Getting at the Heart of Faith
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
The 1st Sunday after Epiphany/Baptism of the Lord – January 9, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts:  Acts 10:34-38/Matthew 3:13-17]

            It is appropriate that we begin our series on “getting at the heart” with faith, and even more appropriate that on this day we remember the Baptism of the Lord. In the Christian tradition Baptism is the sacrament of faith par excellence, regardless of theological position, because it is tied to the incorporation of the one baptized into the living body of Christ – the Church. The summary of faith, or creed, attributed to the apostles is actually an early baptismal creed used at Rome. Before the candidate was baptized he or she would have to say ‘credo,’ I believe, and the familiar words of the Apostles’ Creed were simply a summary of the faith of the community, but more on that at another time. My point is that baptism comes as the result of faith and not vice versa. Even when a child is baptized the parents are pledging that they will see to it that the child will be raised in such a way as to grow into a faith of their own.

            The early church understood that Jesus had no need of baptism, but that he received it “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” as Matthew puts it. In other words, Jesus was baptized for us and as one of great teachers of the early church said he came out of the waters, “drawing, as it were, the whole world with him.” Jesus was baptized so that we might understand it as a means of grace and embracing all of humanity for all time. It was the understanding of the early church, and a position that I hold, that Jesus was not baptized as a simple individual, but as the “well-beloved” who recapitulates humanity and draws us back into the life of God. While only Jesus heard that voice and saw the anointing dove of the Spirit, the effect was seen in the way he lived and in what he taught.

            Peter’s sermon that we heard in the Acts is the core proclamation of the gospel, the kerygma. Bruce Metzger, the noted Biblical scholar, describes the content of the kerygma as having three major points, the second of which has five sub-points:

• The promises of God made in the Old Testament days have been fulfilled and the messiah has come.

• He is Jesus of Nazareth who:

• Went about doing good and executing might works by the power of God;

• Was crucified according to the purpose of God;

• Was raised by God from the dead;

• Is exalted by God and given the name “Lord;”

• Will come again for judgment and the restoration of all things.

• Therefore, all who hear the message should repent and be baptized.  [The New Testament, Its Background, Growth and Content, p. 177]

Now, while we don’t hear the explicit call to baptism in this particular Acts reading, I think we can certainly see the outline here.

What we hear is the core teaching, the heart of the message of faith preached by the early church. C.H. Dodd, a leading Congregational Biblical scholar of the last century said this about the kerygma. “The kerygma is primary, and it acted as a preservative of the tradition which conveyed the facts. The nearer we are in the Gospels to the stuff of the kerygma, the nearer we are to fountainhead of tradition. There never existed a tradition formed by a dry historical interest in facts as facts. From the beginning the facts were preserved in memory and tradition as elements in the Gospel which the Church proclaimed.” [The Apostolic Preaching, p. 20] In short, the core proclamation of faith is not something merely historical or academic; rather it is a living, and therefore growing, thing. Remember that the word tradition simply means ‘handed on,’ to speak of a faith tradition then is to speak of that living reality handed to us.

So, what is the heart of faith? I think I have given you a brief glimpse of the heart of the Christian faith, and my colleagues will take up and develop what the heart of Christianity and our Congregational approach to it are in the next two weeks. But what of faith itself, what is its heart?

We need to understand that it is very difficult to define faith. In Western society since the Enlightenment faith has come to mean something “like a lower form of knowledge.” As Alistair McGrath writes, “Faith is understood to mean ‘partial knowledge’ characterized by a degree of uncertainty, and based upon a lock of evidence or evidence which is inadequate to convince fully.” [McGrath, Introduction to Christian Theology, p. 238] Quite honestly, faith has been under fire from rationalism and from its child, science and there are those who think that faith is incompatible with rational thought. In other words, faith is merely an exercise in subjectivism. However, the work of people like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn have helped us to understand that even rational thought and science involve an element of faith. Still others have come to understand faith as synonymous with ‘belief,’ but this is also problematic, since it reduces faith to simple exercise of assent. For many people to say “I believe in God,” is essentially saying “I believe there is such a thing as a god.” Yet, to have faith in God is something very different.

