Review of Andrew Root's "Faith Formation in a Secular Age" (Part 7)

8. What is Faith?

Through the cross of Jesus Paul finds a new divine transcendence emerging from this negation. Faith is a transcendent experience born out of this negation. “Faith for Paul is something ever strange to our modern ears. Faith is actually to enter into Christ; it is to have our own being taken into the being of Jesus.” (2901) We are tied to Jesus’ faithfulness, his ministry.

“’Faith’ then, for us, ‘is a complex human experience, and Paul preserves this complexity while giving it a unique twist. While affirming its character as trust and conviction, Paul connects faith to the experience of Jesus as God’s faithful Son. Faith is more than trust; it is also fidelity, or loyalty.’” (2920)

Dreaming of Phinehas

Phinheas is Saul’s model of righteousness. Only he and Abraham are called righteous in the Old Testament.

“He was a young man with a robust, consequential, vital faith—with a personal religious commitment brimming with adjectives. He saw the Israelites losing ground to the worshipers of Baal. So with passion and conviction he acted, putting his commitment into motion. Grabbing a spear, he went to the tent of an Israelite man and stuck it through him and the Midianite woman he slept with. This act of passionate commitment purified the boundary (like in Secular 2).” (2934)

Righteousness

“Saul wanted his actions to be “reckoned to him as righteousness”; he was bred from earliest days to be a committed cleric, formed to be a man as committed to God as Phinehas was.” (2956) maybe this was why he persecuted the church. Yet he was accosted by the risen Jesus on the way to Damascus, “coming as a light that blinds Saul, Jesus turned him from a raiding zealot with sword in hand to a helpless blind man, needing the hand of another to lead him.” (2964)

The model of Phinehas as righteous is broken for Saul. “And particularly in our time, we would do well not to try to rebuild it. We feel the temptation to do so because Secular 2 tells us we’re in a turf war, believing that the vaccination for healthy faith formation is a deep commitment that is best delivered when we’re young.” (2978) A this commitment is parsed in terms institutional commitment.

“Commitment next to the gravitational pull of Secular 3 has a great advantage; commitment is dependent not on a transcendent force but on our own willing. But faith seen this way is more in the shape of Phinehas than that of Saul.” (2985)

From Righteousness to Righteousness

Saul-soon-to-be-Paul “had failed to be what he always dreamed of being, a zealot like Phinehas. But worse, perhaps Paul was awakened from sleep not only by his failure but by the fact that the way of Phinehas now lacked veracity after Paul’s encounter with the living Jesus.” (2992)

Phinehas’ companion in righteousness, Abraham is of a different ilk. His “righteousness, in Paul’s mind, has been won in a completely different way, in such a different way that “won” becomes an inappropriate descriptor. If Phinehas is righteous through commitment that leads to the strongest of actions, then Abraham is righteous for the weak act of faith.” (3000)

This thread of Abraham’s faith becomes the thread that Paul must and does follow in his thinking and acting serving God’s call. That faith and the career born of it can be summarized like this: “Although the fulfillment of the promise is negated at every turn and found impossible, he nevertheless gives fidelity and loyalty to a new realm from which, out of the barrenness of dead wombs, God’s act comes.” (3016)

“Abraham is righteous because he is absurd; he is willing to enter a reality where what cannot be is made possible by the act of God’s gift.” (3023)

And God’s gift in the negation makes possible the ministry of Paul’s which follows. Ananius comes reluctantly but obediently to Paul, enter his weakness/negation and becomes his minister. “Ananias becomes Paul’s minister, and as he does, he invites Paul to take hold of the gift of faith: to let go of his Phinehas-shaped righteousness, and to walk into negation (cross), where he will experience the very righteousness of the risen Christ who will make Paul’s own negation into new life (resurrection).” (3046)

Paul, Faith, and the Seculars

“Secular 3 pulls a dirty trick; it tells people to feel, to dive deeply into their experiences (‘for experience is all there is, after all,’ whispers Secular 3). But following these experiences too deeply opens you to mystery or longing that moves you to see beyond the natural and material. Secular 3 then admonishes you for these experiences, negating them with doubt.

“In response to this doubt, we unknowingly turn to Phinehas for the shape of our faith formation. We seek pragmatic steps that increase people’s level of commitment. But ironically this only turns faith into religious commitment that in the end is natural and material (and supports a transcendentless existence).” (3060-3067)

For Paul faith is not sure commitment but rather the experience of being found in Christ through the negation of his cross. “Faith cannot be vital, vibrant, or robust; it can only be as broken as negation and as slippery as transcendence in the age of Secular 3.” (3084)

From Negation to Union

“Union happens through negation, and this union is the act of ministry—sharing in the life of another. It is perceived to be weak but is actually the strongest force in existence.17 It is strongest because only ministry joins negation, turning negation from prison to communion. Ananias joins Paul’s negation, and through uniting in the ministry of shared negation, the negation is transformed into the union of shared life.” (3091-3099)

“Divine action comes to Paul as the force of negation. But this force is personal (‘I am Jesus!’). Faith, then, for Paul, is the transcendent encounter with the person of Jesus through negation, which forges a ministry of union that can turn death into life.” (3099)

9. From Membership to Mystical Union

In Paul’s thinking central place is held by the phrase “in Christ” (and variants). But what does he mean by this phrase?

