Bernard was lost. No, not geographically, but just about every other way he could imagine. He even felt as if he didn’t know up from down. He sure didn’t know right from wrong, good from evil, friends from enemies, or truth from lies. Bernard didn’t know whom to trust, help, avoid, or flee. He didn’t know what was good for him or bad for him. What was worse, Bernard didn’t even know if it mattered. He had no purpose in his life. At times, he didn’t know if he even existed or if was just imagining himself. He almost thought he was having a nervous breakdown or going crazy. Maybe he just needed to check himself into an institution, where he could just totally check out. But then, late one night when he was spiraling down yet again, he felt a presence that, without speaking, somehow told him everything was going to be alright and to just follow me.
Question
The question why have faith has some great answers to it. But like any question, you must ask it genuinely if the answers are going to make sense. People who already know what they’re about, including who they are, why they are, and where they’re going, don’t generally ask about faith. They lack or miss nothing, and so they look for nothing. They have the answers they need. If they ask who needs faith, they do so dismissively, knowing already that they don’t. They already see all that they believe they need. And so they cannot imagine the need to discern and rely on what they cannot see, in the way that faith trusts in the unseen. The unseen structures, patterns, powers, and principles that influence the world hold no interest for them because they trust in their own sight and strength for all that they believe they need. If that’s you, seeing and having all you need, then you’re not interested in an answer to the faith question.
Possibility
To appreciate the answer to the question why have faith, you must instead know that you need more than you can see, grasp, acquire, or accomplish. Faith generally doesn’t appeal until you reach your limit of grasping and controlling, and realize that much more exists for you beyond your reach if you would just have faith. To discern and rely on the unseen, you must first believe that its possibility exists. The man marooned on an uninhabited island won’t strike out across the ocean swells on his flotsam craft until starving or so desperate for company as to risk his life. He also needs confidence in the belief that rescue or a better island lies just beyond his sight. If you are sufficiently content without wondering what lies beyond that may be so purposeful and powerful as to order and govern your world, then go ahead and live the slug’s life. But if instead you sense your need for rescue from whatever despair, loss, curse, burden, corruption, or limitation you suffer, and you believe in the possibility that such a rescue just might exist, then you’re ready for answers to the question why have faith.
Explanation
First, faith explains things. The material that we see explains very few things, if anything. Materiality gives no account for itself, not its source, cause, purpose, object, or direction. The material we see does not even declare the rules under which it operates. Faith alone posits those unseen rules, deduced from principles we discern and then test against the properties and behavior of what we see. Materiality suggests to us unseen things that govern and direct it in processes only the results of which we can see. The whole of the scientific method, beginning with observation, proceeding to hypothesis and then to testing and verification of test, rests within a nest of faith. Faith says that we can draw confidence in the reliability of things that we do not see or control but for which we may find purpose and utility. Only from faith can we begin to see how the world operates, not simply as it is. Faith explains what we see and even why we see. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Faith tells us to trust when the basis for trust is not yet apparent but may show itself consistent with the operation of what others have seen.
Reliability
Faith is in that sense reliable. Those who mock faith believe it to be unreliable because imagined, a fantasy without witness. Faith is instead the opposite. Faith is both reliable and reliability. We take faith in things because we reliably trust that they will come to pass, and when they don’t come to pass we trust yet more because we have examined the unseen thing and know it to be more trustworthy than what we see. The neighborhood gang mocks the boy whose father has gone off into the military to protect the homeland. The gang sneers to the boy that his father has abandoned him and will never come back. But the boy just smiles back, telling them that you don’t know my father. The boy has seen not only his father’s strength and courage but also his fierce love for the boy, and accordingly trusts in his father’s return with a confidence that far exceeds the visible circumstance. The boy knows that his father’s love is the more-reliable unseen thing than the visible circumstance. Having known his father’s love to be reliable, the boy himself becomes a witness to reliability, caring not only for himself but also for his mother and even for his dismissive friends.
Account
Faith, though, does more than explain discrete things and show itself reliable. Faith also places explanation and reliability within their larger account of all things. The faith of one who knows the unseen yet demonstrable creator doesn’t just have the confidence of the Father’s love. The faithful also receive the full account of the Father creating, the creation’s fall through the will of the created, and the creation’s rescue through his Son’s loving defeat of the death the fall caused. Faith in the loving rescuer shows us our journey, not as a sodden speck on a spinning sphere but as a co-redeemer of his glorious creation. Faith replaces the meaningless lie that we are only stardust, with the truth that we are stars on a battle adventure across the skies in which we know the battle is already won. The Father’s account gives the full context for what we see and experience around us and sense within ourselves. We receive that faith account as a gift along with the Father’s love, assembling the scattered hints around us into their coherence within the Father’s grand narrative. Faith thus accounts for everything, as one discerns the course and intention of the unseen Father’s redeeming love.
