Final Installment
We have been exploring the contours of classical Christianity, outlining some of its most prominent features, and asking what is it that constitutes Cristian faith, thought, and practice. This we have found is a difficult task, for ultimately Christianity is an ineffable experience that exceeds the limits of our understanding. However, that it is impossible to reduce Christianity to precisely defined parameters does not mean that it so amorphous, nebulous, or vague that it is impossible to know it when we see it. My hope here in these brief essays is to help anyone on a spiritual quest to know how to recognize classical Christianity, and how to distinguish it from reconfigured “Christian” philosophy. I suspect, or at least hope, this will enable a more intelligent and mature choosing of a spiritual path –– a better understanding of whether our commitment is to fundamentalism, to an evangelicalism that is distinct from fundamentalism, to modernity, to nothing at all; to a modern liberal or progressive orthodoxy; or, to classical Christianity––although the latter two, in my opinion, may be considered to be pretty much the same thing.

What’s So Bad About Sin?
President Calvin Coolidge was the proverbial man of few words. In fact, his nick name was “Silent Cal.” When he was in the White House he and his wife Grace went to church every Sunday. One Sunday Grace was not feeling well and insisted Calvin go on without her. But when he came home she asked him, “How was church today?” Coolidge simply replied, “It was good.” Grace persisted with her questions, “Well what was the sermon about?” The short answer she got was, “It was about sin?” Grace had one more question to try to get Cal to elaborate, “And what did the minister say about sin?” she asked, to which Silent Cal responded, “He said it’s bad.” So, what’s so bad about sin? To begin to answer that it might be helpful to look at the catechism in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
A catechism is a series of fixed questions and answers used for the instruction of Christians. It can be thought of as a kind of outline or summary of the principles of the Christian faith. The Outline of the Christian Faith: Commonly Called the Catechism which begins on page 845 of the Book of Common Prayer is, I think, helpful in getting at the classical understanding of that uncomfortable and much abused word “sin.” It begins like this:

Q. What are we by nature?
A. We are part of God’s creation, made in the image of God.
Q. What does it mean to be created in the image of God?
A. It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.
Q. Why then do we live apart from God and out of harmony with creation?
A. From the beginning, human beings have misused their freedom and made wrong choices.

Things have gone awry in the world, have gone terribly wrong at every level –– the personal and private, the institutional, communal, and corporate, in families, in religion, and in politics. This beautiful blue planet, our island home, is sick and dying. Everywhere the blood of the innocent, the suffering of the poor, the misery of the victims of injustice cry out, “Violence! Violence! Violence!” Inhumanity to humanity, cruelty to sentient life, terror to every rock, tree, and sea is ubiquitous. As Eugene Peterson wrote in his commentary on Revelation, Reversed Thunder: “Nothing is exempt from the catastrophe. Nothing is innocent in the catastrophe.” The third question and answer of the catechism asserts that things have gone awry in the Milky Way because they have gone awry in the human heart, that the cause of this cosmic catastrophe lies in how we human beings have used our freedom to choose, to love, for creativity, to reason, and to live in harmony wrongly.  And while we are free to choose as we will, we are not free to choose the outcome of our choices. There is a law as unequivocal as the three laws of thermodynamics or gravity. Good thoughts and actions always, in the end, produce good results, bad thoughts and actions invariably, produce bad results. As James Allen noted, “We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world — although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating.” The choice to rely on ourselves, to trust ourselves more than God, and to live by our own devices, our own blind self-will, is the essence of sin. The Greek word most frequently used for “sin” in the New Testament is hamartia. It simply means to miss the mark as when an archer releases an arrow and it misses the target by falling short. Sin can be thought of as the failure to live up to the highest to which we human beings may aspire –– the failure to follow the Way and to live in harmony with God, ourselves, each other, and creation. The Bible also makes a distinction between those sins which are sins of ignorance and those sins which are presumptuous. Sins of ignorance, it has been said, are like walking too close to the edge of a curb and suddenly slipping off. Sins of presumption are those wrong choices we make knowing they are wrong when we make them, but are, nevertheless, determined to have our way no matter what. Rather than slipping off the curb, it would be more like the person who walks up to the edge and then deliberately steps out in front of oncoming traffic because, after all, as a pedestrian he or she has the right of way.

