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Editorial:
Trust enough? From
the director: Icons of Culture and Political Identity: A Decade
of Opportunity Comment:
Shaking hands with soldiers At
the end of the day: Trust Remember
1916 Shattered
pieces - a journey in recovering trust Interview
with Rev John Dunlop & Danny Morrison: Truth & Trust Faith
matters lyo
nta kindi dufite uretse UKWIZERA A
Reader's Response to Lion&Lamb #40 Bible
Study: Trust Review:
Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries
of Belonging and Belief Review:
1916: Lest We Forget Difficult
Conversations |
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The Structure
of Human Faith Consider, for example, a friendship between two people. On the basis of many and diverse experiences of each other over a lengthy period of time, these two people relate to each other with reciprocal trust and loyalty. One friend’s faithfulness to the other is the gift that calls forth the response of trust, which, we might say, is faith in its more passive sense; yet it also evokes fidelity, which is faith in its more active sense. Each person trusts, and therefore seeks to be faithful to the other, in that ongoing interpersonal interaction that we are here calling ‘faith’. Their mutual belief, borne out by experience, is that reciprocal bonds of trust and loyalty extend between the two of them. By the same logic, the opposite is also true. Where ‘faith’ is called into question, undermined, or otherwise distorted, we can assume that all three aspects (belief, trust and loyalty) will be radically affected. For example, if some recent incident led you to the belief that I was no longer a trustworthy person, it would likely lead to you no longer trusting me with anything of great significance, doubting my loyalty to you, and with the further quite understandable consequence that you no longer felt able to be loyal to me or our former friendship. Your interpretation of some unworthy action, perhaps taking the form of some real or perceived faithlessness on my behalf, can possibly, and quite easily, though not inevitably, lead to our former friendship, based on mutual beliefs about each other, and thus evoking reciprocal trust and loyalty, now becoming mutual faithlessness. Since we live inextricably in a web of interpersonal interaction as social selves, one person’s faithlessness, whether it is initially in the form of distrust, disloyalty or disbelief, can have devastating and pervasively negative consequences for whoever is caught up in the dynamics of that particular communal context.3 The breakdown of a formerly healthy and fulfilling marriage because of some real or perceived act of faithlessness on the part of either husband or wife, or both, is a poignant illustration of this phenomenon. Not only has there been faithlessness towards the other person, but there has also been faithlessness to the covenant relationship itself, founded on the vows that constitute the ‘marriage bond’. When trust has gone, what is left? Trustworthy
Value Centres and Worthwhile Common Causes Faith, therefore, whether demonstrated within a marriage, between friends, or in a larger communal or national setting, involves interpersonal interaction with certain ‘objective realities’. These can be described as being both ‘trustworthy value centres’ that give meaning and significance to those who place their confidence in them, and also ‘worthwhile common causes’ that call for the active allegiance of those so devoted. The trouble, of course, is that each of us has several, or even, many different objective realities that we consider to be trustworthy value centres and worthwhile common causes. How do we harmonise or integrate them? Implicitly, or explicitly, we demonstrate which ones have priority over others in our own personally selected scheme of things. But throughout, there is a sense of conflict between the various objective realities that we trust in, or seek to be loyal to, evidence of the fact that we are, despite our protestations to the contrary, polytheists. Often, however, our natural polytheism, in which our faith is scattered among many objects of devotion, gives way to another form of faith. Niebuhr calls this ‘henotheism’ or ‘social theism’, a form of faith that is less diffuse, but, arguably, more demonic, than polytheism. What happens is that one particular objective reality in our lives takes precedence over the others so that these become subordinate to the single overarching value centre and its common cause. This objective reality becomes, to all intents and purposes, the controlling ideology for those devoted to it: be it an economic one such as capitalism or communism; or a more geographical communal one, as is the case in the various competing forms of social identity that constitute the human landscape of a people. The history of Ireland, particularly the last several generations in Northern Ireland, give ample and tragic evidence of the often, negative consequences that flow from such ‘social faiths’. If we consider the entire spectrum of local communal identities, cultural aspirations and political agendas, the radical lack of trust and overwhelming sense of suspicion that exists is striking. The mutual hostility that marks republicanism and loyalism, and, to a lesser degree, nationalism and unionism, as well as the numerous factions and splinter movements within these larger groupings, is a self-evident fact. It is also a reason for, and a consequence of, the continuing absence of real peace and reconciliation. The objective realities that we each relate to as our trustworthy value centres and worthwhile common causes are, to use biblical language, ‘false gods’ or ‘idols’. Speaking of what he calls ‘our combative human loyalty’, Niebuhr says that this “involves us in apparently never-ending religious animosities which at the same time unite and divide neighbours, as they forge close bonds of loyalty to each other in a common cause among closed societies disloyal to each other.”5 The logic of Northern Ireland’s agonising lack of reconciliation can thus be partially understood, though not excused, by interpreting it in terms of an ideological conflict between different objective realities whose devotees engage in mutual hostility over which value centre to trust in and to which common cause they ought to be loyal. Their ‘positive’ sense of identity and belonging has, as its ‘negative’ counterpart, an interpretation of other people as being ‘outsiders’ who are not to be trusted, and with whom no shared future is possible. Faith in
the Gospel In the midst of all this, Jesus holds on to God in naked trust, confident that the One whom he knows and names as ‘Father’ will continue to be faithful to him, in, through and beyond the harrowing and unjust events that are now unfolding. In agonies of body, mind and spirit that no one else can fathom, Jesus goes to the cross, and when he is dead and buried later that same Friday, it seems that his faith in a faithful God is as misguided as any other vain belief that humans have held. The story does not end there, however. On the third day he is raised from death to a new mode of embodied existence, his energies now bent on convincing his formerly faithless followers that even their failures could not efface God’s loving, faithful, forgiving purpose working in and through him. And so he equips them to live and share the Gospel with the people of Israel, and, after his ascension to be with God the Father, sends the Holy Spirit to empower his disciple community in his mission to all people. There are many ways of interpreting this Gospel. One such way is what I would call ‘crucial faith’ – crucial because faith is an essential feature of this message, but also because it centres on Christ crucified (‘cross’ coming from the Latin crux or crucis). We may state this in Trinitarian terms: Jesus going to the cross on Good Friday demonstrates the faithfulness of God the Son, trusting in God the Father, and being loyal, even to those who oppose or deny him. Jesus being raised from death on Easter Sunday is the revelation of the faithfulness of God the Father, vindicating his Son’s faithfulness. And the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost expresses the faithfulness of God the Spirit, entrusting his mission to those who, then as now, can do little or nothing worthwhile without his instructing, inspiring and converting presence. Biblical
Faith in a Changing World However, the loving faithfulness of God in Christ by the Spirit is forever present to transform us, personally and politically, in ways scarcely imaginable. I believe that to exercise biblical faith in the changing world of Ireland, in the early twenty first century, will call for renewed resolve to trust God’s rule as our only trustworthy value centre. At the same time, it calls upon all of us, whatever our instinctive allegiance may be, to extend our fidelity far beyond our smaller concerns, our tribal loyalties, seeking to be faithful, therefore, to nothing less than the one realm of God’s beloved creation. A shared future indeed. A Prayer ALLEN SLEITH
is Minister of Regent Street Presbyterian Church, Newtownards. 1
W. J. Allen Sleith, Crucial Faith: The Theology and Ethics of H.
Richard Niebuhr, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2004. |
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