-membership card: a member of the church (legal overtones)/not transformative/major effect is on God/resonates with Secular 2 (sense of spatial battle)

-mystical union: encounter w/transcendent reality (Paul on Damascus Road)/mystical but also personal

“Paul sees this as a union (a kind of participation in being) because he discovers that his own person is now bound with the person of Jesus Christ. And it is bound there through negation itself. Paul understands himself quite literally “in Christ”: his being is now in Christ’s being, as Christ is in him, because Paul has died with Christ, and through death Jesus has brought him into a new reality made through the ministerial action of the persons of the triune God (again, Gal. 2:20).” (3210-3219)

We enter this encounter with Christ through his own faithfulness because only he is able to find coherence in a collision of opposites (negation/new life through negation). This encounter “bring(s) forth . . . an all-new realm of being, a realm in which weakness is strength. This realm is called ‘Christ,’ and to be in it is to be ‘in Christ.’” (3227)

Though Secular 3 opposes any sense of transcendent reality and seeks to keep us anchored in the natural and material, we have seen that it cannot wholly filter out some “echoes of transcendence” from getting through. Experience and personhood are two places where transcendent divine action might break through.

Experience

“The experiential is central to Paul; faith cannot be divided from your own (or someone else’s testimony of) encountering the living Christ.” (3250) “This experience might be your own, like Paul’s on the road to Damascus, or it might be the story told within the household of faith (within the ecclesia/church). Regardless, the only way into this realm called Christ is to follow experience.” (3259)

“And this means to enter the negation, the cross. This experience is always cruciform. “We experience the cross in our many death experiences (that is, our encounters with rejection, loss, and fear, those moments when we feel our being in question, question, alone to face the darkness). Paul seems to contend that when we confess these experiences, we find the risen Christ coming near us, giving us new life out of death, ministering to us out of God’s own experience of death on the cross.” (3259-3267)

“In the age of authenticity, we no longer give ourselves over to orders and duties (or even intellectual arguments based on some disconnected reason), believing them to be more real than our own experience. Rather, experience itself becomes the measure of what is. This experiential focus can spin us into heavy expressive bohemianism that births a radical individualism. However, this experiential attention of the age of authenticity can also move us to openness. But for this to happen, we must recognize that the world is bound not in an impersonal order but rather in a very personal one.” (3276-3283)

What legitimates this experience is that it meets us in the negation coming with a force to flatten us so we might experience the deeply personal love of Jesus as your minister.

Personhood

“in Christ” = we experience the person of Jesus within our own person. Objective. Hypostatic as the early church called it.

“Hypostasis, from the perspective of the Cappadocians, is a zone where the divine and the human not only intermingle but, more so, find a deep union of distinct but mutual sharing. Hypostasis (relational personhood) is the way distinct and even opposed realities are tied, the most predominant example being the divine and human natures, which find union in the hypostasis (personhood) of Jesus.” (3291-3302)

To be “in Christ” is not to be in a religious or clairvoyant state, but it is to be in the person of Jesus, given back your own person in a communion of other persons who are loved and therefore love one another through the ministry of Jesus’s humanity.

We are persons because we draw our being by sharing in the lives of others.

To open the world to transcendence we do not need to reenchant it (return to Secular 1) but rather re-personalize it. Faith is to be loyal to the person of Jesus not to a concept, an ideology, or an institution. Thus, faith cannot be disconnected from experience, a transformative space.

How does thIs happen?

Story

Story has deep spiritual vigor. It expresses/explains our deepest experiences. “Stories are the tentacles of personhood that reach out to share and be shared in.” (3377) And when our stories connect with one another we experience a share in the being of the other.

“Jesus invites Paul to share in his life by seeing Paul’s life through the narrative shape of Jesus’s death and resurrection.” (3377)

“From within the negation comes the person of Jesus, taking Paul’s person into his own, giving Paul the narrative arc of Jesus’s own life and breathing new life into Paul as Paul’s life now takes the shape of Jesus’s, which moves from cross to resurrection.” (3386)

By living into this new narrative of Jesus’ life, Paul can realistically claim that it is no longer he who lives but Christ who lives in him (Gal.2:20). This is the work of the Spirit.

There is a reciprocity here. Sharing in Christ’s story is not an emotional experience. Rather it issues in a shared life of Jesus within the community.

The Echo Effect

Our sharing in Christ’s life also has an echo effect. Sharing in his life opens us to sharing the life of another who comes alongside us as our minister. To be “in Christ” is to is to be called in God’s action, ministry.

“Through Ananias’s ministry, Paul is given the gift of a new narrative arc: Jesus’s own life of ministry.”

What the is Faith?

“Faith is not something that we do or create; it is the gift given to us to share in the person of Jesus through negation, where our narrative arc is transformed and becomes Jesus’s own.”

“Faith then is always participation in the narrative arc of Jesus’s cross and resurrection by having your person ministered to and ministering to others.”

Faith is a death experience that leads to a resurrection experience.

Helping others, ministering to them in our Secular 3 age is

“. . . like Paul and Ananias, to encourage people to pray, opening their lives to the transcendent. It is to invite them to come in and, through prayer, to articulate their experience of negation so that they might be ministered to. And it is, in and through these acts of ministry in which their person is shared in, to continue to prayerfully seek the action of God.” (3506)

“To help people have faith is to help them experience divine action through the act of being ministered to and ministering to others.” (3513)