Formation Friday: Faith and Belief

Formation Friday is a weekly blog from our Minister of Formation Scott Coulter, exploring what it means to be an Episcopalian. From the theological to the practical, this is all about understanding the Episcopal Church, walking with Christ, understanding the Word, and living out our Baptismal Covenant to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves”.

I recently led a Bible Study on the Gospel According to Matthew. It was a wonderful group, with some amazing conversations. We ventured from the philosophic to the historic to the theological to the political. All of this made perfect sense for a text like the Gospel of Matthew - it contains theological argument, political commentary, historical nods and a deep well of wisdom teachings from Jesus. It is a complex text, with a complex history.

One of the central questions we explored was faith. Specifically, what does faith mean when we don’t believe everything in our Holy Scripture to be fact? How do we define faith when we willingly acknowledge that a text like Matthew is not historical? In fact, not only is Matthew “not historical”, it has been altered and edited and augmented countless times. It contains within it the distinct voices of the writers (which did not include the Apostle Matthew), who came to the text with their own political, spiritual and social agendas. Frankly, if we take historical and Biblical scholarship at all seriously, we must acknowledge that there are a number of passages, ideas and events recorded in our Gospels that simply did not happen in any literal historical sense.

And yet… we do have faith! We do have faith in Jesus Christ. We have faith in his unique and mysterious union with God the Creator. I personally have faith that in my lowest moral moment it was His voice and His presence that came to me and did, in fact, save me. We believe in the discipleship of all people, in the life-giving presence of the Creator, and in the life-giving act of non-violent sacrifice Jesus lived out on the cross. But faith is not the same as belief.

In all honesty, I don’t really believe in the literal Virgin Birth. I have faith in the resurrection, but I don’t have much of an opinion on whether the Tomb was literally empty 3 days later. I have faith in the saving power of Jesus’ very real presence, but I reject the idea that “belief” is what gives me that salvation or that the salvation he represents is denied to my Buddhist friends. For me, and for most Episcopalians, faith is much more nuanced than that. We hold a faith that is comfortable with a little contradiction and lot of mystery.

And this is a faith that can feel lonely sometimes. Some of my friends in liberal circles consider my faith to be “silly superstition”, an unfortunate but benign intellectual shortcoming on my part (“yeah, he’s a Christian, but he’s still cool,” I overheard one time). On the other end of the spectrum, many fundamentalist believers declare my faith false or illegitimate due to my lack of belief in a literal reading of Scripture.

But in spite of all that noise and conjecture, I call my faith strong. I call our Episcopal faith strong. It is strong because it does not depend on mental gymnastics to make everything in the Bible literally true. It is strong because it affirms the very real, loving presence of God while acknowledging that our words describing God’s being will always fall short. It is strong because it is based not on mental belief, but on the turning over of our hearts to the unimaginable ground of Love that Jesus gives to us. It is that much stronger because most of us don’t believe that ground of Love only extends to “us Christians”, but to all hearts overflowing with love and mercy and forgiveness. Like Jesus before us, we look to the content of the hearts of our neighbors, not whether or not they pray and believe correctly (see the Parable of the Good Samaritan!)

Our faith is strong not because of who is excluded from salvation, but because literally nobody can ever be excluded from that earth-shattering act of Sacrificial Love. We don’t need anyone to nod and “believe an Earthquake literally happened and the body wasn’t there after 3 days”. We understand that such stories are the fingers pointing to the moon, stories meant to tell us, “look, something important is happening here!” Our faith is strong because it is so much broader and larger and deeper and more mysterious than mere belief could ever be. Amen.