A Balanced Faith
Do we really have to choose between pursuing our faith with the intellect — asking critical questions, and bringing our best reasoning to bear on our faith — or enjoying a deeply emotional, passionate, and heartfelt faith that moves us? The truth is, we need a balance of the two.
~Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White, Adam Hamilton
For centuries, certain segments of the Church have been anti-science. Whether it was when Galileo made the bold assertion that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, or the seemingly unending fights about teaching evolution in schools, or even in more contemporary times when it comes to the data and pushback surrounding COVID protocols, mandates and vaccines.
People, who I would like to believe are on the fringe of the Christian movement, have been particularly vocal about passing along misinformation in the last two years. Some leaders of these groups go so far as to frame the whole matter as a battle between faith and fear. “If you wear a mask or ‘get the jab’, then you don’t trust God!” It’s ridiculous and embarrassing for those of us who are out here trying to do the right thing.
Ultimately, COVID doesn’t care about your religious or political beliefs. It just wants to spread, which it does, very effectively. I don’t even want to know how many outbreaks can be attributed to worship settings where people believed their faith was enough to overcome an airborne illness. Even one is too many, and I know it’s a lot more than that.
What is this fear of science when it comes to certain segments of the Christian faith? Where does it come from? Why is it so persistent and ugly?
We see something similar when it comes to education. There are certain segments of the Christian faith that are anti-education, especially higher education, because they think it has some kind of agenda to turn people into atheists. As somebody who holds a Masters degree, I can assure you that education at that level is what we make of it. If people are afraid that young adults are turning to atheism by going to college, then maybe they need to do a better job at discipleship to give them a solid foundation of faith before they go.
In my educational process, I was taught biblical criticism. And I know that some people are going to read that and not know the difference between intellectual criticism and being critical. But there is a difference, and it is significant.
I wasn’t taught to be critical of the Bible. I wasn’t taught to disdain Scripture. That’s not biblical criticism. Biblical criticism is about asking question of the text. Exploring the deeper layers of meaning of the text that are present because of the cultural and language barriers, as well as the barriers of time.
Biblical criticism takes the Bible very seriously by trying to find out what it says. It looks at things like textual variants in the manuscripts to determine what is closer to the original text. For example, did you know that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts we have of the Gospel of Mark stop at Mark 16:8? That the available evidence we have seems to indication that Mark 16:9 and following was a later addition and not part of the original text? When I read through Mark, I stop at 16:8. Not because my education made me an atheist, but because my education helped me better understand the truth.
When it comes to our faith, we are not called to check our brains at the door before we sit down in our pews. But that’s what far too many people do. In fact, there are too many pastors that want their parishioners to do that because they are going to be much easier to control and manipulate if they do. If God is who Scripture says God is, then there is nothing about our intellect that is going to negate or destroy what God can do. But that seems to be the fear, doesn’t it?
People get emotionally caught up in their faith that the slightest suggestion that they may be thinking of something the wrong way is offensive to them. It’s labelled as persecution or heresy. Why is that? Because when we are emotionally invested in something, we aren’t always as clear-headed as we could be.
The best approach, then, is to balance out our faith. A faith that is both emotional and intellectual is one that is going to have a much stronger foundation in the long run. We shouldn’t ignore the emotions any more than we should ignore the intellectual side of our faith. But we should strive to bring them together in harmony with one another. It is only then that we truly achieve balance in our faith.
