"The word "faith" (Greek : pistis) is prominent in this verse (Romans 1:16 -- 4: 25). We should note that behind various nouns in the NRSV such as "faith" "belief" and "trust" with their related verbs (have faith -- "believe" and "trust") -- there lies a single Greek word, pist--. This root is generally used in the LXX to translate a Hebrew word that relates to notions of trustworthiness, reliability, faithfulness and firmness. The causative verbal form of this Hebrew word, usually translated in the NRSV as "to believe (in)" means, "to reckon trustworthy" or "to trust." The noun , usually translated in the NRSV as "faith" -- means "faithfulness", both in the sense of sticking by something or someone (constancy) and in the sense of being worthy of such constancy.
The purpose of this explaination is to make clear that "faith", in the Biblical and Pauline sense, has very little to do with feelings and a great deal to do with being reliable and standing by committments. In the biblical sense, "to believe" or "to have faith" in God is to live and act on the basis of the supposition that God is trustworthy, whether we happen at any particular moment to feel that God is trustworthy or not . In this sense .......... the church invites us to confess we "believe" in God. For sectarians, the opposite of faith is doubt. For scripture, the opposite of faith is unfaithfulness in the plain sense in which we speak of unfaithfulness in a marriage or any other relationship. The English theologian Austin Farrar wrote:
If you want to have faith, decide what you would do if you did have faith and do it. That is faith."
Chapter 26 EFM study guide
I am reclaiming THIS blog --- I've been posting more to the other blogs , because those are the trains of thought that I've been following.
I forgot about this one, but , the last post was right about this time of year last year, going back to EFM, feeling unprepared and unfocused. So , why not pick up that thread, and use the blog to gather my thinking about the materials, the people, the threads of reflection that run through all of the four years?
Since there are so many third and fourth year students, (mostly year three) I need to concentrate on the history and philosophy, which should actually be useful for the group.
Cleaning out my bedroom/former office/reading and workspace, I finally found the lesson on Paul Tillich, which went missing last year.
I feel closest to Tillich , in my own personal and autobiographical Christianity. I suspect that the minister who I learned from as a child was very much a Tillich sort of theologian.
The year 4 lesson begins with:
"He was convinced of the power of the traditional biblical symbols, but he felt they had lost much of their meaning in the contemporary world. By using the terms in which philosophy couched its ultimate questions, he hoped to bring meaning back to the old symbols At his hand Go was interpreted as Ultimate Concern, sin as existential estrangement, and salvation as the New Being."
Sounds familier.
Tillich's reinterpretation of the gospels brings them to the 20th century, rather than seeking to make an idol of the past.
"He brought the resources of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to his existentialist contemporaries, and the insights of depth psychology. Medieval mystics and expressionist painters, radical socialist theorists and romantic poets, were all used by Tillich to witness to the "New Being" revealed in Jesus the Christ."
and;
“Theology grows out of the life of the church as a community of faith. It’s sources and norms come from scripture and tradition, the life of faith and prayer. Without the rich witness to revelation given in scripture and tradition, theology would quickly be reduced to a barren philosophical abstraction.......
Theologians need to inquire deeply and passionately about what is true, what is real. God can be served only by the truth. Theology is formed by the interplay of passionate faith and critical reason. The technical way of saying this is to recognize that theology is dialectical.”
**************
“The notion of “ultimate concern” provides Tillich with the fundamental criterion for discerning the religious dimension of the human situation, the dimension to which thrology speaks. “Ultimate concern,” he says, “is the abstract translation of the great ccommandment: ‘The Lord, our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with alll your soul and with alll your mind, and with alll your strength.’ The religious concern is ultimate; it excludes all other concerns from ultimate significance; it makes them preliminary.”
*************
“For Tillich, God is not a being among beings, even if we call God the highest of beings. God is not the highest example of all that we count good, true, and beautiful. God is not a kind of benign grandparent in the sky who guarantees the success of our causes, the triumph of our nation, or the rightness of our opinions. When we think of God in these ways, we have really substituted, he argues, an idol for God. The tragedy of human spiritual life, according to Tillich, is our constant substitution of realities that we make, shape , and control for the true god. When God is remade into the guarantor of my church, my nation, my class, then God loses reality for me. It is at this point that atheism occurs. For Tillich, atheism is inevitable when god is made to be one being among others........
....Tillich speaks of God as “the ground of being.”....... It is the experience that amid pain, death, guilt, fear, and brokenness, we can still be grasped by a power of renewal. The demonic and destructive powers threaten but cannot overwhelm the reality of a healing, no matter how tenuous, that keeps us clinging to life.......
....God is the name we give to the source of that new being. God is the power of being itself. God is the name of the vitality that breaks into us from beyond our brokenness to bring us hope and renewal. God does not provide us with an eternal safety zone. God provides us the gracious gift of life made real against death. God is that most basic dimension of reality in which we find healing and hope when all finite reality fails us. The very fact of our existence is witness to a ground or source of being.”
****************
“Faith is our ability to accept the divine acceptance of us... This is the gift of grace. Tillich summed up his vision of salvation in his sermon “You are accepted.”
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaninglessness and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we feel we have violated another life, a life which we have loved, or from which we were estranged. ...
It strikes us when , year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”
(1948, 161-162)
********
What could be more core to the concepts of The EFM program? The 21st century will require even more skill at ministry, to survive the forces of disintegration that are bombarding us.