Socrates suggested a different way of looking at things. Socrates taught that wrong choices come from ignorance. If we knew what was right and good we would always do what is right and good. This is the model preferred by many people in the world today –– either it or the notion that there is simply no such thing as right and wrong. But when we set aside all self-enhancing rationalizations and self-justifications we all know that we make many wrong choices, commit many “sins,” that are harmful and out of synchronization with what is greater than ourselves.

Years ago as a result of an incident in which my nephew and his four-year-old son confronted a violent gun-wielding criminal breaking into their car in a camp ground, and had their lives threatened before the intruder was himself shot and killed by a passing stranger, I had an epiphany. And it was this: In life we do not get so much what we want, but what we are. This, even if we find it distasteful and reject it, is the classical Christian view (1 John 1:8-10). “We are literally what we think, our character being the sum of our thoughts . . .” (Matthew 7:24-27; 12:34-35; Philippians 4:8-9).

Salvation
The doctrine or theology of salvation (soteriology) can only be understood in light of the catastrophe or reality of sin. As Eugene Peterson observes in Reversed Thunder:

The salvation songs and images that St. John sets before us (in the Book of Revelation) are placed against a background of catastrophe. Salvation is the answer to catastrophe. The dimensions of catastrophe are understood, biblically, to exceed human capacity for recovery. All parts of creation –– Arcturus and the Mississippi, Lebanon cedars and English turnips, rainbow trout and parula warblers eskimos and aborigines –– have been jarred out of the harmonious original and are in discord. The transparent complementarity of male and female is darkened into rivalry and accusation. The cool evening conversation between God and humans is distorted into furtive evasions. The “fit” between heaven and earth, between creation and creature and Creator is dislocated: form no longer matches function result no longer flows from purpose. Instead there is pain, travail, sweat, death.

But pain, travail, sweat, and death is not the final word. “Salvation,” Peterson goes on to say, “is the answer to catastrophe”

Salvation is God’s response to the cosmic tragedy of sin into which humanity has fallen. If we combine both the Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek words for “salvation” we get meanings like: to make large, expansive, spacious, to rescue from danger, to heal or mend a broken or diseased body, to preserve in good condition, to keep in good health, to be free of everything that narrows, constricts, diminishes or restricts life –– free to know and experience the spaciousness, the reality, the presence, the mystery of God. To be saved is to be rescued. To be saved is to be rescued from our obsessive and compulsive living, from hurting others and ourselves, from afflictive states of consciousness, from self-destructive attachments, from mechanical meaningless lives, and from death in every form.

There are popular authors and teachers who argue that Christ did not die for our sins, that salvation is about this life and its transformation, and has nothing to do with what happens after our physical death. However, if we take not only the English word “salvation,” but the original Hebrew and Greek terms in their multiple comprehensive meanings, then it seems impossible to limit the meaning of salvation to some sort of psychological transformation; or, some middle class, twentieth century notion of “self-actualization.” To completely detach salvation from sin is to entirely misunderstand both sin and salvation; that is, it is to misunderstand the catastrophe and its remedy. The origins of this latter view are to be found in the enlightenment which began just a little over two hundred years ago. Classical Christianity believes that Christ died to save us from sin and death –– that we might live eternally in harmonic communion with God. There are a number of theories meant to explain this but no theory is the reality itself. To paraphrase Thomas à Kempis, “It is better to experience the peace, joy, and freedom of salvation than to define or explain it.”

