IVP - Strangely Dim

Headless Faith

There’s a church near my house that recently updated its billboard to say “Our faith is 2000 years old. Our thinking is not.” I hate it.

Oh, I suppose I understand the sentiment: it’s a more braggadocious way of saying “Don’t check your brains at the church door”—or something like that. But I still hate it, because it insinuates that thinking has nothing to do with believing.

Why is it OK for our faith to be two thousand years old, while our thinking has to be somehow novel? What bragging rights does longevity grant to faith? For that matter, why is longevity a detriment to thought?

Oh, I suppose I understand not all that was considered true in the early days of Christian faith is still counted as true today. We now acknowledge that Christianity allows no space for slavery, for example, and the humanness of women is more readily acknowledged in our time than in the dawn of the Christian era.

But I’d argue that faith had a hand in forming that understanding. That’s long been a credo of the church: “I believe that I might understand.” And the act of believing certainly involves thinking, so to divorce thought from faith is to hamstring both.

Meanwhile, quick thinking with no respect for history is an embarrassing hallmark of our era. “Chronological snobbery,” I’ve heard it called. Everything dead is dead because it wasn’t as smart as us—I mean, we. So we should probably be suspicious of our own fresh thinking, because once we've segregated our thinking from all the thinking that’s gone on before us, we’re free to cause all sorts of trouble for the people around us, or the people who will live on when we ourselves are dead.

The idea that new thinking is vulnerable to error is proven in our own experience, but it is grounded in ancient history. The Bible counts gray hairs as the crown of the righteous, while God shuts up Job by saying “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Meanwhile, faith is defined as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for” (Hebrews 11:1-2).

If the ancients are to be commended for their belief, then at least some of their thought processes are to be commended, as well how they acted on that faith. Believing, after all, is a function of both brain and body. We encounter God in some capacity, which sets in motion a response that involves both thinking and doing. That’s not all faith is, but it surely isn’t less than that.

So I celebrate my old faith, and I welcome fresh perspectives, but I will not reject the understanding of my forebears. To do so would be to cut off my brain to spite my face—or something like that.

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While you're out surfing, check out my new blog: Loud Time. Here I'm strange; there I'm loud.