Introduction to Faith

These thoughts are from 'Tokens of Trust', the Archbishop's short introduction to Christian belief, published in 2007 by Canterbury Press:

Believing is Trusting

Faith is about trusting and trying to understand. In the Christian tradition over the centuries there have many approaches to 'faith', some good and dependable some not so good or dependable. Even in the Bible there are different images of what faith is. We read about the 'household of faith' (a community, a belonging), a 'seal of faith' (a kind of badge or identity), a 'deposit of faith' (a kind of precious treasure trove), the 'journey of faith' (a long, testing exploration for a promised destination). It is all these things. But, in a way that the New Testament's letter to the Hebrews makes plain, in Christian understanding it is principally 'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.' (Hebrews 11.1). It is about having the confidence to set out to find the God we seek, to discover how he understands himself, to discover our human history, and to discover our own life-story, in a way that is centred on the love for that God reveals in his Son, Jesus Christ, God's eternal Word made flesh.

This journey of understanding is not planned and set out for us like a study course. All we possess when we set out on the journey is two fundamental promises from God. The first, very simply, is the promise that God considers every moment of your life worthwhile; that God your creator is committed to your human joy and fulfilment, and the joy and fulfilment of the whole world around you, human and otherwise, and that he will not desert you even when you run away from him. The second promise is that there is nothing that God will not do or face to secure your joy and fulfilment, and that the inexhaustibility of that promise is revealed in the life, death and new life of Jesus Christ.

I wanted to begin with the issue of trust (something I explore in a recent book) because the opening words of the Christian statements of faith, the creeds, are about just this. In John's Gospel (the ninth chapter) Jesus asks the blind man he's just cured whether he 'believes' in the Son of Man. He's certainly not asking whether the man is of the opinion that the Son of Man exists; he wants to know whether the former blind man is ready to trust the Son of Man – that is Jesus in his role as representative of the human race before God. The man naturally asks who the Son of Man is; Jesus says that it is him; and the man responds with the words, 'I believe'.

He believes, he has confidence. That is, he doesn't go off wondering whether the Son of Man is out to further his own ends and deceive him. He trusts Jesus to be working for him, and he believes that what he sees and hears when Jesus is around is the truth. Believing makes a difference, as I said before – a difference in how we understand God, our human history, and our own life-story because its centred on a love and a person we can trust.

The Bible gives us various answers to the question of why we should trust 'the maker of heaven and earth', as the creeds put it, and not regard him as an unfathomable alien intelligence. One of the plainest answers is that found in the Letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament, where the long and complex introductory passage (including one of the longest sentences in the Bible!) culminates in the claim that, in the events around Jesus Christ, God has at last made his purpose clear; he has revealed the mystery hidden for us in ages past, he has shown us what his agenda is. What was once mysterious – or at least shadowy – has now emerged into daylight, and the purposes of God that existed from the world's foundation are now laid bare for us. Because of Jesus we can now see that what God has always meant to happen is (to pick up two centrally important words in the letter) peace and praise. This and this alone is God's agenda: the world he has made is designed to become a reconciled world, a world in which diverse human communities come to share a life together because they share the conviction that God has acted to set them free from fear and guilt. It is a reconciliation that affects the whole cosmos; that draws diversity together so that it works harmoniously; that liberates human voices for praise, for celebrating the glory of God who has made it possible and has held steadily to his purpose from the beginning. This is what God is after; there is no hidden agenda, nothing is kept back.

This only begins to turn the first page on many immense questions. But the only point I want to make here is to say that God is to be trusted as we trust a loving parent, whose commitment to us is inexhaustible, whose purposes for us are unfailingly generous. I trust, I have confidence in, I take refuge in the God who has made everything and so can have no selfish purpose and has made visible for us the sort of God he is and the sort of purpose he has in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

One last thought, before I leave you to your thinking further. Following on from this idea that God is seen and known as trustworthy in Jesus Christ, the Church has known from the very beginning that faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we'd like to live in. The clearest examples we call saints, people who take responsibility for making God credible in the world, who take responsibility for God in the world. That can happen in extreme and tragic human experiences or in much more normal ones. People taking responsibility for God, for making a connection that argument and speculation would in ideas cannot make. We may be uncertain, racked by doubt and anguish, we may be unable to give any very satisfactory account intellectually of what we believe; but somewhere in out horizon there are people who are making the connection. Never mind that the lives of such people may be as anguished and struggling as we think we are: the point is that what we see is someone who is a native of a world, God's world, in which we want to belong.

As long as we see, as the first Christians saw, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, a decisive moment of divine power, God saying who he is, and as long as there are those who effectively and bravely take responsibility for God, with and like Jesus, then the doors remain open and the possibility is there for others, perhaps very slowly, to find their way to a point where they can say 'I believe'. Not just, 'I'm convinced that there is something called God', or even I think believers talk about something that is real', but the ultimate choice: 'I want to live in the same world as them; I want to know what they know and to drink from the same wells.' That's when we can truly say, 'I believe; I have confidence; I take refuge; I have come home.'