Is Faith Useful? What We Have Instead Is History
We lose something essential when we present Christ as being useful.
That is, believers lose something when we begin with the premise that faith in Christ or following Jesus will usefully solve problems or provide answers in a person’s life. Maybe it will. But a set of solutions is not what we have been given.
We have history instead. The core of what believers believe centers on the way God entered history, the way he lived and moved as a human being, and died. We have the written record of this, the documents written by witnesses, and confirmed and carried among communities of other witnesses, about who lived and what happened in first-century Galilee, Judea, and surrounding lands. We have the historic movement that spread out across the world and its cultures, starting from the Mediterranean’s eastern shore.
“Useful” has a different starting point than this—it begins with the self. “Useful” means useful to a particular person, one who is as broken as all of us are. This measure makes the standard of evaluation the utility to that particular soul.
Meanwhile, history just is. If the history is true, then it presents a set of facts to be confronted. The story and the history we have in Jesus are so full of the work of something transcendent that the events of this story stretch to the absurd. Prophecy, virgin birth, miracles, resurrection. Plenty do not want to confront this story as history, and who can blame them? The broken self breaks further against these facts. Faith in Christ means peering deeper and farther into reality, and it is too vast. We find answers bigger than our needs, and we find a helplessness opening onto many responses, one of them sorrow.
Jesus was clear on this. Followers came to him and he warned them away. See his words to the crowd beginning at Luke 14:26, for example. Jesus made clear: If you want a tidy and complete life without loss of what you have today, without cracks in the surface of life opening upon fissures in your soul, then follow something that is easier and safer than this way.
A related point arises from this. The one who looks to Christ does not have as much affinity as we might imagine with the one who is avowedly spiritual. We look for connection here, but it is elusive. The spiritual person lifts up the feelings of the individual human spirit. The Bible describes a different Spirit bringing a different experience.
In fact, the Christian’s nearer affinity is with atheists. The atheist is, or claims to be, determined to see only observable or credible facts. I am, or claim to be, determined to do the same. Among the facts I see are those God has revealed through the record left to us of first-century events and the meaning found in that record. The atheist disqualifies consideration of this much, but beyond this difference, seeking the factual truth is nearer to the matter at hand.
The place where all this leads is both logical and anything but; both useful and also rendering utility useless. If anything can gather, move, and lift the scattered pieces of broken human hearts, then it has to be big. And so we have this truth: the story so big and true and full as to be history as well as faith, one imprinted upon the other. Alongside this, mere usefulness to a single human life is a meager, passing thing, and ultimately not nearly enough.
Photo: “Mediterranean Sea Area at Night (NASA, International Space Station, 10/15/11)” by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center