Peace and Social Justice
While attending a conference at Buckfast Abbey in England several years ago, I decided one morning to take a tour of the abbey led by one of the monks. The first Buckfast abbey, he explained, was established in 1018, and the first construction of monastic buildings on the present site was in 1134. He went on to tell how after the Dissolution of the Monasteries  in 1539, the abbey estate was sold and the monastic buildings were left to decay. In 1793 the site was cleared by Samuel Berry to make way for a new mansion house. Then in 1882 the site was purchased by a group of French Benedictine monks, who re-founded the monastery and built the beautiful new abbey in the old style. In giving this history the monk who guided our little tour noted that Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries and convents and looting their assets, destroyed the entire apparatus for social care that existed at that time––assistance for the poor and hungry, hospitals, homes and care for lepers, education not only in reading and writing but in crafts and vocational skills, and orphanages for children with nowhere to go. Only in fairly recent times, for example, have we come to think of health care and education as functions of government. Before that care for the poor and sick rested with families and the church. The idea of universal education as it exists today actually began as the modern Sunday School movement started by Robert Raikes who thought it the best way to prevent children from becoming criminals. He hired two women in Sooty Alley to teach poor children, many already working in the coal mines, how to read and write. Since the Bible was the most easily accessed book it was used as the basic text. And it was Sunday school, because that is the only time the children could be present. There are obviously many dark and shameful stories of “professed Christians” committing egregious evils in the name of the “institutional church” –– even now. Nevertheless, from the advent of Christ, whose whole life was shaped by the Torah and saturated in the Hebrew spiritual tradition, and continuing century after century to the present day, the Christian Way is the way of compassion, peace, and justice. Its greatest heroes are saints and not soldiers –– men and women, like Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Clare, or Mother Teresa of Calcutta who have practiced uncommon care for the poor, the sick, the incarcerated, and the unwanted. Saint Basil in the fourth century and Saint Patrick in the fifth were among those who spoke out forcefully and eloquently against human trafficking.

There is, of course, no way around it, if we think of classical Christianity as that which has generally been believed everywhere by most Christian across the centuries, then the way of peace and nonviolence as the renunciation of war does not fit easily. The case is not so difficult to make up to the time of Constantine. Jesus in prophecy, song, and the teaching tradition of the church is the Prince of Peace. In an age of brutality and unrestrained violence Jesus was the embodiment of peace. “He is himself our peace. . . who has broken down every wall of hostility” (Ephesian 2:14). No one ever advocated or lived more for the way of nonviolence, than Jesus of Nazareth. Even Gandhi came to a deeper understanding of the Hindu concept of ahimsa after studying the Gospels. But as Gandhi noted, “The only people in the world today who don’t seem to know that the teachings of Jesus were nonviolent are the Christians.”

Before around 175 C. E., there is no evidence of any Christians serving in the military. Most Christians in the first century were seen by Rome as a Jewish sect, and, therefore, exempt from service in the Roman Army. And we know that the Jerusalem Christians, warned by the prophecy of Christ, did not join the Jewish fight to defend Jerusalem in 70 C. E. Men serving in the Roman legions who converted to Christianity could in those first two hundred years not easily leave without facing death. By the time of Tertullian the church saw the increasing number of believers serving in the military as a problem. With the Edict of Milan, issued by the Emperor Constantine in 313 granting the toleration of Christianity, more believers began to feel obligated to support the state whose protection they now accepted. Nevertheless, through the centuries there has not been an absence of Christian men and women advocating for the church’s return to the renunciation of war and violence in all of its forms.

In 391 Saint Telemachus (also Almachus or Almachius) was a Christian monk from the eastern part of the Roman Empire who, according to the Church historian Theodoret, jumped into a Roman amphitheater in an attempt to stop a gladiatorial fight. The crowd was so enraged by his interfering with their gruesome entertainment that they stoned him to death. Not many years after the Emperor Honorius, impressed by the monk’s martyrdom issued a historic ban on gladiatorial fights. And Saint Basil (330-379) said of the greedy and violent:

What killed Naboth the Israelite? Was it not King Ahab’s desire for his vineyard? Truly, the avaricious person is a bad neighbor in both the city and the country. The sea knows its boundaries, the night does not exceed the limits set from of old, but the avaricious person does not regard the passage of time, does not respect any limit, does not defer to the proper order of things, but rather imitates the violent nature of fire: spreading to all and devouring all.”

