1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 6: Credibility in faith

1.6.1 Introduction

In chapter 2, the issue of the credibility of the scriptural testimony was raised in the context of how believable is its testimony to the world. At that time, I expressed the point that the issue of the credibility of the scriptural testimony within the community of faith is another question altogether. That question must now be addressed in the light of the previous chapter. In that chapter it was said that the power of scripture within the community of faith lies in the way in which, through this testimony, the Spirit speaks to us in our present context and situation. Within the framework of the whole thrust of the message of this book, it is the central affirmation of the church that the word that Spirit speaks is the word that brings salvation to the world, a salvation not to 'another world' but to the state of human existence in this world. Upon the power of this word of the Spirit, according to the witness of the church, rests the issue of whether global humanity will continue to exist on planet earth or will go extinct or decline into insignificance. This is the macro-message of the gospel that the Spirit drives, but the message drills right down through all the billions of human individuals and makes exactly the same message to each and every individual or family or local community, religious or otherwise. The key to life lies in the hearing of the Spirit.

We cannot therefore escape the question, either of the macro or micro message, just how credible is this? Remember, this chapter is not asking this as someone outside the community of faith. I ask it as it is asked from within that community.

There is a difference between credibility and credulity, and the distinction is important. Too often the church has demanded of its people a suspension of credulity so that it becomes the mask of being Christian that we believe what, to quote Porky, "it ain't necessarily so". To demand that one believes the earth was founded in seven days, 7000 years ago, with fossils fixed in place to fool scientists of our day, is to demand a level of credulity that simply demands rank stupidity of people and projects a version of God that cries out to be rejected as false -- which it is. To be required to believe literally in the Virgin Birth -- and all the legendary stories about Jesus’ nativity -- demands a suspension of credulity that also violates the integrity of our minds and the Spirit does not demand this, not even within the community of faith.

In contrast, what is happening within the community of faith is a radical re-evaluation, driven by the creative Spirit, of what it is that the constitutes the meaning of the community, and our contemporary memory is in fact very different from that of our forebears, though still identical in its essential content and thrust. Until very recently our forebears would have said that the stories of Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon were part of concrete historical memory -- these stories were of events that happened in real time to real people in a real state. Our memory is different: we remember them as part of a saving story that, as a story, was an essential component in the transformation of the Hebrew community -- but with a clear and unequivocal recognition that they are simply stories and not related in any way to real-time happenings. It is the story qua story that is a memory, and the power of that story to transform is not limited to Hebrew times. The story of David can still move to transform life even today. What the Spirit does not ask of us is to believe that these stories were historically true when we know from hard evidence they were not. The Spirit does not ask us to be a credulous people.

How is it, then, that the community of faith discerns that the words spoken by the Spirit through the memory of the community is credible? There is a sense in which this is the most important question any of us within the community can ask.

Email comment on 6.1 Introduction to Credibility in faith

1.6.2 The credibility of bringing a knowledge of God

In the third book in the series, I shall be developing the basis of Trinitarian knowing of God and a more full exploration of the point here would have to wait that book. The point is this: that the community knows that, in the witness of the Spirit through its memory, the Christian community 'knows' guide with a fullness that can never be transcended at least under the conditions of physical human life. This is not an issue of intellectual knowledge or of the adequacy or inadaquacy of our models and paradigms. It is certainly true that intellectually our understanding of God changes. The death of theism in the 20th century and the rise of a new model or new models in the present time is changing radically many aspects of how we understand God intellectually. But project ahead 100 million years to the existence of successors to the species homo sapiens whose brainpower makes us as homo erectus is to us, yet the 'knowing' of God that we now possess will not be transcended. Of 'knowing' God -- and being known by God -- we lack nothing -- not by our attainment but by the word of the Spirit. This is the cornerstone of the credibility of what the Spirit speaks to us.

Email comment on 6.2 The credibility of bringing a knowledge of God

1.6.3 The credibility of the world as grace

In similar view to the previous section, the development of this response, too, lies in a future book, in this case, the second book in the series, 'Model Basics'. It is easy to confuse the issue of seeing the universe as grace with the issue of credibility mentioned above. What both the Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments speak of constantly is the manifestation of grace that defies physics -- at least as we understand the physics. In a world in which the nature of physics was controlled by Newtonian concepts of the laws of nature there was no choice for Christians but between outright rejection of the 'miraculous' on the one hand, and credulity on the other. However, the world is no longer seen through Newtonian eyes and the game-plan has changed completely. Quantum Mechanics has opened up an entirely new way of seeing -- and experiencing -- the physical universe.

What the Spirit witnesses to is the power to transform human life and community: literally, to save it. We cannot even begin to hear the Spirit speaking such a message if we operate on a purely physical level. This became the tragedy of the liberal interpretation of Christianity. It demanded the community think only at the physical level -- and it was a Newtonian physics at that. As noted earlier, pastoral care became simply psychotherapy in a religious guise and the church's social proclamation an echo of the secular agenda. The conservative reaction was authentic in its rejection of liberalism, which was based upon an outmoded model even in its ascendancy.

