispositions are linked to our values,
our choices, and our practices is sometimes hard to discern. Twice during my eleven-year career as
a nursing orderly in a hospital, I ran into patients’ rooms where fires had broken out to try to rescue
them. At no other time when I was on duty did a fire break out in our hospital. But when they did
occur, that's how I reacted. I certainly do not make a habit of running into smoke- filled rooms. But
do I have a disposition to rush in to help in emergency situations? Perhaps. But what is the root of
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that disposition? Is it rooted in my faith? My upbringing? Bluntly, I have no idea—and that is, I believe,
because the relationship between a person's disposition and its roots is truly murky. Even if one's
faith seems to dispose one to engage in certain forms of behavior and avoid others, being sure that
faith is a root of a disposition may be impossible. This uncertainty suggests that it is unwarranted to
identify faith as the same thing as a disposition to act in certain ways.
Our virtues and vices are our moral practices, the enduring patterns of action rooted in our moral
dispositions, expressive of our values, and displayed in our choices. Philosophers have discussed the
range of virtues and vices since antiquity. The cardinal virtues—prudence, fortitude, temperance,
and justice—are found on almost every list. The list of vices seems more varied; one list names the
“seven deadly sins” of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Many of us are well
acquainted with at least some of them.
One of my vices is impatience—I have a tendency to be irritable and frustrated in certain
circumstances. I snap at machines that fail to function and people who fail to do tasks that need to
get done in a timely manner so I can do my own work on time. Like most people aware that they have
a vice, I work on ways to overcome that vice—in my case, striving to be more patient.
The point is that there is not a one-to-one relationship between faith and morality. Nor is my faith a
result of my moral choices touched with emotion. It is an error to equate faith with morality—
whether we understand morality as fundamentally disposition or choice or act of will or habit—or
even morality tinged with emotion. The insight at the root of this misunderstanding, of course, is that
one's faith affects one's moral dispositions, choices, and habits, even though faith is not the only factor
that affects one's morality and in some instances may have little effect on one's morality. Reducing
faith to morality or morality to faith is a confusion.
FAITH AND FEELING
If you have ever participated in a powerful revival service, or been swept up in the frenzy generated
by a gifted Pentecostal preacher, or participated in the ecstasy generated by whirling dervishes, you
may well understand why people identify faith with religious emotion. Nineteenth-century German
Protestant theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher defined the piety that underlies life in a religious faith
tradition as “the feeling of absolute dependence.” Many theologians have assumed—not without
good reason—that Schleiermacher's “piety” is simply another word for faith. Even if they are correct
in their analysis, equating faith with feeling is the emotionalist misunderstanding of faith.
Feeling or emotion is certainly a component of faith. Faith without feeling is described as “dry” or
“flat” or “dead.” But emotion cannot be the whole of faith. Even the most emotional participants in
religious traditions recognize that emotions are not sufficient. Emotions may be fleeting; faith is
enduring. In the absence of emotion, religious people have spoken of a “dry period” in their faith
lives. In the sixteenth century, Saint John of the Cross wrote of a “dark night of the soul” when he had
great trouble praying—and when he did, it was profoundly unfulfilling. Moreover, as we discuss the
expressions of faith in Chapters 3 and 4, we will see that some expressions of faith have little
emotional or affective component—at least on the surface. All these factors indicate that the feeling
or emotion is not the substance of faith, even if feeling is a component of faith. Faith is always “faith
in...”
Emotions and Faith as Relationships
As with the two previous misunderstandings of faith, there are important things to be learned from
the emotionalist misunderstanding. First, emotions are relational. We feel about something. And this
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point about faith is crucial. It is a relationship. Second, emotions may not be chosen rationally, though
not all emotional responses are irrational. Whatever the roots of our particular emotions may be,
some emotional responses “make sense” while others are puzzlingly “flat” or embarrassingly
“overboard.”
While we rarely think of emotions as “rational,” we do find them “appropriate.” We appropriately feel
sorrow at the misfortunes of others, joy when our favorite teams win a match or game, grief when a
loved one dies. We also talk of some emotions as irrational or inappropriate. For instance, we might
say someone has an irrational fear of spiders or an irrational fear of intimacy. We speak of anger as
appropriate when it is an emotional response to an intentional injury of a friend, yet we would find
it irrational or inappropriate for an adult to be angry with a small child who cannot keep up with the
adult's walking pace. Pity or mercy may be warranted or unwarranted. We may find some love
irrational or obsessive or silly or beautiful. We respond to emotions—our own or others’—not
necessarily “judgmentally” but evaluatively.
