Monday, March 21, 2011

Letting Go of Knowledge and Returning to Faith



Often what gets called “faith” is not “faith”. “Faith” is not a certainty; it is “the substance of things hoped for” - and when we divorce “faith” from “hope”, I believe we get a mutant version that can be very destructive

Fwiw, one of the biggest theological mutations in the current Church that I think needs to be fixed is the over-emphasis on knowledge almost to the exclusion of faith. (I think that’s probably why the brethren seem to be emphasizing grace more and more recently - to return to faith in Him over confidence in self.) If you remove faith from the equation, you remove hope from your perspective - which means that when the black-and-white certainty of supposed knowledge shatters, there generally is no foundation of faith left on which to fall - since “hope” has been removed from the equation. 

To be clear, I am not saying we can't seek for and find knowledge in some things; I just think we try to hard to know everything and forget too often the need to accept that faith can be enough - that it's OK for some things to remain unseen but believed.  Malleable faith and hope can grow and be molded into ever-changing shapes as new perspectives are encountered and adapted; calcified knowledge shatters when struck or dropped.

1 comment:

Lindsey said...

I absolutely LOVE this post! It put words to thoughts I have been mulling over but had no idea how to express.
Thank you so much!!