The following three statements, from three different people, make sense of one another:
Pascal: We must love things before we can know them.
Kierkegaard: A believer is someone in love.
St.Anselm: I believe in order to understand.
To really understand something we have to be in a relationship with it, involved with it, to some extent given to it. I guess that’s what Pascal was getting at.
But that’s really what “faith” is. It’s not a rational assent to a given truth — like “I believe in God.” Rather, it’s a commitment, a trust, a giving of oneself to a way of life that is based on what we trust is true. And when we are so committed, when we are “walking the truth,” we come to know and be able to “talk the truth.” I guess that’s what Kierkegaard was getting at.
So Anselm is right: When we have faith in something — that is, when we trust and then act on that trust, we discover what is real and worthwhile.
So truth doesn’t grab us by the brain. It grabs us by the heart. – And then, what we know with our heart, we have to think about with our brain.
The words and thoughts of these great thinkers are so similar to those spoken by so many Latin@ Penteocstals I have been privileged to encounter. How sad that they are so often misunderstood as irrational believers with little sophistication of matters of faith and theology.
The term “To believe,” when it is used in religious context, has bad connotations nowadays at least for non-religious people. It is probably because we, religious people, have distorted this term. I am glad that you offer us here something that absolutely deserves to be heard by non-religious people. “Trust,” “Commitment,” and, “Relationship,” are much better substitutes for that term, as you may suggest. Borrowing from your way to put, I would say with you, we trust something not by brain but by heart, or by our whole being. One may disagree on what I trust, but what I trust always requires, at least, respect from others because what I trust constitutes who I am. So….I respect what people of other faiths trust.
Sam, I understand — and I wish I could feel more deeply — the truth of what you are saying about Pentecostals. I think Pentecostals might be called “mystics with words.” We usually talk about mystical experience as the movement into the depth of religious experience that calls us beyond words. Pentecostals have such experiences and are called to words. We academic-types aren’t used to that, maybe because we’ve lost touch with how words can be mystical.
I wonder if the religious experiences of the marginalized, whose spirituallity is one of the body/heart rather than the spoken or written word, have acquiesced to the pressure to explain through words their mystical experiences so as to be more readily accepted by the dominant religious/theological episteme of the day/culture?