But something profound is happening within the faith community. As the implications of the physical universe as quantum reality is changing our way of thinking, so there is a realisation that the universe is not a closed system that Newtonian physics postulated. Most radically, as will be explored in Book 2, we are realising that the universe presents itself according to the stance we take before reality, and that when we stand before reality as seen in and through grace, once more we can be grasped by the possibility, excluded under Newtonian physics, that, “with God anything is possible”.

What is happening is that the faith community is rediscovering the authenticity of a model of reality which accords direct engagement of God in, through and with everything that happens and that the 'miraculous' is everyday reality. The credibility of the ancient testimonies as vehicles of the Spirit is being affirmed and reaffirmed daily in the life of the present community. When they Spirit attests the power of God in the universe and over the universe the credibility of that attestation is found in the living experience of the community.

Email comment on 6.3 The credibility of the world as grace

1.6.4 The credibility of the faith

In the letter to the Galatians chapter 5, Paul listed nine "fruits of the Spirit". He probably never intended this to be an exhaustive list or a definitive one but as a list it has served the community well over the centuries in directing the focus of our attention on what occurs in human community when and as the Spirit is heard.

Now while all the these 'fruits' have 'non-Spirit' counterparts (although it can be maintained that whereever they occur they are fruits of the Spirit), the experience of the faith community is that they only manifest themselves under adverse conditions when and as the community lives under the word of the Spirit -- lives inside its memory. As Jesus pointed out, it is not hard to love those who love you: it takes the extraordinary power of the Spirit to love those who are your enemies. The authenticity of Christian fellowship is not found in sectarian banding together of like-minded people but in the reaching across deep divides. This is why the entire band of those who recently have been working to split and divide the church so that it comprises only of those who agree with the particular theological party-line are outside the Spirit, however zealous their religiosity. The parishes and dioceses that have split away are doomed to wither and die because by their very existence they deny the life of the Spirit.

The entire Western Church, of course, lives under the judgement of God because of its divisions, as does the whole Church, divided between East and West. In this divide, the Church of Rome is just as much under the judgement as the Protestant churches or the Eastern Church. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God".

In creating a fictional picture of the first generation church in the early chapters of his gospel, part two, Luke created an unfortunate legacy for the future of a vision that there was a time when the Christian community was 'of one heart and mind'. Reality was that this was never so. From the very beginning, even among the Twelve when they were with Jesus, there has been division, disharmony and discord. The endless struggle of the faith community is to find and express the fruit of the Spirit -- all of those listed by Paul -- into the constant living experience of all these dissonant notes. The credibility of the power of the Spirit is not found in the sectarian solution of excluding from the community all those who disagree with its dominant group but in the finding of a fellowship that transcends disharmony, even enmities. When one person or group refuses to share the Eucharistic meal with another who is baptised, then those who refuse place themselves outside the Spirit and in so far as then, among themselves, they share the Lord's Supper they eat and drink condemnation upon themselves. When, though, the baptised community sees past theological and ecclesial differences, passed ethnic and cultural divisions, past gender and class barriers and everything else that divides, and share Eucharist together, then the word of the Spirit is authenticated.

It is not just in relation to love that the scheme of authentication can be explored. The same route can be taken with each and every one of the fruits of the Spirit. As one example, it is easy to be joyful when life is full of vitality and pleasure and all is going well. The test of joy as the fruit of the Spirit is found in the face of tragedy, disaster, disappointment, loss and frustration. It is when joy is found here, where the world can see no possible cause for or source of joy that the word of the Spirit is authenticated.

Email comment on 6.4 The credibility of the faith

1.6.5 The credibility of the centre that holds

What the two testimonies, Hebrew and Apostolic, witness to is that the faith community can face the loss of every single element in life, even to total death and destruction, yet know that its centre, its core, is indestructible and from this call will spring new life. Thomas Oden, in his book, The Structure of Reality, describes God as the "slayer of all values". The most profound of all our spiritual struggles is our determination to hold on to values in the face of their destruction and, our refusal to let go and allow God to destroy everything we hold dear and good. This applies to things, people, principals, traditions, theologies -- everything. The book of Lamentations is terrible reading yet it should be basic text for Spirituality 101. In these five powerful poems, written probably contemporaneously with the appalling suffering arising from the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, we have probably the most expressive statement of the experience of God, the slayer of all values. For the apostolic church, of course, this core experience was the execution of Jesus. What is testified to in both instances is that while everything of value to the community was destroyed it discovered that its centre was indestructible.

That is an experience that Spirit speaks to us about and the credibility of that testimony is validated time and again in the living experience of the community of faith corporately and individually.

There is much more that could be written about the ways in which the experience of the faith community constantly provides it with attestation of credibility to the word of the Spirit. To sum up, the community, through scripture and liturgy, constantly opens itself to the memory of the action of the Spirit in its past. When it does so, the Spirit speaks to it the word that brings the memory to bear upon the community’s present issues and challenges. The authenticity of the word of the Spirit as attested through the way its power is manifested as fruit in the life and actions of the faith community. In every case the Spirit’s authentic word is made known in circumstances where all 'worldly' solutions fail.

Email comment on 6.5 The credibility of the centre that holds

Email comment on Chapter 1.6 The credibility of Faith

Page Load: 489 msec