In regard to economic and political justice, it is difficult to think of any statement more radical than the Magnificat of Mary (Luke 1:46-55); or Jesus’s inaugural sermon (Luke 4:16-30); or, the fifth chapter of James. The early church fathers are just as strong and clear. Saint Ambrose of Milan (340-397) said, “It is not from your own goods that you give to the beggar; it is a portion of his own that you are restoring to him. The Earth belongs to all. So you are paying back a debt and think you are making a gift to which you are not bound.” And Gregory the Great (540-604) wrote:

“In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. When, therefore, we offer the means of living to the indigent, we do not give them anything of ours, but that which of right belongs to them. It is less a work of mercy which we perform than the payment of a debt.

Today day one might think of Dorothy Day, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Martin Luther King Jr., or Bishop Oscar Romero to name only a very few.
The reality is that all ideas of equality, of justice, of peace, of help for the poor, the oppressed and the suffering are derived from Christian teaching. It is worth quoting at length from the front inside dust jacket of Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World:

“We are all twenty-first century people,” Richard Dawkins has said, “and we subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what is right and wrong.” Yet what are the origins of this consensus? It has not remotely been a given across the reaches of space and time, that humans should believe it nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering, or that people are all of equal value. There are convictions which instead bear witness to the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, a revolution in values that has proven transformative like nothing else in human history: Christianity. . . . Even the increasing number in the West who have now abandoned the faith of their forebears and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition remain recognizably its heirs. Christianity’s enduring impact is not confined to churches. It can be seen everywhere in the West: in science, in secularism, in gay rights, even in atheism.

“The Mosaic Law,” said Saint Basil expressing classic Christian nonviolence in his Homily on Justice and Mercy, “contained many commandments regarding not harming one’s neighbor, as well as many precepts enjoining kindness and mercy. . . . The world that forgets God,” he said, “is ruled by injustice toward neighbors and inhumanity toward the weak.”

The Beloved Community
Classical Christianity believes that the very core of reality is not a thing or idea, or concept but the Personal and Living God. “All real living,” wrote Martin Buber, “is meeting.” Our biggest problems all center in our relationships, and our moments of greatest happiness all involve the joys of friendship and family. When Jesus comes he comes for the salvation of a people, making explicit reference to his “church” or “community.” Historically, Christianity knows nothing of the modern notion of the solitary Christian. The church of The New Testament is a continuation of the story of God’s people, created by the Holy Spirit and constituted by God’s work of love (1 Peter 2:9).

Mysticism
The Judaic – Christian tradition, both Biblical Judaism and Christianity, are inherently mystical and they are mystical in the same way. Classical Christian spirituality has nothing to do with weird, bizarre, strange, or esoteric practices. It is simple and straightforward, and accessible by everyone –– which is one reason those who are proud of their intellectual prowess frequently reject it. It is as uncomplicated as a walk on the beach but utterly profound. In fact, my own study of classical Christianity suggests that the more complex our spirituality, religion, faith, theology or philosophy the less likely it is to be “true.” Bernard McGinn perhaps the world’s most preeminent historian and scholar in regard to Christian mysticism defines mysticism as, “Those beliefs and practices of the faith that concern the preparation for, and the consciousness of the direct and transforming presence of God.” But as McGinn goes on to note, mysticism is, more than anything else, a way of life –– “a journey to God.” Mystics through the centuries, beginning with the patriarchs and matriarchs, the Hebrew prophets, and continuing with the Gospel writers and Saint Paul, and the early church fathers, then on into the Medieval period with St. Hildegard, Julian of Norwich, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross and into the Modern Age with Evelyn Underhill, Karl Rahner, Thomas Merton and many others who have spoken of Christian thought and practice as a conscious connection with God, as an awareness of sacred mystery, as an experience of union and communion with God, as a first hand encounter with God, as the beatific vision, as bliss, ecstasy, as an unnamable desire which is, paradoxically, itself an infinitely satisfying longing. “Presence,” “consciousness,” and “encounter,” suggests Bernard McGinn, may be the preferable way of describing the mystical experience. This is because God does not become present to human consciousness the way an object in the concrete world is said to be present. Encountering God, he says, is much more like meeting a friend or loved one. Mysticism is not simply an unusual bunch of sensations, but a way of loving and knowing based on states of awareness in which God is present as the direct and transforming center of life.”

