This was written in response to a recent article published in the New Statesman, in which Lamorna Ash reflects on reading the Bible and searching for faith.
1. My confession of faith
The search for faith, in a Christian way, has been a central thread of my life. Reading the Bible, by myself and in company with others, has been a key part of my seeking.
I believe seeking and finding faith in God in Christ is good and true, not just for me, but for the world. It is good and true for me because and as it is good for the world.
The seeker finds, but every finding spurs fresh seeking. We are not ‘there’ yet. And ‘God has yet more light and truth to show forth from his word.’1 ‘We are now ere long to part asunder, and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again: but whether the Lord had appointed it or not, he charged us before God and his blessed Angels, to follow him no further then he followed Christ. And if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry: For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to breake forth out of his holy Word.’ From John Robinson’s farewell address to the Mayflower ‘pilgrims’ as they embarked for their voyage in 1620.
Seeking, living in the awareness that we are not there yet, is good and true, for it is full of potential. The potential rests in the living God, the Father of the Son who is witnessed to in Scripture and and every day ‘has yet more light’.
That is why it does not dismay us to cry, ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’ (Mark 9.24). As God responds to this confession of inability, faith is given and is realized in our living. Words, specially of the theorizing sort, struggle to keep up with the life given by God.
This is my attempt today to confess my faith in Jesus Christ. I take it as seriously, as sincerely, as I can. I hope it can be heard as witness that encourages others to try faith, but that is not in my hands.
2. Lamorna Ash speaks to me, and for me, on the matter of seeking faith
She is right to say that sharing in church-reading of the Bible often does not give convincing evidence of the potential of reading the Bible for people in search of faith. I do not need Lamorna to tell me that. Another thread in my life is being disappointed by reading the Bible fruitlessly, both alone and with other Christians. Bible reading has mixed results.
3. ‘Supposed certainty’
Lamorna says that observing Bible-reading Christians has sent her the furthest she has been from Christianity since she began her investigations. It was the ‘supposed certainty’ of a Bible-reading group that drove her away. That, by itself, is an adversarial negative comment, which many Bible readers will not like. It will intensify the defensiveness which is often a profound power under the skin of such Christians. Sometimes they burst out in aggressive assertion, sometimes they withdraw into injured isolation – neither way helps them to work with the potential of the Bible to help themselves or others to find faith.
4. Seeking faith
I would prefer to say that this kind of Bible reading frustrates its potential because the Bible readers are not in search of faith, as Lamorna is. For them, the Bible gives information about God; it gives assurance and peace; it ends the search rather than provoking and accompanying it. Bible reading brings us far too quickly to be bold witnesses who can say, ‘Once I was blind, now I see’ (John 9.25) rather than cause us to cry out like blind Bartimaeus, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ (Mark 10.47).
5. Reading the Bible as Searchers
Lamorna, in her last three paragraphs, especially as she reads the Psalms, illuminates what searching for faith can be like. A practical question, for Bible reading groups and for church where there is preaching, is how to accompany and encourage people in searching for faith, rather than didactically to bring them quickly to the sure answer. ‘Supposed certainty’ is a superficial symptom of a serious malady. To treat the illness at root, we have wake up and to start at the beginning, by seeking for faith, to get on journeys driven by ‘wanting to go out and see’ whether what we want will be given, or whether we will go on with God, without God,2 D Bonhoeffer Letters, 16.7.1944, final two paragraphs. For Bonhoeffer’s own search for faith and the difference between finding faith and becoming a saint, see the letter of 21.7.1944, written the day after the failure of the plot to kill Hitler. praying while being told to wait a little longer (Rev. 6.9-11). Faith might be, she says, ‘the desire to unblock my ears and be ready to hear it, even if I’ll never fully understand’. Those words I receive gratefully, and am helped by, even though I immediately think this is not a completely satisfactory way of putting it. In spirit, in deep practice which cannot be captured in words (not mind, anyway), what she says reminds me, again, of the desperate father in the Gospels: ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’ (Mark 9.24).
6. The edges of churches
There are many like that father, like Lamorna, like me, at the edges of churches, and some even in the pulpit. Often churches find no way to help them, it does not meet them, or begin to stand where they do. I am sorry that is so. I do not accept that it is inevitable, even in our culture. But I fear it will go on being like this, church will go on ‘sending people farthest from Christianity’ because it is not free within itself to walk with searchers for faith, but, confident in possessing faith, it loads them with its faith, like Saul hampering David with his heavy armour (Samuel 17. 38-40) or passes them by on the other side.
