Lord I believe, Help Me Un-believe!

It means almost nothing to state your beliefs. First, a belief is worthless unless it is put into action, and second claiming to “believe x” is the easiest way to fool those around you, but primarily yourself, as to what is most valuable to you (what you value is often more evident to those around you than you yourself). In the first instance for example, it is very hard to imagine a valuable belief that carries no weight in the way that you live your life, this is fairly obvious. These kinds of beliefs are benign and hardly worth talking about (or are they… death bed conversions?). The second instance of believing, wherein you are unconsciously deluding yourself, is much more dangerous. The danger of placing any kind of emphasis on belief is that we can make ourselves believe belief itself makes a difference. For example we believe that we are pro-environment, green, conservationists, etc. – perhaps because we have just seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and have been incredibly moved – but by telling ourselves this story about ourselves to ourselves, an gap is automatically formed, a separation, between who we actually are and who we think we are.

Christianity is the immanent threat with this kind of dangerous believing, for what is the overarching mantra of Christian orthodoxy? Is it not “believe you are saved in order to be saved?” At the core of orthodox theology (and I use the term “orthodox” tongue-in-cheek) there is the assertion that believing something to be true is the mechanism of your own salvation and happiness. If this is accepted, the Christian story is the ultimate narcissistic relgion in which we get to tell ourselves who we are, no matter what we are doing. Here we may read Roman 7: 15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” as Paul admitting “I know I am an ass, but nonetheless I reject this fact and as long as I reject it, God will as well.” Christianity can thus provide the trump card for any action, it is a lie about who we are.

This line of Christian thinking presumes so much as to tell us that God believes whatever we believe about ourselves. 

Thus orthodoxy is the ultimate non-realism about God: there is no big Other pronouncing judgements on us, we decide whether we can be saved or not, and God listens. God is reduced to superego in the ultimate irony of conservative theology, in which it is asserted vehemently the historical and literal nature of God’s interaction with humanity and objective existence in Heaven. Is this really what Jesus means when he says “believe in me” to be saved? Is this not the attitude of a psychopathic or immature lover who proclaims “I love you with all of my being and desire to be with you forever,” however follows this remark with the stipulation of “but if your spurn my love, I will ensure a life of misery and pain for you…” Aside from the dangers of belief itself being a goal, the very idea of beliefs having the kind of efficacy Christians endow them with turn God into quite the narcissistic lover, not an example of true love which never seeks self recognition before the good of the beloved. But I digress.

Perhaps we have misunderstood the man oft quoted from Mark 9 who implores Jesus “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!” I like to think of this man as the first disillusioned evangelical, who also having misunderstood Jesus’ command to “believe” in order to be saved,  came to the realization that his emphasis on believing the right proposition about Jesus and God were inhibiting him from entering into “eternal life,” or life of the ages, becoming fully human. This man came to realize that his belief in belief was hollow and superficial, that believing that one is saved in order to be saved is a scam that prevents us from creating a new reality in the now by taking responsibility for our own actions and life.

In the case of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, or any such documentary, the point should not be to get us to accept propositional beliefs (global warming is true) so much as convince us that the alternative, green lifestyle is desirable, that to live in a cleaner, less wasteful world is a good thing, whether humans are to blame for climate change or not . Similarly, the community of believers should not be insisting “believe like us” but rather “come and join us in our project of renewing all of creation.” We need faith, not belief, but what is faith?

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see

Hebrews 11:1

Peter Rollins on faith: 

Today faith is most often taken to refer a way of holding propositions. In other words, faith is considered to be a mode of belief. To be precise faith is thought of as a way of firmly believing something that lacks sufficient evidence to know beyond reasonable doubt. Here are examples,

- I have faith that the rain will clear up later today

- I have faith that my partner will come back to me

In each of these examples the individual who asserts them believes that something will happen in the absence of overwhelming evidence (indeed, for some, faith increases in direct proportion to the decrease in evidence). This will become more clear as we contrast the above expressions with statements that we would not likely hear or utter,

- I have faith that 2 plus 2 equals 4

- I have faith that the milk I put in the fridge will be there when I open the fridge door [unless, of course, you live with people who might drink it]

The point here is simply that faith has come to mean a psychological claim to certainty about something that would, from a purely empirical point of view, be uncertain. In terms of religion faith has come to mean the confident assertion of dogmas (historical, biological, cosmological etc.) that evidence alone could not reasonably enable us to affirm…Paul is referring to faith as a way of participating in a different kind of reality, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with beliefs (for their domain is the world of exteriority)… It is an invisible reality that we do not see, but that we fully live within. A reality that enables us to see.