Purpose
The account we receive when we place our faith in the loving creator also gives us a place and purpose within his grand narrative arc. Without an account of the world, the world can appear to be a terribly confusing and chaotic place. At times, our place within it can seem even more unfathomable, unaccountable, pointless, and despairing. Yet the account that we receive when placing our faith in the loving creator is that we are his co-adventurers, called along on a journey the destination of which is his reclamation of his glorious kingdom on earth. We are kings and queens, princesses and princes, royalty preparing once again to rule as soon as our King of kings returns with the final edict. Every act of love we share with our spouse and children, our neighbors and even our enemies, brings that final edict closer, while confirming our coming rule.
Victory
The account we receive when we place our faith in the loving creator also assures us of victory. The hardship of battle is not in the effort it requires or pain that it brings. Battle’s hardship is instead that we might lose the battle. With the victory instead assured, we can rise each day to soldier on, no matter how hard and painful. We are never hopeless. The soldier gives up only when having lost the battle. Those who have the loving creator’s faith know that he has already won the battle. We thus do not despair but instead stand tall with courage and conviction, pointing to the horizon where we see our loving creator drawing nearer in his certain return to reclaim his victory. We are to raise the standard and declare that victory, even when we have fallen into the enemy’s temporary grasp. We are to march confidently on in whatever struggle the day brings, as a soldier assured of victory even if we fall in battle, for the loving creator restores us.
Structure
The account we receive when we place our faith in the loving creator also gives us the cosmic structure of all we see around us. That structure is not the constant dissipation toward a cold and dark end, which is the cosmic vision modernity offers. We are not inconsequentially small dots on a tiny rock among numberless other rocks, spread across a rapidly expanding universe already so vast as to be beyond measure, on our way to the big chill of entropic exhaustion. The cosmos we see and experience, undistorted by our instruments, is instead one of constant regeneration and bursting life, not hanging like a tiny spider in the center of a huge dark room, but instead standing solidly between a sky above and ground below. We ingest through the Spirit’s movement the meaning that descends from the creator above, to draw order from the earth’s chaotic material below. We are the creator’s mediators between heaven and earth, ordering his earth according to his desires to enjoy the bounty his designs produce. The structure that faith in our loving creator gives us thus lends full freight and meaning to our existence as his image.
Reality
Faith in our loving creator also gives us an account of ourselves and our place within his creation that accords with the reality of what we experience. Those who reject faith call its account a speculative fantasy. Yet the account could be no more real. The account reflects not just the nature, order, and course of creation but also the creator’s desire and essence. The faith account explains and allows us to fulfill who we are in every dimension, not just physical but also mental, not just material but also spiritual. We have the desire and capacity to journey and adventure with passion and purpose, not simply to survive to satisfy our sensuality, which admits no satisfaction and offers no uniting purpose. The faith account aligns our desire with its highest end, to make the most of reality in all its yearnings and dimensions. Why have faith? To live as you should, in full reach of that which lies around and above you.
Reflection
When you ask the question why have faith, are you able to do so in earnest, honestly and with an authentic interest in the answer? Do you believe in the possibility that more exists around you than meets the eye? Can anything other than a faith account explain everything you see and experience around and inside of you, in a way that helps you live soundly? What other belief system, aside from one of faith, would enable you to live reliably, trustingly, believingly, ambitiously, soundly, and confidently? What philosophy or ideology, outside of the faith realm, gives a full and satisfying account of your role and purpose in the universe? Do you sense the possibility of victory within and across the span of your life, that you might in the end have prevailed? Can you see how the faith account helps you experience the actual cosmic structure in which you dwell? Does an astrophysicist’s cosmology, with spinning planets, blazing stars, and whirling galaxies, lend equal meaning to your daily experiences and actions?
Key Points
Ask the value of faith in the right frame of mind, wanting answers.
Faith embraces the possibility that unseen things affect seen things.
Faith explains the behavior and outcome of many things.
Faith gives a reliable account of experiences and outcomes.
Faith gives a full account of our place in the cosmos and its course.
Faith gives us our purpose and role in creation.
Faith shows us that we are victors and will prevail in the end.
Faith confirms the structure of our environment and experiences.
Faith accords with the reality of phenomena as we experience them.