Faith is the catch
Are you enjoying the ride so far, getting the message? Yes, it all sounds pretty good: we undergo the Metanoia, the whole world undergoes the Metanoia, we all live happily ever after in a beautiful, golden Metanoia Kingdom. So, what’s the catch?!
Well, we’ve seen it already: faith is the catch. Faith not in ourselves or anything human but in a selfless love teaching divine parent capital G God—the one this letter is basically all about. Faith, yes, in a being whom we can’t interact with in any normal human way; who is literally invisible, inaudible, non-physical, and who most of the time, if not actually all the time, gives the distinct impression of not existing at all! We might find ourselves crying out to them for a whole lifetime, in fact, searching everywhere for them, begging them to talk to us, show us they exist, come to our aid—just for this one time at least, please, please—all, seemingly, completely in vain!
The catch or paradox, therefore, seems to be that we do not find them, they find us—or not as the case may be. In the ordinary run of our lives, as we go about our daily activities, we are so filled with faith in our own agency that any sense or thought of an invisible God who might be useful to us in some way is easily crowded out. The opening typically only comes in that moment of crisis or breakdown that we’ve described in previous chapters, when something goes badly wrong and our faith in ourselves suddenly collapses. But even then, it may or may not happen—the finding of us by that elusive God. Everything seems to turn on this: do we, in that moment of crisis, come into a true awareness of our own foolish, self-destructive selfishness as the cause of our present troubles, or do we do the usual human thing and dumbly, blindly blame everyone but ourselves—our parents, other people, the “system” that always seems to be against us, even the God we think we believe in the existence of?
Wonderful, liberating self-awareness, versus continued self-deception: waking up at last out of a dream of life into true reality! This is the precise point at which we are now ready, open, vulnerable to the spiritual intervention in question, to being found by God. The thing to do, therefore, is to intentionally cultivate such an awareness, otherwise your life will be an unending series of breakdowns—or, worse still, you will be cursed by success and carry on through life oblivious to the real damage you are causing yourself and others! Maintain an outlook, an orientation to the world, of self-effacing humbleness, involving regular, frequent self-reflection, in which you invite the Spirit into your life to show you the way to greater selflessness—this is what I earnestly recommend. Be constantly on the lookout for ways in which you are acting selfishly, give up all your agendas and ego-trips, stop getting defensive every time someone looks at you sideways, get down off your high horse and cry out to God to send their Spirit to help you stop being such a self-centred jerk! When you open yourself up in this way, you become the happy recipient of regular download doses of grace, real spiritual energy and agency, enhancing your faith, giving you the courage you sorely need to be able to let go of your selfish grasping and start to live and act more selflessly. The rest is up to you, to cultivate the self-awareness I am talking about, to open yourself up to the Spirit, to see for yourself that it indeed works, as I have described – that you do, slowly but surely, become a better, more selfless person.
Yes, it’s true that there does still seem to be a catch here, however. The God in question doesn’t appear to be in the business of forcing themself on anyone—not that I have noticed, anyway—rather, as we have just noted, they seem to only intervene in our lives when we reach that point of self-awareness and cry out for it. But—and here’s that pesky catch again—we can never come to such an awareness off our own bat, rather only ever, as usual, through outside intervention in our lives—through the Spirit waking us up to the real truth about ourselves!
At each and every step in the Metanoia process, therefore, we seem to be at the mercy or even whim of the capital G God, to intervene or not, as indeed the case may be. Thus, it seems that they do intervene significantly in some people’s lives, but not so much or even at all in others’—because, as we can readily observe, there is still plenty of selfishness going around out there in the world. Does this God have favourites, we can’t help but ask—hopefully I’m one of them, but maybe I’m not, maybe I’ll just keep missing out?! Certainly, it often seems this way, and historical religions, not excluding Christianity itself, have not been backward in exploiting the apparently gratuitous nature of the intervention in question, using it to set themselves up as exclusive gatekeepers of “salvation”. Thus, there are, in all religious traditions, the “chosen people”, the “elect”, the “true believers”, the privileged community or even nation who win the favour of the residing deity—provided they play their cards right and follow the rules handed down from on high, of course. Jesus, however, I have to tell you if I haven’t already, came to blow all that nonsense away!
