Faith

This research will examine the concept of faithfulness as it relates to religion. The research will set forth the context for looking at the religious principles that reflect moral character and then discuss how faithfulness to God's principles reflects a commitment to moral thought and action, as well as a faith and trust in God.

The life of faith might seem to involve a simple idea about belief in God, but in fact faith is a very complex concept. The term is used in various ways in the Christian tradition. There is of course the famous statement of Jesus when he calms the storm in the sea of Galilee: "Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?" (Matt. 8:26). In that context, faith is to be interpreted as the equivalent of absolute trust, or more specifically, the equivalent of man's unquestioned trust in God. The spiritual experience of trust is thereby interpreted as the actual experience of faith. This idea is also in the background of Paul's injunction to the Corinthians, in his discourse about how the first-century Christian community ought to behave: "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it (I Cor. 10.13). Psalm 91 makes a similar point, characterizing the Lord as "my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust . . . He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler." In The Book of Common Prayer, the latter line of the Psalm runs thus: "his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler." The slight difference in the meaning of faith conveyed in these various contexts is that faith is not a one-way street, inasmuch as those who do have faith are said to be able to rely on God's good will and/or providence in situations of moral uncertainty.

In other words, faith is to be connected to mankind's idea of God, and this in turn is to be connected to mankind's actions in the world. Undoubtedly, the individual is meant to repose trust in the absolute goodness, and in Christian tradition, the absolute power of God. But the whole process begins with faith. It has been an issue that has engaged theologians of Christianity through the ages. In the Catholic tradition, Augustine's theology is built around two important elements: authority of the Church and the leap of faith. Leaving aside the issue of church authority for the moment, it may be useful to look at Augustine's view that faith -- identified with God -- precedes all understanding. He first deals with faith in its connection to the existence of God: "That one will I plainly acknowledge to be God, than whom it is proved nothing is superior. . . . When I shall have proved that what is above reason exists, it will be proved that God exists" (Augustine 43). Augustine identifies wisdom (ultimate knowledge) as the highest abstraction, the highest good. There are individual instances of good, but for Augustine there is the highest good existing at the same (higher) level of abstraction as the infinity of numbers. This highest good, both apart from (prior to) and potentially in common with reason, is God (Augustine 47).

So far so good, but then arises the problem of evil. Augustine's agony over this dilemma ties together the goodness of God, the presence of evil, the nature of reality, and man's free will -- or in other words, faith and morality:

Where is evil, then, and whence and how crept it hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being? Why then fear we and avoid what is not? Or if we fear it idly, then is that very fear evil whereby the soul is thus idly goaded and racked. Yea, and so much a greater evil, as we have nothing to fear, and yet do fear (Augustine 42).

If as Augustine says man has nothing to fear (and in this he is really saying no more than Psalm 91), then if evil exists it is placed at the foot of men, in their free-will, moral (immoral) response to the good of the Creator. Faith offers the escape from this idle fear. It precedes and transcends and is therefore superior to mere human reason. Accordingly, it is meant to guide reason, to guide the human response to the found universe, and to serve as the basis for human behavior. Now for Augustine, faith also means the Church. And what that means is that faith becomes equivalent to the moral authority of the Church.

In the Protestant tradition, the work of the theologian Paul Tillich (d. 1965) explores the content of spirituality by way of a rational (i.e., semantically consistent, logical) method that he terms correlation. The reason that is important is that it is a method that is meant to explain faith in rational terms, even though faith may be directly experienced at the psychological level of feeling and fundamental human need for connection. Acknowledging that "the problem of the rational character of systematic theology finally must remain unsolved" (54), he nevertheless takes the view that the theologian, especially one who, like Tillich, describes himself as a man of faith, is obliged to try to explain his views as rationally as possible. This is not an endorsement of a specific doctrine, catechetical orthodoxy, or philosophical elegance, but rather clarity, relevancy, and consistency (Tillich 58) within the circle of human experience. Tillich, like other major Christian theologians (whether Protestant or Catholic) asserts systematically derived Christian/spiritual answers to difficult philosophical questions, of which one of the most basic is faith itself. Tillich makes the case that interpretations of God have direct relevance for the full range of human experience, inasmuch as human experience is "cultural in form and religious in substance" and that there is a "boundary between religion and culture" to which a theology or a philosophy of religion must respond (Tillich, Future 68, 69). In other words, man's faith in God is connected to man's moral behavior in the human community.

Although Tillich understands that human society is the context for religious practice and belief, religion "cannot relinquish the absolute, and therefore, universal claim that is expressed in the idea