I would contend that faith rises out of the depth of human experience, it is a natural part of us, and my research shows me to be in good company. Blaise Pascal talked about our “God-shaped void” and I think faith is keyed to that. Faith is at once an exercise in human selfhood and self-transcendence. It is an opening of the self to the possibility, the reality that there is more to us than what we see and extending that realization to our world. Perhaps a good analogy of this would relate back to science and atomic theory. Scientists believe that the world is made up of atomic particles, not because we’ve seen them, but because we’ve discovered evidence of them. Based on that theory that which is solid only ‘appears’ to be solid, because everything is moving. So what I think solid isn’t really, there is more to it than I see. I’ve not seen an atom, but I have faith that they are there.

 One aspect of the heart of faith, then, is that it is an exercise in being human.

That said how do we get to that point? Marcus Borg has been producing a number of interesting books on Jesus and the Bible. Carrie, Sam and I are reading his The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith together. In fact, Borg’s book inspired this sermon series and it is my intention to lead a book study on it during Lent. I think Borg does a very nice job in explaining the various aspects of faith and so I would like to follow what he does in his book because he realizes that faith is more than ‘partial knowledge’ and more than simply ‘believing.’ After all, there are people who believe that the earth flat and we could go on and on with people who believe things despite evidence to the contrary. Some would say that by being here we fall into that same category, yet I think there’s a difference.

            Borg identifies four aspects of faith, one of which tends more to “the head” and the other three tending more to “the heart.” He gives these aspects Latin designations to show their antiquity, but it also gives us a handy short-hand for keeping them straight. The first aspect of faith is assensus, from which we get our word ‘assent.’ This is faith as belief, as we’ve discussed. It’s giving our intellectual assent to a series of propositions and saying, “I believe.” Borg thinks, and I agree, that stressing this aspect of faith comes relatively late and even shifts the notion of orthodoxy from ‘right worship’ to ‘right belief.’ Faith, especially since the Reformation, became an exercise in believing the “right things” as set down by a church authority or a particular interpretation of the Bible. Given what we’ve come to know and understand about our world, this form of faith is often understood as “what you turn to when knowledge runs out.”  I think it summed up well by Tertullian’s statement, “I believe because it is absurd,” rather than Anselm’s, “I believe in order to understand.”  A letter in the most recent issue of Time magazine illustrates this fairly well:

As a Southern Baptist Sunday-School teacher, I tell my students what most of us here in the Bible Belt believer: the Scripture is the inerrant word of God, given by inspiration to the writers of the Bible. That Matthew and Luke record different details makes neither of them inaccurate. Nor does the fact that some of this cannot be corroborated by other sources. That’s why we call it faith. [Karen Rogers, Chattanooga, Tenn., in Time January 10, 2005, vol. 165. no. 2]

My response is, no, that’s not why we call it faith and, further, faith isn’t about mastering a body of content.

            Borg makes a good point when he writes, “That the Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads – as if ‘believing the right things’ is what God is most looking for, as if having ‘correct beliefs’ is what will save us.” [p. 30] It is odd, especially when you consider what Hans Kung noted, “Jesus nowhere said, ‘Say after me,’ but rather ‘Follow me.’ That means that Jesus did not first require a confession of faith from his disciples, women or men, but rather called them to utterly practical discipleship.” [Kung, Christianity: Essence, History and Future, p. 50] In other words, it’s more about the life we live than the words we say; because we can ‘know’ something and never have it make a bit of difference in our lives.