The problem here, the glitch in our thinking that causes us to imagine gods who seem to act in arbitrary, exclusive ways, comes from our very natural tendency to see ourselves as separate, self-complete individuals: me “in here” (in my body, in my brain), everyone and everything else, including an invisible God if they exist, “out there”. But is it not self-evident, given all I have shared with you so far in this letter, that such false consciousness is itself the result of the very thing the wonderful Metanoia sets out to resolve, namely our natural-born self-centredness, which constantly causes us to focus in on ourselves, over and against the wide world out there? In reality, we are never separate, self-complete individuals, rather born, essentially, in relationship, connection, with parents, family, community, society, immersed from the very beginning of our lives in language, social life and culture, which form our individual consciousness at the deepest level. And this essential relatedness includes, also, at the very deepest level, the divine parent God who, as I described in the second chapter of this letter, appears to have given birth to our whole universe in the first place.
So, the situation is actually the reverse of how we typically imagine it: rather than an isolated, lonely me, in here, hoping beyond hope for the favour of a distant, self-absorbed God out there; it is actually a distant, self-absorbed me in here, hiding myself away from a loving God out there, whose favour is continuously on offer. Jesus’ famous Parable of the Prodigal Son expresses it beautifully. The son in the story – I’m sure you’re familiar with it – having selfishly and stupidly blown his inheritance from his father on wine, women and song, ending up on skid row sharing food with pigs, fully expects to be judged mercilessly by his father when he returns, so that he plans to grovel and ask only to be taken back as a hired labourer. The father, however, who all the while has been waiting patiently, hoping, ready for his son’s return, ignores the grovelling when it comes and instead restores his son in full to his former position in the family, throwing a big party to celebrate the fact that the young tyro has finally come to his senses and is now ready to start out on the road to becoming a better, more selfless person.
Ready and waiting, ever-present; close-by to us, not distant; the favour, grace and love on offer 24/7. It is as if we are immersed in a field of spiritual force, a “grace field”—think the Force in Star Wars, except all light-side—which exerts a constant, positive pressure on our lives, waiting to be accessed, activated. This grace pressure comes to us through all the human hands around us that offer love and help, through positive aspects of the culture in which we live and breathe, through the watching, waiting, ever-present Spirit. So that it does indeed take an intentional effort on our behalf to keep pushing the grace away, preventing it from flowing into our lives. Any apparent gratuitousness we might sense in the Metanoia process is, therefore, not down to the whim of an unpredictable deity, rather to our own free agency in accepting or rejecting the wonderful grace that is constantly on offer to us.
Free agency: yes, I make the choice; me, myself, I. But still there seems to be a catch, some sort of gratuitous judgement that is being made before our free agency even has a chance to cut in. Thus, a person might be the victim of terrible circumstances in their life, with little or perhaps even none of this “grace pressure” able to penetrate through to them. Or their life might be suddenly snuffed out before they have had any opportunity to accept the grace on offer—a tiny infant that dies tragically, for example. And what about severe disability or illness, physical or mental, which can inhibit or destroy a person’s agency? Fate does indeed seem to be arbitrary and cruel, in some or even many cases. But what is at stake here is not reward or punishment, heaven or hell, or somewhere in between, like the old conception of “limbo” where the souls of unbaptized infants go after death—that is the MO of the old creator God, not the divine parent who Jesus presents. Rather it is passage through the Metanoia for those who are able to and choose to take the cure, and the selfless actions that follow and serve to make the world a better place for all—even, or perhaps especially, for those who have gone before whose lives have indeed been marked by innocent victimhood.
Free agency? No, I don’t mean free will—that’s a different kettle of fish altogether, which I’ll talk to you about in detail in Chapter 6. In the meantime, in Chapter 5 coming up next, there’s a little matter to do with Jesus’ alleged resurrection from the dead that I’m keen to address. So, feel free to have a quick break; I’ll be back shortly.
Commentary 4
From grace to, now, faith: Chapter 4 of Paul’s letter focusses on the second part of the brilliant but flawed formula of atonement that Paul constructs to connect Jesus back into the narrative of Old Testament Judaism. Sola gratia, sola fide and all that: the great mantra of the Reformation, basically an attempt to recover what the reformers saw as the foundational principles of Christian theology and doctrine enunciated by Paul. The wonderful truth of sola fide, by faith alone, is that no human effort, no commitment, no work or works, can, on their own, get true Metanoia going in our lives and propel us along the path to becoming better, more selfless human beings. Paul knew this firsthand, his experience of the Pharisaic life with its futile attempt to force a way back into God’s good books by absolute obedience to the Law. The flaw in Paul’s account, however, comes from the same source, his unreconstructed pharisaic understanding of the nature of God—the sort of God who even keeps good-books! Let’s now look more closely at Paul’s Chapter 4 and see how this unfolds.
