Religious Belief versus Intellectual Acceptance - Essay Example

Celebration of Discipline Paper For true believers, the system of religious beliefs represents a unique mixture of dogmas and principles they follow in order to reach the truth of life and the God’s kingdom. Belief can first of all be set apart from mere opinion because belief carries with it the element of personal conviction by which one is willing to act. One entertains opinions, but he guides his life by his beliefs. Actually, the verb believe has two meanings that should be distinguished. On the one hand, it may refer to an intellectual acceptance of the truth of certain propositions, without any emotional coloring being involved. One's beliefs, then, are really the undergirding of life. As such, they may remain only implicit. Many religious people would be hard put to give precise expression in language of their beliefs. When they are formulated in language in order to be communicated to other people, they become doctrines-especially if they are not purely personal, but represent convictions held by whole groups. Doctrine can be formulated and recorded in writing to be handed from one generation to another. It will remain alive so long as its particular modes of expression are understood and so long as it is grounded on a living faith or belief. Belief itself, however, cannot be given from one person to another or from one generation to another. We believe only that which has a believable quality about it that commends itself to us. We do not believe what we regard as inherently unbelievable. The believers suppose that they may believe something that on the surface seems impossible but which, on further consideration, we have discovered to be sound. We do not believe what finally remains impossible to us unless we are dishonest with ourselves (Foster, 2000). Theology is the organizing and systematizing of the doctrines of a religion to make them consistent with each other and relevant to the rest of life. It means evaluation and correction of doctrine. One doctrine is not just as good as another unless it gives equal expression to the same belief, equal in the sense of being as true to experience and as easy to understand in the terms of its expression. A detached study of doctrines in relation to knowledge as a whole is undertaken in philosophy of religion (Foster, 2000). Some doctrines do not change with changing life but remain constant because the aspect of experience to which they refer remains constant. An example, to be discussed more fully later, is the doctrine of the two natures of Christ. Working with the facts of Jesus' humanity and the conviction of his Deity as well, the Church after rejecting doctrinal formulations expressed in terms of dual personalities, or dual wills, or Divine spirit inhabiting a human body, settled on the doctrine of the two natures; namely, that Christ was fully man and fully God, yet one person (Willard, 2000). The doctrine is held to this day because a better formulation of the central conviction has not been found. And, of course, insofar as there is similarity of belief and culture, there will be similarity of doctrine--hence, the degree of consistency within a particular religion that sets it apart from other religions. For example, in the doctrine of the Trinity--that God is one in three persons--person means something quite different from our contemporary idea of person. Failure to appreciate this often makes people think that Christianity affirms the existence of three Gods. Or again, Protestants affirm their faith in the "holy Catholic Church," even though for many of them the first association of the word catholic is with the Roman Catholic Church rather than with the universal body of Christian believers, as they really define it (Bonhoeffer, 2003). The main practices followed by believers are being meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance and celebration. This search for life's meaning has a peculiar nature all its own. It is different from that involved in scientific investigation, for its object is not so much how things actually are but how they ought to be. Its nature is normative rather than descriptive. This movement from God to man through which all of a man is involved is called revelation. It is God making Himself known to us, disclosing Himself so that we, in turn, must do something in response. Our problem, therefore, is not to project our thought to Him: it is more simply to recognize and understand His approach to us. Revelation in some form is basic to all religion. It accounts for the experience of complete involvement apparent in the sense of obligation. But the crucial question (Bonhoeffer, 2003). This carries with it the idea that God's revelation is given in actual sentences which an earthly writer merely transcribes. Sometimes the relation between God and the human writer is expressed as that of an official to his secretary. Believers might receive a letter from such a man, but actually his secretly would have written it. Believers had a letter from his secretary, but from him. In an exactly parallel manner, according to this view, the Bible is God's direct word to us. All the human authors contributed were writing materials and mechanical skill. This view of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to maintain in the light of the discovery of the historical process through which it grew. The Bible reflects, for example, the picture of the universe that ancient minds conceived: a fourcornered flat earth surmounted by the dome of heaven on which the stars were fixed and through the windows of which rain poured down on the earth. Underneath was water and the abode of the dead. The world of the Bible is inhabited by spirits and demons. To make it the revelation of God is to absolutize these ancient concepts. In sum, our world view of atoms and electrons and microbes and viruses may need to be corrected in time--that is, none of these can be regarded as final and ultimate truth--the search for truth surely is not aided by accepting first-century views as final, merely because the men who wrote the Bible happened to hold them. The Bible is thought of as claiming to be eternal truth; but whereas in the first view it is regarded in the whole as ultimate truth, in the second, much of it is rejected because it is so characteristic of the period in which it was written. Bibliography Bonhoeffer, D. 2003, The Cost of Discipleship. Touchstone; 1 edition. Foster, R. J. 2000, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. HarperSanFrancisco; 3rd edition. Willard, D. 2000, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. HarperOne. Read More