This post will end the True and Real series. I have wandered the landscape a bit but hopefully the discussion has raised an awareness of the possibility of faith that is true but not real.
My premise being that secularism’s disenchantment and rejection of transcendence, creates faith that is a mirage, true but not real. The essence of disenchantment is the absence of transcendence, most apparent in the absence of God. Without the divine, life loses its meaning and purpose. The only remaining option for meaning and purpose in a secular age comes from within, each individual becomes their own god. As transcendence is diminished, my religion becomes a commodity in a quest for meaning and purpose.
I am increasingly convinced the current upheaval in evangelical Christianity is directly related to faith that is nothing more than a mirage. Faced with a pandemic and other realities, our faith has been tested and found wanting.
Timothy Keller gives credence to this proposition in his recent Atlantic article entitled “Growing Faith in the Face of Death”. Excerpts below reflect his struggle with his belief in the face of death. His term is abstraction, an apt synonym for mirage.
…our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions…. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.
When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God. Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree.
American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey. The sense of the honey’s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart.
Timothy Keller
It is comforting that I, like Keller, struggle “to bridge the gap between an abstract belief and one that touches the imagination”.
The antidote and ultimate vaccine for secularism is unseen reality. My spiritual quest is to seek and engage unseen reality. To put it in Christian vernacular… “Come to know God.” it is there we find meaning and purpose.
Still on the journey.