Another factor that previous scholars have tended to underplay in discussing faith is that faith is a
relationship. But just as emotions relate one to something else, so does faith. Note that
Schleiermacher's definition just cited fails to mention on whom or what the pious person depends.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century theologian whose work is central to Roman
Catholic philosophy and theology, argued that faith is a virtue. We ordinarily think of virtues as a
person's good habits, not a relationship. Karl Barth, the influential twentieth-century Swiss
Protestant theologian whose work is paradigmatic for many Protestant theologians, found that faith
is an unearned gift from a gracious God. For Barth, faith is a relationship, but all the work is done by
God, none by the recipient. It is construed as a “oneway” relationship. Paul Tillich, a twentieth-
century liberal Protestant theologian who influenced many Protestant and not a few Catholic
theologians, defined faith as one's “ultimate concern.” Some take Tillich to imply that we have another
“one-way” relationship, as if we choose our ultimate concern (which was not his point).
None of these theologians would deny that faith involves a relationship. For Aquinas, the virtue
of faith is a gift of a gracious God that builds on and completes human abilities and virtues. For Barth,
the gift of faith neither builds on nor completes human abilities or virtues, but transforms a human
person fundamentally. For Tillich, one's ultimate concern relates one to what is ultimately important
for one's life (which may or may not be God). But the fact that one always talks “transitively” about
faith as faith in something—as a relational term—is not prominent in their works or in scholars’
discussions of them.
The emotionalist misunderstanding of faith may be as much a reaction to these theories that seem to
downplay the faith relationship as it is an outgrowth of powerful and profound religious feeling. In
any case, the emotional misunderstanding alerts us to the relational aspect of faith.
Evaluating Emotions
Even though we think emotions are often not within our control, we nonetheless evaluate emotions
rationally by evaluating their appropriateness or inappropriateness in the circumstances. My
inference is this: If the expression of emotions that we often think of as irrational or arational or
beyond our control can often be rationally evaluated, then why would we think that the expression
of faith cannot be rationally evaluated? Obviously, faith can be rationally evaluated just as emotions
can—that is the task for Chapter 5.
Yet real faith cannot be reduced to emotions any more than it can be reduced to propositional beliefs
or acts of will. We might say, “I was angry with him for an hour after he insulted me, but I got over it.”
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Yet, it would be odd to say, “I had faith in her for about an hour yesterday, but I got over it.” Emotions
may be fleeting; faith endures.
In sum, that faith has an “affective” or “feeling” or “emotional” component seems clear. But that faith
is not merely emotion also seems clear. Yet, like the other misunderstandings of faith, the
emotionalist misunderstanding includes insights—feelings are a component of faith and feelings are
always about or toward something.
FAITH AND RELIGION
Faith without Religion
People without religious faith also do have faith. People who do not have faith in personal gods or
God often have faith in abstract ideals or concepts. These ideals function for them as the objects of
their faith. Religious believers typically have faith in personal gods, whereas nonreligious folk have
faith in something impersonal or beyond the personal.
Secular humanism is a form of faith—faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. Scientific
materialism is another humanistic form of faith—faith that science is the source of ultimate truth
because there is nothing beyond what science can analyze. Another form of materialism, classical
Marxism, was a form of faith; it promoted a faith in the progress of humanity toward realizing a
classless society. Adolf Hitler's Nazism was rooted in faith in “blood and soil.” These are not forms of
religious faith, but they are all types of faith. One's faith is not always developed and expressed in the
context of a religious faith tradition.
Committed religious believers sometimes talk as if humanists and other nonreligious people have no
faith. The truth in this is that they do not believe in a god who creates and sustains the world. They
do not believe (usually) in hidden spirits, whether divine or demonic, that act in the world. But what
they do not believe in does not mean they have no faith; rather, the question is, in what do they place
their faith?
Humanists have faith in humanity. They believe in that which is deepest and best in all of us. What
inhibits the best in us from coming out are circumstances that warp or shatter us. Even the most
heinous criminal could have been good, save for the circumstances of having a brain disease or a
disastrous upbringing or an oppressive life situation. At our best we recognize our limits and live in
solidarity with all the others on this earth who are, like us, doomed to live a short while and then die.