            When Borg turns to “the heart” he first uses the word fiducia, for which a good English translation is ‘trust.’ It’s not about trusting a set of statements about God or about faith, but placing our trust in God. Borg uses the illustration of teaching someone to swim – something I need to learn one of these days – and notes that you can’t learn to swim until you’ve learned to trust the buoyancy of the water. It’s the same with God; we have to trust that God is present and will hold us up. The Bible is full of similar references, but among my favorites is from the Psalms. Psalm 46 says, “God is our refuge and our strength,” Luther based the hymn “A Mighty Fortress” on it. The essence is there, God is where we put our trust and to put radical, root, trust in God is real faith.

            I believe this is the point that Jesus is making in Matthew chapter six when he talks about the birds of the air. He’s not saying we ought not to work or anything like that; he’s saying that we should not have anxiety about things we can’t control. We should allow God to be God and allow ourselves to be who we are. In that way we can come to have far less anxiety in our lives. As Borg says, “If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power.” [p.33]

            Borg’s second “heart” meaning for faith is fidelitas; the English word is “faithfulness.” This has to do with how we enter into our relationship with God. If God can be trusted and God is faithful, then we are also to be faithful in how we relate to God and to others. The opposite of faithfulness is unfaithfulness. As adultery typifies it for our human relationships, idolatry describes it in our relationship with God.

            I’m not suggesting that you might have little statues in your home that you are making sacrifices to or anything like that. Rather, we suffer from idolatry when we allow others – whether persons or things – to come before God. Fidelity is what the first commandment is about, “You shall have no other gods before me.” It’s what Jesus meant when he said, “You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Then he adds, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Fidelity means living that out in the way we relate to God and relate to others, with nothing coming between us – including our own narrow self-interest.

            How do we accomplish fidelity? Simple, we accomplish it by paying attention to our relationships. Paying attention to our relationship with God by attending worship (which is really all the Lord asks of us in return for all the gifts of creation), praying, practice and a life given to loving service. I believe the consistent message of Jesus in the Gospels to be this, “Pay attention to God.” None of us likes to be ignored, especially by the people who profess to love us. It just makes common sense that the good God, who has lavished love and care on this creation, would want us to pay attention and live in relationship. Fidelity is living the faith and, yes, it involves ethics.

            The third “heart” term for faith is visio, “vision.” In other words, faith is a way of seeing. This goes with Anselm’s statement, “I believe in order to understand.” We come to trust God and to live our lives in order to see the big picture of the world in which we live.  I like what Borg says about this. “. . . we can see ‘what is’ … as life-giving and nourishing. It has brought us and everything that is into existence. It sustains our lives. It is filled with wonder and beauty, even if sometimes a terrible beauty. To use a traditional theological term, this is seeing reality as gracious. It is the way of seeing spoken of by Jesus in his words about the birds and lilies. God feeds them, God clothes them, and, to echo another saying of Jesus, God sends rain upon the just and unjust. God is generous.” [p. 35]

            When we see with the eyes of the heart, with the eyes of faith we, again, can respond differently to life. We can move beyond our own narrowness, our preoccupation with self and move out to touch and enjoy a world undergirded with and marked by God’s goodness. As Borg says, “Faith as visio is a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to ‘what is,’ that is, to God. Faith as fidelitas is faithfulness to our relationship with God. And faith as fiducia is deepening trust to God, flowing out of a deepening relationship with God.” [p. 36] Faith is about living in relationship and then living out relationship.

            What about faith as assensus, assent? Is there room for that? Yes. But we have to come to understand that when we say “I believe” we’re doing more than just giving intellectual assent. The word ‘credo,’ I believe, has its Latin root in the word for heart. To believe is to really give one’s heart to something. To say, “I believe” is to really say, “I belove.” As Borg points out, “Faith is about beloving God and all that God beloves. The Christian life is about beloving God and all that God beloves. Faith is our love for God. Faith is the way of the heart.” [p. 41]

            So, where do we place our trust? How do we ground our actions? What do we value? How do we live and love? Faith’s answer to each is, “God.” Where does faith reside? In the heart. The heart is the center and all else flows out of it. The heart of faith is the heart itself. Faith is where our heart rests. Where does your heart rest today?