From: julian@sfu.ca (Julian Shillcock)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Is Christianity really the only way ?
Date: 17 Dec 92 04:37:49 GMT
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada

thughes@ug.cs.dal.ca (Tracy L. Hughes) writes:


>(* Note this was probably the greatest part of the sin of worshipping false
>idols... Idols, of man's making, could be said to uphold things that
>man liked...and thus people could feel free for faith reasons to continue
>their sinning... so the idols would stand very strongly between a
>person and God.  But this is not true of all other religions today. *)

>....God gave us brains for a purpose.  Your choice to use them or not.  After
>all, even faith is based on logic (ie our brains tell us that this or that
>is logically true so we base our faith on it...:) )

julian replies:

This post has brought some things into my head that I had not considered
before. Thanks. I want to expand the last sentence because I think it is
crucial to living a life "of faith".

The caricature of faith that is sometimes presented is that it means 
believing something you know to be false. So christians are sometimes
presented as clinging to ideas that the rest of humanity has long since
discarded along with flat earth ideas. In response to this I think some
christians try to make faith into a subset of logic. I came across
a lovely phrase on the net some time ago: propositional truth. It has 
a
beautiful ring of pure mathematics about it. I can just see Cantor using
it in his work on infinite sets. (Sorry I did not mean to name drop. I want
to convey the point that these words prop.tr. sound like part of
 a human system of logic). As far as I can tell this phrase means that
it is possible, by reading the Bible, to come to a complete and absolutely
consistent set of IDEAS about God, the world, christians, etc. This view
is also presented by some of my more fundamental friends who say that the
Bible contains the COMPLETE WORDS needed for understanding any issue in
life. The last sentence in the above post about faith being based on
logic sounds like it is also putting faith inside some human scale
of understanding.
In contrast to this I would say that faith is completely distinct from
our knowledge (gained by experience) of the world. BUT I am not saying
it is not possible to have faith and to know you have faith. It is
impossible (in my opinion) to break faith down into smaller parts andf
analyse it using logic. My argument rests on the fact that even a human
being (pick one) cannot be analysed into WORDS or IDEAS ALONE. The only
way to know someone is to get to knowe them, not read about them or think
about them or come up with theories about who they are. Similarly, the only
way to know God is to get to know by living with him. Now the Bible
gives us many records of other people's experiences of God and His own
revelation of some things about Him. BUT knowing GOd is not the smae
as knowing what the Bible tells us about him. The link between the two
(experiential knowledge and intellectual knowledge) come through faith.
I read the bible, it tells me things, I try and put them into practise
in my life. I fail. I go back to the bible, etc, etc it is by faith that
I continue to trust what I read and learn in life. Sometimes my faith
makes me do things that I would never do if I were not a christian. Then I
have to exercide faith. My logic cannot tell me which course of action
I should choose unless I know the conclusion I want to get to. BUT logic
can certainly discriminate between ill-thought out courses and reasonable
courses of action. It can also prevent us from accepting stupid ideas
in place of trying the painful process of learning by living.
Faith is a word that tries to convey what it means to trust God to a human
being. It is as undefinable as consciousness, or what it means to be me
at this moment. If I have it, I will know I have it because it shines
like a light in my life, I will keep coming back to it, again and again,
it both supports my understanding of God and sometimes convinces me 
that my understanding is woefully inadequate and that I need to think 
again about what I believe. I have read passages in the Bible many
times and still do not understand what they are telling me. But one day,
I have an experience and I can see what I never saw before.
Faith as Jesus presents it in his life is what we are to seek after.
Some people will distort faith into legalism or nonsense and say that
one can believe anything without regard to logic or science or even
human compassion (does faith transcend ethics? Or was genocide ok
for the Israelites in the OT?) but then people have always ridiculed
Jesus and his followers (and others). But we cannot escape from the 
essential ambiguity of faith without losing part of our relationship with God.

Sorry it was so long, I could say more but I will go away and think how to 
say it more clearly.

julian