In 1986, my wife Antoinette and I were in a shopping mall in Christchurch, New Zealand, when we noticed people looking at the televisions in the stores. My cousin, whom we were meeting for lunch, arrived, and said, “Have you heard about the space shuttle?” We hadn’t heard that the Challenger had blown up when it took off from the Kennedy Space Center. The horrifying picture that exploded across the screens that day reminded us of the dangers of space exploration. Seven astronauts died that day. On October 7, 1988, after a two and a half year hiatus from space, NASA launched the Discovery. Five more astronauts put their lives on the line to try again. They put their faith in the engineers to correct the problems and design a better and safer system. They couldn’t know with certainty that they would survive the flight. They couldn’t know with perfect confidence that everything would function properly. But they volunteered to go anyway. A few miles south of where we live another rocket will be launched to go to the moon this week.
Gary Parker, sees in this story a parable of the way faith works in our lives.[1] He finds three elements at work. First, these five crewmen climbed on board the Discovery at great personal risk. Second, they responded to the call of their mission out of a deep sense of commitment to the program of space exploration. Third, their commitment spurred them to action. They placed faith in their mission, their ship, their abilities, and their equipment.
Faith can be defined as the willingness to trust our lives to a person or God, whom we cannot prove as trustworthy, before the actual moment of risk, commitment and action occurs. We may believe that God, by definition, is trustworthy. “Here is a trustworthy saying: if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.”[2] Faithfulness, or trustworthiness is central to the character of God as revealed in the Scriptures. But having faith, means acting without final knowledge, or proven certainty. It means we go before we know the final results. When we define faith in religious terms, it means the same thing. But instead of trusting a mechanical ship, or a crew of support engineers, or even our own abilities, we cast our dependence upon God. Religious faith leads us to take hold of a scientifically unprovable God, and it allows him to take hold of us.
This is what Hebrews 11 is asserting. “Now faith is being certain of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”[3]
What is the certainty claimed by faith? It is the subjective, personal appropriation of the truth that compels us to respond by virtue of its innate authority that meets our own need. It is not fantasy, the projection of our own desires, as Freud contended “The very idea of ‘an idealized Superman’ in the sky – to use Freud’s phrase – is ‘ so patently infantile and so foreign in reality, that … it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never rise above this view of life.’ He predicted, however, that as the masses of people become more educated, they would ‘turn away’ from ‘the fairy tales of religion.”[4]
It is not insanity, a delusional obsession with fanatical imaginings, e.g. the portrayal of some preachers and prophets in novels and movies. The certainty of faith is the willingness to risk our lives for what we consider to be worthwhile, by committing ourselves to something greater than ourselves, and taking appropriate action to do something about it. We are not talking about intellectual faith in abstract theory, but the faith that causes us to do something different with our lives.
If you review the names of the ancient heroes and heroines of faith listed in Hebrews 11, you will find that their faith resulted in risk, commitment and action based on their trust in the guiding hand of God. People can have this sort of faith without being religious. Marxists and capitalists place their faith in a political and economic system, which they believe will provide the greatest benefits for the largest number of people. Materialists place their faith in the proposition that happiness comes through the acquisition of wealth and property and spend their lives trying to prove that it is true.
Pascal (1623-1662) put forward the proposition that faith was a wager. Christianity cannot be proved conclusively by reason, but neither can it be disproved. If it turns out that Christianity is true, we have everything to gain; but if it turns out to be false, we have nothing to lose. We should accept the inevitable risk of faith, and gamble on the truth of Christianity. This was the essential step of Pascal: that doubt leads to faith. “You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?” We all wager one way or another. Not to acknowledge the wager is to take the risk of losing.
Soren Kierkegaard maintained that
“To gain eternity without risking anything is impossible.. ‘To risk everything on an if’, you say. My friend, if you do not take a risk on an ‘if’, then you take no risk: take away the ‘if’ and you take away the risk. You cannot really have any objection to risking on an ‘if’, for this is what risking is. If therefore you have any objection, then it must be against risking itself. Take care that you are not disappointed, by claiming that you have nothing against risking, you are quite ready for that – only not on an ‘if’, which is just as though one were to say, ‘I have nothing against swimming, on the contrary I should love to swim – only not in water.’