7. Reading the Old Testament
Lamorna reads the Psalms which give her words that she can make her own, and here she comes closest to knowing what faith might be. And she gets secular friends together to read the Old Testament. They are prepared to read the Bible and to be honest about it. They are left wondering what to make of it all. (Such wondering is where the disciples began, according to the Gospels). Are the stories meant to lead them to faith? They do not immediately do that. Sometimes they seem odd, sometimes they appal. But there are parts of the Old Testament that move Lamorna in a way that might be significantly spiritual. But what is that? Is there is a difference between ‘being affected’ and ‘finding faith’? All these questions are real and important. The questions are not reasons for giving up any quest for faith, but they are mark out difficult, maybe arid sections of the path to be travelled.
8. The Old in the New and the New in the Old
Lamorna seems not to have tried reading the New Testament with her secular friends. Perhaps she had had enough of it in her church groups. It is certainly not wrong to read the Old Testament. It is not superseded, made redundant or disqualified by the New. Christians read the whole Bible, and as they do, they see how much the Old is in the New, the New in the Old, enriching each other. There are aspects of searching for faith, for faith in Jesus Christ, which are wonderfully illuminated and deepened by their relation with the Old Testament stories. Consider Hebrews 11, and Abraham a father in faith, who ‘went out not knowing whither he was going’ in response to God’s call and promise, walking in faith, hoping against hope (Romans 4.16-20). Giving up the Old Testament is neither a good or necessary option.
9. Jesus is in the search with us
There are parts of the New Testament that are very hard to understand, as Peter said of Paul’s letters, though none is so barren, I find, as much of Leviticus. I think we do well not to get hooked on the problematic parts, but to find and work from the bits that are clearest and that come home to us, from both testaments. And that is why I think it a pity that Lamorna did not focus on Jesus in the Gospels and the witness of the letters to Jesus. Jesus moves out from the pages of the Gospels as a living person,3I discovered what I am talking about here with some clarity when I was writing Entry Point (2013) with Keith White. Pp12, 20-21, are very like what I am saying in these notes. who calls and invites us to search for faith in God, giving us a sense that the quest may be long but is not fruitless. And Jesus does more than call us to this search, he shows himself to be in the search himself with us. Other people in the Bible – the Psalmists, for instance – also let us search alongside them. It is a quest in lived thinking fellowship, not merely a theory held and argued for in the isolated intellect.
10. The lived search for faith is itself prayer
Again, Lamorna’s final paragraphs present us with the reality of prayer, in significant contrast to common forms of praying, which lack the heart desire and persistent search that she captures in her words. The wish “Just once I’d like to see the world ‘charged with the grandeur of God’” has the supra-personal scope of true prayer, which is not focused by ‘me’ but by God and world.4The desire to see the world charged with the grandeur of God may be one source of Lamorna’s inattention to Jesus. Jesus seems a small human being, long ago, he was parochial then, and is preserved parochially in church. All this in contrast to the Holy Ghost who broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings over the bent world – a great saving vision. Manley Hopkins was a Catholic struggler with faith, and knew that the Father, Son and Spirit are one, and so Jesus, truly man, is not a mere little isolated human being. But in this poem that does not appear. There is quite of lot of faith and spirituality now which links Spirit and world in this way, as the reality we little creatures live and move and have our being within. The Bible invites us to read Jesus as coming from the Father, returning to the Father, and so with the Spirit showing and enacting the universal world reach of God.
Notes
- 1‘We are now ere long to part asunder, and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again: but whether the Lord had appointed it or not, he charged us before God and his blessed Angels, to follow him no further then he followed Christ. And if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry: For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to breake forth out of his holy Word.’ From John Robinson’s farewell address to the Mayflower ‘pilgrims’ as they embarked for their voyage in 1620.
- 2D Bonhoeffer Letters, 16.7.1944, final two paragraphs. For Bonhoeffer’s own search for faith and the difference between finding faith and becoming a saint, see the letter of 21.7.1944, written the day after the failure of the plot to kill Hitler.
- 3I discovered what I am talking about here with some clarity when I was writing Entry Point (2013) with Keith White. Pp12, 20-21, are very like what I am saying in these notes.
- 4The desire to see the world charged with the grandeur of God may be one source of Lamorna’s inattention to Jesus. Jesus seems a small human being, long ago, he was parochial then, and is preserved parochially in church. All this in contrast to the Holy Ghost who broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings over the bent world – a great saving vision. Manley Hopkins was a Catholic struggler with faith, and knew that the Father, Son and Spirit are one, and so Jesus, truly man, is not a mere little isolated human being. But in this poem that does not appear. There is quite of lot of faith and spirituality now which links Spirit and world in this way, as the reality we little creatures live and move and have our being within. The Bible invites us to read Jesus as coming from the Father, returning to the Father, and so with the Spirit showing and enacting the universal world reach of God.