Explanation of What is Faith - Essay Example

"What is Faith" Faith is a belief in supernatural power of a person or thing which cannot be explained or tested. There are different definitions and interpretations of faith based on different contexts and spheres of influence. Faith can be interpreted from religious point of view and explained through daily life and activities important of people from a particular group. Also, faith can be seen as a part of our life influenced by state of affairs and our beliefs in positive outcomes of certain actions. In many cases, faith becomes the equivalent of what we call a "world view," a context or framework within which life can be lived. The world view need not be optimistic, as it is above. Faith now includes trust and reliance on an authority, even though all the experience of the speaker suggests that the authority is wrong. The extent of the trust has now been enlarged. The evidence that a compass offers has a high degree of assurance behind it; compasses do not lie, cheat, change their minds, or get fooled very often. There is greater risk involved in this kind of faith, for it is trust in a person. Trust (and risk) has now been further enlarged (Cimino, Latin 2001). The same thing happens when a person (a) undergoes anesthesia and surgery, (b) sits in the back seat of a moving vehicle, (c) eats a meal someone else has prepared, (d) marries, (e) shares a secret. These random examples cumulatively begin to tell us something about the meaning of faith as we ordinarily use the word, and what they tell us will be useful when we develop a working definition. Faith clearly has some sort of content, drawn out of our own experience or out of the common experience of the past, and our engagement with it involves us in varying degrees of commitment to that content, involving both trust and risk. Consequently we act on the basis of the degree of trust we possess: we continue the lab experiments, we endure dungeon, fire, and sword, we sail north-northeast, we buy the painting, we stay out of the airplane, we remain confident in the space capsule. There are many number of ways to argue that faith must lead to action, that action is the proving ground of faith, and that what we affirm in our hearts or minds is not truly affirmed until it is translated into deed. Those who say love and who live hate are not only denying their neighbors but negating their affirmations as well. Better still, they are demonstrating what their true affirmations are, when put to the test (Dennett 2006). The incident is instructive in many ways, not least for indicating that it often takes someone else to confront us with the kind of challenge that puts our faith to the test and insists that we act upon it. In religion, faith plays a special role determining the course of actions and moral behavior of followers. In religion, faith is associated with God and his divine power. To believe in God is to believe that he is on the side of the oppressed, which means in turn that the believer must be on the side of the oppressed unless he wishes to deny his belief. The struggle for faith involves him in faith for the struggle. Faith for the struggle, involvement in the concerns of love and justice, vindicates the ongoing struggle for faith. For religious believers, faith and action become virtually indistinguishable from one another; a key word is "praxis" (Dennett 2006) reflection and action to transform the world. In religion, faith symbolizes universal knowledge and truth. Faith can be described as "God's benevolence," his goodwill toward his children (Dennett 2006). This is not merely a psychological insight propounded to protect mortal men from prideful assertions that they can create faith themselves or work their way up into God's presence by dutiful striving. Rather, the recognition that faith is a gift is one of the consequences of the content of this particular kind of faith. The nature of this particular promise is that it comes to us in personal terms, in a life to which we can make response. It comes to us, more importantly, in a person to whom we can relate. From theological point of view, things must not remain as they are. God takes sides against you and denies you his help when you deny to others the full liberation he wills for all (Foxgrover 1980). The social structures that benefit you are destroying others, and must themselves be destroyed. You cannot forge the tools for your ongoing emancipation by denying similar tools to those who are not yet free. Your future is increasingly closed to the degree that you deny these things (Dennett 2006). The main element and determinant of faith is that we do not live in a vacuum. People are not confronted with a choice between faith or no faith, but with a choice between competing faiths, all of which will have a content. We may choose faith in the power of human intelligence to solve all of its problems, faith in a world view that is 'deterministic faith' (Dennett 2006). For instance, in a political system that entails individual responsibility or that leaves it all to 'Big Brother' (Dennett 2006), faith in a future that is either open or closed, faith in the God of Jesus Christ or the God of the Buddha. Today, religious faith is gaining increasing support in many countries, enunciated and practiced by many of those members of the human family who suffer extreme oppression, misery, and want at the hands of oppressors who are comfortable and affluent. The examples and facts mentioned above show that there is a difference between faith-in-general and Christian-faith-in-particular. The difference between competing faiths surely focuses first of all on the obvious fact that they have different contents. The difference between faith-in-general and Christian faith-in-particular is underlined in the following statement: faith is "the creative