“So a shudder seizes the man, and he reaches out to grasp the others: I must have some certainty before I take the risk, he says. Again, to be certain before one takes the risk is putting the cart before the horse, or filling your mouth with flour before you speak. No, if your mouth is full of flour, you must first get rid of it before you can speak. And so with taking a risk. If a man is certain about something, then there is no risk, if he is to take a risk he must get rid of the certainty, as one who as a child was certain, or thought he was, must get rid of the certainty in order to be able to take a risk – so far is it from being true that you must first be certain before you can take a risk…. This is the cunning of existence: the utmost human certainty is just what fools us most certainly for eternity – and the very least human certainty is just what provides the possibility of eternity.”[5]
In Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, the poet lamented the necessity of choosing one road over another. He could not take them both, so he took the one less traveled. He describes for us the necessity of commitment, risk and action in selecting one path or another. How do we choose which road to take? Our choice involves the risk of faith. That does not mean making choices without reference to the realities of our circumstances. We don’t choose vocations for which we have no aptitude. We don’t make investments when we have no capital. We don’t follow gurus whose character is suspect. When we hear a voice calling us to take risks, to take action, to make a commitment, we need to test its validity – to test the spirits to see whether they are from God. We test them by the teaching of Scripture, by the counsel of people we respect, by the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit, and our conscience. But when we have completed this process, and we believe that it is a genuine summons of God to us, then we dare not fail to act upon it.
I am a Christian because I believe for a fact that God came into our world through a particular human being at a particular point in history and invited me to follow him. I had to make a decision to respond to that call. I had to take the risk that Jesus was real and not a fantasy figure. In my reading of the Gospels I was impressed by who he was, what he did, and said, and claimed to be. I agreed in my mind with the substance of his teaching. But I also had to make a commitment to do something about it. I had to decide to act on what I believed to be true. Would I let him into my life as Lord and Savior? Would I trust in his sacrifice upon the Cross as atonement for my sins? When I did, it began to change my life. I began to find that, because Jesus was God the Son, he was not a mere figure of history but a living presence. Each day he talked with me through his Word and Spirit and invited my response through prayer. No matter where I was, he was present to assist me and accompany me in all that I did. I was never alone. He brought into my life a purpose, a joy, and a peace that I wanted to share with others.
Decisions regarding my future began to change. Up to this point I was planning to go to university and study law, and then go into politics. Now I wanted to share what I had learned and experienced. Just as those who aspired to become astronauts had to go through a specialized rigorous training, I chose a course of study that would launch me into a different kind of orbit. As my college days were coming to an end, I had to decide which seminary to attend. As I prayed about it, I sought information from seminaries in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and England. Since I was an Anglican, I thought I might as well go to England. If I had been a Roman Catholic, I probably would have chosen to go to Rome. If you were going to do it, I thought, you might as well do it properly, and go to the best school.
Can you see the implications of this definition of faith? “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” I was risking a lot by leaving home, making a commitment to go overseas, and to take the actions necessary to make it possible. Yet, all this I did as a twenty-three year-old. It wasn’t because I had extraordinary faith, but because I was sure that God was leading me, and certain that he would take care of me to fulfill his purposes. Remember what I said before. The certainty claimed by faith is the subjective personal appropriation of the truth that compels us to respond by virtue of its innate authority, that meets my own need. I had accepted Jesus’ authority in my life, and that liberated me from other desires. Faith is not fantasy, the projection of our own desires. Faith is not insanity, a delusional obsession with fanatical imaginings. Faith is the willingness to risk our lives for what we consider to be worthwhile, by committing ourselves to something greater than ourselves, and taking appropriate action to do something about it.
My faith led me to make decisions, and to take actions that literally made me into the person that I now am. My journey to England resulted in my working in London and meeting Antoinette. Our marriage required faith. We took the risk, that though we came from different backgrounds, we were committed to Christ, and to one another, and we took the action that our love required. When I made the decision to leave New Zealand and go overseas for my graduate education, I had no proof of the validity of my choice. I had no conclusive evidence that God directed me in it. I may believe retrospectively that he did, but I have no conclusive proof. That is why doubt continually plagues us. Without proof, we always have the uncertainty. There is always the possibility that I could have, should have, stayed in New Zealand, and my life would have been very different. But if we possessed proof, then it would no longer be faith, but knowledge.
Clark Pinnock writes, “Faith does not involve a rash decision made without reflection. It is the act of wholehearted trust in the goodness and promises of God who confronts us with his reality and gives us ample reason to believe that he is there.”[6]
What about you? What is Christ calling you to do? Too many people do not experience the benefits of faith in Christ because they are not willing to take the risk, to make the commitment that leads to action. They hold back, they compromise, they delay doing anything, and they miss out on the excitement of faith that could launch them into the discovery of new life. Remember Robert Frost’s famous lines:
“I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
[1] Gary E. Parker, The Gift of Doubt, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1990, 77
[2] 2 Timothy 2:11,13
[3] Hebrews 11:1-3
[4] Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God (New York, The Free Press, 2002), 36
[5] Soren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, edited and translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York, Harper & Row, 1965), 154,155
[6] Clark Pinnock, A Case for Faith, 13, q.v. Gary E. Parker, op.cit.,
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