This is what the desperate man desired, to eschew belief (the kind that is all important) in order to gain access to the “hope against hope” of Saint Paul which leads us to desire a new reality amongst us. Instead of acting as a light that allows us to see, our beliefs, the kind we hold as essential for salvation etc. instead blind us to our true nature and reality. I believe that child sweat shops are wrong, but as I write this, I am wearing a shirt purchased from a well known chain of clothing stores that has again and again been accused of utilizing such reprehensible labor. I am certainly against child slavery, but recently I have eaten non-fair-trade chocolate, which possibly contained ingredients picked by slaves. What shields me from the horror of these realizations? My beliefs against such things. In a similar sense, Christian, or any religious belief, has the potential to inhibit us from addressing the worlds greatest problems by shielding us from the harsh reality. The easiest case to point out is the missionary activity of such organizations as Campus Crusade for Christ, who, rather than addressing serious socio-economic problems in third world countries has, in the past, shown Jesus films and taught the four spiritual laws so that the unbelievers will believe and be saved, in spit of their unfortunate earthly disposition (this is also the message of the newly released, critically acclaimed, and hysterical Broadway musical “The Book of Moron” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone).

That’s an easy target. In our own lives, as Christians, when we believe that we are saved, that we are somehow favored, that our sins are blotted out in the eyes of God (and we want to follow God) we also unfortunately blot our sins from our own mind and consciousness as well. In our own self reflections and world analyses, we miss something. As Pete points out, we make faith simply something that we believe in the absence of overwhelming evidence, like that we are part of some ontological category of “the saved,” or that God loves us and not them. From now on, let us speak of faith as hoping against hope for a new kind of world, hoping for a given reality so badly that we will live as if it is true, all the way to the end when we can’y physically do so any longer.

Let us stop saying things like “I believe…” and proclaim “My hope is here…” We need to leave behind the false security and remember that out material reality is the true reflection of our “beliefs,” thus undermining how we use the word “belief” in the first place. When we come to this realization, and focus on the world we want to create, it is my hope that it provides a bridge joining progressive and evangelical Christians, Catholics, Orthodox, et al in a common ethical and spiritual cause – one where our common hopes about the future unite us rather than our beliefs about the current state of things divide us. I have mentioned the potential unity of Christianity within this paradigm, but we shouldn’t stop there. Since we’re moving the emphasis away from metaphysical beliefs about the identity of God, Jesus, etc. as being meaningful in themselves for some kind of deferred/ future salvation, anyone can share this hope. Don’t believe God exists? Or that Jesus rose from the dead? No problem, our hopes for a new kind of world can still unite us. Do I believe everything I have faith in? No, but I am in favor of these things I may not even believe are real. I don’t really believe that the Trinity is an actual description of who God is, yet I affirm the symbolism of that doctrine as expressing something good and unique about the Christian God. In the same way, on the days I don’t believe God is actually out there, I still remind myself that I think that there is no better story than the Christian story and I still seek to affirm the same things Jesus affirmed, and have faith that adhering to that story has the potential to create and enrich, as I have experienced so many times. Faith is a choice about how to view and interpret the world, and of course we all have some capacity to choose our paradigm, and the Christian claim is that Christianity, the way of Jesus, is a beautiful way to be in the world.

It’s like the story of a non-superstitious professor who was seen by his neighbor nailing a lucky horseshoe to his front door one day. Puzzled, the neighbor asked the cynic why in the world would such a learned, suspicious man be embarrassing himself by putting a horseshoe on this front door where everyone would see it? Without hesitation, the old professor turned an said “Well of course I don’t believe in such madness, but I friend told me that even if you don’t believe in the damn thing, it can still work!”

The point here of course is that the man really is superstitious, he just doesn’t know it. It also shoes us how the story we tell about ourselves and the world to ourselves is often deceptive and dangerous. Jesus told us to believe in him, not to simply “believe that I am a real person who is also a metaphysical God!” It means to have faith and value the same things Jesus did, and perhaps, just perhaps, there is hope.