Believing in believing

Believing in believing
Stephen Curkpatrick

A progressive focus on the experience of believing occurs in the emerging modern era. With the pervasive elevation of reason’s critical authority, Christian belief was increasingly disturbed by its inability to avoid reason as a newly applauded arbiter of all things.

Focus on the experience of believing takes pressure off the need to verify what one believes before the forums of reason. The phenomenon of believing cannot be contested. As an activity of thinking and volition, believing has its own validity in the modern focus on the human subject as the centre of personal meaning.

In the difficulty of making any claims about God in the modern era, spiritual or religious impetus itself becomes a crucial focus of engagement. “Believing in believing” is a religious imperative when God remains a higher reality behind the religious phenomenon of diverse expressions of belief. Human aspirations for God are therefore deemed to be the appropriate focus of faith.

Believing in believing is inevitable when it is conceded that God, “as God really is,” is beyond knowing in any particular way. If God is beyond such knowing, believing in believing is also the ultimate religious response to a modern challenge: Is there a God? Believing in believing neutralises this question and assumedly gives space for the experience of believing.

In the focus on believing as a universal human experience, Christian testimony to God is assumed to represent metaphors, behind which, God is as God really is. Father, Son and Holy Spirit merely represent masks or adjectives for God. Yet if God is another possibility behind God than God disclosed in Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, there is no way of knowing what God is, much less that God is love. This is not a Christian option.

In Christian theology, God as triune is self-disclosing in the initiative of love, calling people to volitional relationship in Christ and to integral humanity through transformation in the Spirit. If God is something other than this disclosure, it is an abstraction to which humans might orientate their lives in obedient devotion but without any way of correlating this focus with an affirmation that God is love and encountered in intimacy in the midst of creation.

The triune disclosure of God in love is affirmed in the excess of New Testament testimony. This disclosure is focused in Jesus Christ as wholly representing the gracious character of God as the Word in the beginning with God. There is no necessity for second-guessing the character of “God behind God” and therefore focusing on the experience of believing as an alternative locale of plausible contemporary religious claims.

The disclosure of God in Jesus Christ is often reduced to symbolism, with “the Christ” as a symbol of human ideals that are shared across religious traditions. Such ideals become necessary when God behind the metaphors of God remains unknowable. Human self-transcendence, which we see in freedom, conscience or hope, can be transposed into “the divinity within.” If it is conceded that God as God really is remains unknown, divinity, assumedly discernible in human experience, can become a focus of believing.

Christian affirmation of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ gives sharp focus to genuine hearing and response to another word, other than any word from within human experience or perspective. The Word of God, who came among us as one of us and continues to be taught by the Spirit in every generation of response, discloses triune grace and truth for integral humanity within creation. While God may be inexhaustible in gifts and wisdom, another other God, unknown as to character and intimacy, does not hover behind the disclosure of God given in Christian testimony.

Christian faith, including its roots in Israel’s witness, gives testimony to the unexpected beyond the possibilities of religious experience—an event of grace in life, death and resurrection as the source of transformation within humanity. God behind God, as God supposedly is without Christian metaphors, is no testimony to the triune initiative of love expressed in Jesus Christ or God’s presence through the Spirit within a new community in creation.

In Christian witness, God is inscrutable as to speculation. God is disclosed as love. In the inscrutability of God within assertions of God behind God, any claim to intimacy with God is implausible. Unknown as to character, God behind God could be perceived as absolute demand or in unqualified distinction, as the antithesis of everything mortal or tangible—that is, an illusion. These possibilities have all emerged at some time as the impassible, the inexpressible or the unknowable. Any quest for God behind God beyond Christian testimony will always stumble over these impenetrable perceptions of God. An assumedly feasible alternative is to turn to the human person as a site of believing in believing.

Christian faith is not concerned with believing in God in a certain way as against other possible ways but with whether God can be believed at all. Without the disclosure of God in the initiative of love by which God is known as to character and intimacy, God remains unknown despite human yearnings for something more. Speculative conjectures about God or the “something more” remain just that, speculative. This difficulty is assumedly met by locating conjecture within the subject as believing in believing. This too, remains speculation yet nevertheless impervious to challenge, because it is located within the human subject as a significant focus in contemporary disciplines of human self-understanding.

Christian testimony to God disclosed in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit does not represent a set of metaphors behind which God is as God really is. This is antithetical to Christian theology, which gives testimony to God disclosed in redemptive and transformative grace in the midst of creation. This affirmation is the foundation of Christian theology against its diminution in any spirituality that posits God behind God with Christian faith as a subsidiary expression or sub-set of such spirituality.

Believing in believing is a consequence of suppressing Christian testimony to God who is wholly given to humanity in love through Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit. Yet believing, as the focus of faith, gives no guidance on whether to believe because it is a helpful human activity alongside other activities or whether it is possible to have faith in something, other than the experience of believing, that is relevant to human life. The believer is caught between believing in believing and unique possibilities given to faith. The first can be invested with many things—religious, political or aesthetic. The second is a specific focus of faith, yet this is nevertheless gutted when the focus is shifted merely to believing in believing. The human psyche represents a bewildering labyrinth of possibilities for believing. Believing in believing is a recipe for confusion.

Believing in believing, in which the focus of believing is only given within the scope of human ideals and experience, is the flip-side of atheism. Yet the contemporary focus on human experience and believing in believing as a verifiable activity, mistakenly, is preferred to focus on Jesus Christ who represents possibilities given to faith in a word otherwise than the relative verities of human experience, desire and conjecture.

To probe an array of speculative ideals within human desire, perchance to peep into the mystery of God behind God, is not given to Christian faith. God is truly other in being disclosed in Jesus Christ as crucified and risen. This initiative remains incomprehensible apart from faith. For Christians, the character of God is wholly disclosed as an open mystery—love given in excess self-giving in Jesus Christ and in intimacy through the Holy Spirit.