Faith as Trust

 

Faith as Trust

© Thomas C. Sorenson 2024

 

This is part of a chapter of a book I’m working on titled How Can I Be a Christian?

 

I have long understood faith as trust. Faith is not primarily believing things you can’t prove are true, though that is what most people in our context think that it is. Faith as trust isn’t belief that facts are true. It is accepting and relying on the reality of the spiritual dimension of existence. All human civilizations have had an understanding of that spiritual dimension. Sometimes they have called it God. Sometimes they have called it something else. They have all, however, reached for understanding of the spiritual. They have expressed their understanding in their system of symbols and mythic stories.. The primary system of symbols and mythic stories in my context, though certainly not the only one, is Christianity. I have accepted Christianity as I understand it as my way of comprehending the reality and the character of the spiritual dimension of all that is. That I consider my faith to be primarily trust means that I live as though I knew that what I learn of the spiritual through Christianity were objectively true though I know that I can never prove that it is. Faith as truth is a leap of faith, to use Kierkegaard’s term for it. The Christianity that I trust is my faith because I choose it as my faith.

It is perfectly legitimate for anyone to ask me: Why do that? What do you get out of it that you wouldn’t have without it? Whatever that is, aren’t you just deluding yourself that it comes from something real? Isn’t it true that you have no real reason for doing it, you’re just doing it because you want to? Aren’t you just being self-indulgent? Isn’t it still true that you do and can know nothing about this ultimate reality on which you say you rely?  Isn’t living in trust in it the same as just pretending? You can pretend any damned thing you want. Pretending doesn’t make it so.

In a way all of that is true, but here is another truth. Everyone needs a way to get through life. Life is precarious. Life is contingent. Life always includes pain and loss. Life always includes death. It is of course perfectly possible to live life superficially despite all that. It’s easy enough to avoid the hard questions about life, to live life not just not knowing all the answers but not even knowing that there are profound questions. That there are questions about the nature of reality, of what is real and what isn’t, about how we know what is real and what isn’t, questions about the meaning of life. It’s easy to live not even knowing that such questions exist. That’s how most people live, not knowing what they don’t know.

Yet some of us do ask the profound questions. We ask about ontology. We ask about epistemology. We ask about meaning. The post-modern existential questions really are “what is real” and “does it mean anything at all.” The easiest answers to those questions for those of us raised in a secular age are “only the physical world is real,” and “I don’t worry about what it means.” Yet that way of living is ultimately existentially damaging. It leads to one of two things, despair or unchecked hedonism. Of course, not everyone who lives this way experiences either of these things, but they don’t only because they neither think nor live their way of life to its unavoidable conclusion. Indeed, unchecked hedonism is almost certainly a vain attempt to avoid dealing with the despair that eventually comes to everyone who lives only on a superficial plain and for whom only the material is real.

Yet here’s a truth about our experience of physical reality that few people today recognize. We think physical reality is real because we experience it, but all we really have is our perception of what appears to us to be a reality outside of ourselves. We can’t prove that it is real. All we can prove is that we perceive and experience it as real. This limitation to our ability to know is existential. It comes from our nature as centered selves. From a center that we perceive to be ourself we experience something that appears to us to be other than ourself. To live in the material world that we perceive is to choose to accept what we perceive as real, and it is to rely on the reality of that which we perceive. Even people who are totally unaware that they are making such a choice are making such a choice. Not to decide is actually itself a decision. It is the decision not to decide. Even for those who live this way, acceptance of physical reality as real is a choice.

As we choose to accept the physical world we perceive as real, we can also make a different choice. We can choose to accept the reality of the spiritual and live trusting in its reality. To do so is not to engage in individualistic fantasizing. It is in part reliance on one’s own experience that there is something more to everything that is than is immediately apparent, but it is also to look beyond oneself to the experience of humanity generally. We don’t need to rely on ourselves alone in our seeking to understand the true nature of reality and to find meaning in life. We have millennia of human experience to turn to and to learn from. That universal human experience says that the physical world in which we perceive ourselves to live is not all there is to reality. Though humanity generally accepting the truth of something does not prove that the thing is true, it is as possible and reasonable to choose to live accepting and trusting in the reality of the spiritual dimension as it is to choose to live without accepting and trusting in it. Those two choices are in fact existentially identical in that they are both choices. There is no way to avoid living in trust, trust, that is, of some understanding of reality as real. That’s what all humans do whether they know it or not. Therefore, choosing to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual is at least as existentially justifiable as is choosing to live without the spiritual.

We all live in trust. The only questions are what we trust and what it means for us to trust it. To trust in something is to assume that it is real, but it is also more than that. It is to rely on the reality of that which we trust. Rely on it for what? Rely on it to shape the reality in which we live. Most people in my context trust only in the reality of that which they perceive as the material world. We people of faith make a different choice. We choose to live in a world that is shaped by an additional dimension, the dimension of the spiritual. We people of faith believe that we gain things from our choice that the other possible existential choice cannot give us, and, if we’re honest, we concede that we are indeed making a choice about which world we will live in.

So is it self-indulgent to trust in the reality of the spiritual? In a sense yes, but only in the sense that any decision about what to trust as ultimate reality is self-indulgent. The choice of what to trust as ultimate reality is unavoidably self-indulgence. Whether we know we’re doing it or not, no one can avoid making a decision about what to accept and trust as the ultimate truth. In our secular, western culture it is actually easier to accept and trust in physical reality alone than it is to accept and trust in spiritual reality. The dominant culture of North America in which I live and from which I write was formed by the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Those profound historical developments produced a culture in which the findings of science are accepted as true. Our culture accepts as true that to which human reason leads us whether through the methodology of science or through rational thought alone. Our culture predisposes us toward choosing only the material as real.

To choose to accept and trust in the spiritual is countercultural. I don’t mean a superficial choice to call oneself a Christian or some other type of person of faith. Most Americans probably still do that. I mean to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual with all of one’s being—body, mind, and spirit. Not to give a faith tradition lip service but really to live into it. To understand its teachings. To understand its history. To critique both its teachings and its history in a way that makes it more true to its real nature than faith traditions usually are, Christianity perhaps least of all.

Few people in my culture ever accept and trust in the spiritual at that depth, yet only accepting the spiritual at that depth truly makes it real for us. Only accepting the spiritual at that level truly leads us to shaping our reality on the basis of what we trust is true of the spiritual. Doing that is what faith truly is. It isn’t mere acceptance of alleged facts as true. It is choosing to devote one’s whole self to living with the reality of the spiritual in trust that what one understands of the spiritual does not deceive. Very few if any of us ever do that perfectly. I know I certainly don’t, but it is still true that faith is trust. Deep trust. Existential trust. This is a truth I try, rarely very successfully, to live into. Christianity would be truer to its true self, and it would avoid the negative conclusions so many people draw from it, if more people understood faith as trust.