“What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?”, Paul starts by asking (4:1-2), “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.” The founding father of the Jewish nation, no less: Paul reasons that if he can demonstrate that the great Abraham was justified by faith rather than works, the rest will fall into line. But we see the problem right from the outset: the aim is still justification, gaining the favour, the grace of the old God, getting back into the good books we imagine they keep.
Paul’s strategy at this point is to draw a clear line between Abraham’s faith on one hand, and his mighty works inspired by this faith on the other. Mighty works might be what in fact really matter in the world, but faith seems to be what matters to Paul’s God. “Faith without works is dead,” wrote the apostle James (2:20), seemingly contradicting Paul—even if his letter was likely written before Paul’s—and the argument has raged ever since. Thus, Paul asserts:
“Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (4:3)
It is as if he is responding to what James says next:
“Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.” (2:21-24)
Martin Luther, father of the Reformation and a staunch adherent to the Pauline party line, sounded contemptuous of James’ contention when he referred to his letter as an “epistle of straw”; and even though what James says seems to be perfectly reasonable, even painfully obvious, our continued insistence on idolizing Paul’s notion of sola fide makes it sound still controversial.
“Works without faith also is dead”, Paul, or even Luther, might have more accommodatingly responded, instead of continuing to insist on separating the two things completely. The reality is that, even though grace always comes to us from the outside, as I have described, from the one who presents it to us and in whom we have the faith it stimulates, this faith itself is not like a discrete commodity we acquire which somehow formally “justifies” us in God’s eyes, independently of any subsequent action it might or might not inspire. Rather, an unbroken movement occurs in which the grace we ingest flows continuously into our faithful behaviour and action, so that there really is no point where the faith stops and the works begin. What we actually see happening (or not as the case may be), and what really matter, are the faith-inspired behaviours and actions which make the world in which we live and act a better world. It’s all about the Metanoia—sanctification—in other words, and justification doesn’t come into it in any way, shape or form, simply because, contra Paul and the entire Christian tradition since his day, there is no omnipotent creator God out there who makes it his business to judge us in the first place. Instead, as we have seen, there is the loving, divine parent God—the one Jesus, but strangely not Paul, presents—who seems to make it their business, rather, to keep pouring the grace into us, giving us the faith to become better people, in a better world—the Kingdom Jesus continually speaks about, but Paul scarcely mentions.
What are we to make of Paul’s ancestral hero, Abraham, then? Well, what would make him, or anyone, a true hero of faith, is evidence of Metanoia occurring in their life, of them becoming a better, more selfless person, and making the world a better world through their life and actions. According to Paul, drawing on interactions described in the book of Genesis, God had promised Abraham that he and his descendants would “inherit the world” (4:13), that he would be “father of many nations” (4:17). In another Genesis text which Paul doesn’t reference, God is recorded as telling Abraham:
“I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families [peoples, nations] of the earth shall be blessed.” (12:3)
So, has all that actually happened? Maybe. It is true that our hero, Jesus of Nazareth, seems to have been a descendant of Abraham—a Jew by birth of the tribe of Judah, one of Abraham’s great grandsons—and that his (Jesus’) influence has now spread throughout the world, changing it, as I have argued, so much for the better. Is that in reality, therefore, a fulfillment of the Genesis promises, and of Paul’s claims about Jesus as Messiah? Well, yes and no. No, certainly, in any direct, literal sense: the old creator God who allegedly made those promises and who will then keep manipulating human affairs until they are fulfilled, simply doesn’t exist. But yes, certainly, in the sense of our collective hopes, regardless of our national origin, for a better future, a better world in which justice, goodness and love reign—for, in fact, the wonderful Kingdom of heaven on earth that Jesus so inspiringly proclaimed 2000 years ago.
Justification, justification, justification: so Paul continues to fixate, in fact, throughout much of the remainder of his letter, as we have already noted, at the expense of what matters so much more, namely Metanoia, or sanctification. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have some great things to say—remember he is speaking to a different audience, a different world, to the one we are speaking to today. So, let’s keep going and see what he, and we, come up with next.