appropriation of an open past" (Foxgrover 1980). Faiths with different contents derive those contents in part by appealing to different normative events from the past. Christian faith is unique and must finally be seen on its own terms rather than as merely one of a number of interchangeable faith-options. Doctrinal theology explains that faith is "founded on the truth of the freely given promise in Christ" (Foxgrover 1980), but we do not enter into relationship with a "promise"; such a claim would make no sense. Critics therefore inflect the same statement in a different way: faith is "founded on the truth of the freely given promise in Christ" (Cimino, Latin 2001). Religious believers speak of "the faith once delivered to the saints," which is a transmission of teaching about the event" (Foxgrover 1980). Only the general drift and permanent central features of faith can be thus assessed. In so far as that can be checked out, it must contain no falsity and much truth; and it will be further evidence in favor of the genuineness of the revelation if some parts of it which do not seem initially true turn out to seem true on investigation and reflection. Some version of where the boundaries of the revelation lie may have the consequence that there lies within those boundaries an account of the kind of revelation which has occurred and the test of its genuineness. To be acceptable what the version claims to lie within its boundaries must be self-consistent. But doctrines formally revealed are already doctrines requiring assent, before the Church declares them to be such. Such unease is a step toward rethinking the faith by which we presently live, and challenging the adequacy and even the legitimacy of many of the commitments we have previously taken for granted. And as long as the voices issuing that challenge remain insistent enough we may be forced to the point of some crucial decisions about the future direction of our lives. Since so much of the human problem today is posed by the irresponsible use of power, and since so much of that power is located within the United States, and since the abuse of that same power works both against oppressed minorities at home and against oppressed majorities abroad, the message to oppressors begins to be pretty clear: work where we are for basic changes in the way we use and abuse our political and economic power, and seek ways in which those who have been denied power can be given a share of it. Many secular and scientific studies underline communal nature of faith (Cimino, Latin 2001). A community of faith is a source in which people can sometimes be empowered to do together the things they would scarcely be willing to undertake alone, and they must now look briefly at ways in which community can nurture and strengthen the life o faith. First, the community is the place where the faith of the individual can be tested against the faith of the community. The community has a long history; better still, it has a memory, which means that it can put its history to use. The individual has a short history that needs frequent checking against the community's longer history (Dennett 2006). Such a view of community (and religious community) by itself can lead to timidity and rigidity, the community finally being cast in the role of the 'preserver of orthodoxy' (Dennett 2006). It must play a second and opposite role as the place where the faith of the community can be tested against the faith of the individual. Any community that is truly a community must be able to suffer fools gladly and even embrace the heretics that threaten its peace. Since communities are almost always careful and conservative, they need the leaven of fresh ideas, along with new interpretations of old ideas, and these are contributions that only the most venturesome within their midst are likely to propound. This is how communities stay alive and grow (Yazawa 2001). A crucial question for faith today is whether or not it can reflect innovations to the challenge of individual choice, and adapt its life to the demands for change that they place upon it. "The very choice of such individuals symbolizes the intricacy of the interrelationship between individual and communal faith" (Dennett 2006, 45). It is important to note that faith is associated with the burden of doubt. Religion is a place where the burden of doubt can be shared. Following Cimino and Latin (2001) faith is connected with risk. "Some risks, shouldered only by the individual, are too overwhelming and can only be destructive" (56). In sum, faith based on beliefs and fears of people help them successfully overcome that hurdle by going on immediately to point out the necessarily intimate connection between content and commitment, between our view of "the way things are" and the resultant demands that acceptance of such a view places upon us. And the minute we get to this point there is another side of us that would prefer to retreat from such a conclusion, because it is the nature of faith so understood to make demands upon its adherents. For instance, if we have as the content of our faith a belief in the God who acts in "divine benevolence toward us," i.e., if God is the nature of ultimate reality, then such a content demands from those who accept it lives that demonstrate a similar benevolence toward others--an uncomfortable and exacting life-style that most believers assiduously avoid. Works Cited 1. Cimino, R., Latin, D. Shopping for Faith: American Religion and the new Millennium. Jossey-Bass, 2001. 2. Dennett, D.C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking Adult, 2006. 3. Foxgrover, David. Temporary Faith and the Certainty of Salvation. Calvin Theological Journal 15, 1980, pp. 220-32 4. Yazawa, M. Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America. Journal of Southern History, 67, 2001, p. 835. Read More