Final Note
I wish I could put into words –– words that might make public what was a highly personal and singular moment for me. It is the moment I realized, while listening to a Catholic nun’s presentation on the spiritual path, a lecture that strangely wove Buddhist teachings together with New Age perspectives and a liberal theology that had little room for Christ as other than an intriguing and inspiring historical figure of limited significance, that what I wanted to know, the reason I was there, was to look over the precipice of the Christian faith to see, as best I could, how far it descended. This I knew in that moment, would require some understanding of what the Christian faith actually is in and of itself, some understanding of what I have described here as classical Christianity, rather than what the Christian faith appears to be as reinvented and reconfigured in someone’s speculative imagination. I knew in that moment that if in looking over the edge I saw a safe and shallow drop I would look elsewhere for the fulfillment of my passion, for that unnamable something more that is higher than I can think and deeper than I can imagine. I can say all these years later, that peering over the edge of the outcrop from where I stand I have never seen the bottom, and looking up I have never seen the summit. Much of what I have glimpsed has been shrouded in cloud and mist, and this is itself a part of the unfathomable joy. I have been happy to discover that this is no aberration; nor, is it something spun from my own disordered mind, but rather is the Way taught by Jesus and promulgated as the Christian faith by the Apostles, the early church fathers and mothers, and great saints, mystics and sages through the centuries; as well as, all the ordinary men and women who have discovered that in consecrating their hearts to the cruciform way they have become “fully human, fully alive.”

The Hitchhiker’s Question

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, earthman Arthur Dent and his three friends, after many comic adventures, find their way to the Planet Magrathea. There, they learn that in the distant past a race of “hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings” created a supercomputer named Deep Thought to determine the answer to the “Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After having worked on the answer for 7.5 million years, Deep Thought has determined the answer to be 42. It is an answer which makes absolutely no sense because no one remembers what the “Ultimate Question” was in the first place. Was it the question I was told in my first college philosophy course the early Greek philosophers asked: “What is the world made of –– water? fire? ether? or tiny indivisible pieces of matter called atoms?” Was it one or all four of the fundamental philosophical questions: “Where did I come from? Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?” Or maybe as everyone who has ever looked up and wondered at a full moon has asked, “What does it all mean?” For the ancient Hebrew sages and prophets and for the Christian apostles, saints and early church fathers  the ultimate question was and is: “Where is God to be found, where is God to be seen, how is experiential knowledge of God gained and the presence of God realized?” For them, as well as contemporary Christian mystics and contemplatives, to desire God is the greatest of passions, to seek God the greatest of adventures, to find God the greatest of all discoveries. That, as I understand it, is the essence of classical Christian spirituality.

A Working Definition
The following working definition of classical Christianity is a fairly standard one among theologians and historians and at least initially offers no major surprises.

By classical Christianity is meant the central Christian tradition as commonly understood by most believers, in most places, and on which there has generally been substantial consensus now for over two millennia; and, which has been received and celebrated by the vastly different cultures of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, including Eastern Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants, as well as many who would also identify themselves as liberal or evangelical.

While there is nothing startling in this brief definition, there are for most people who have never read or studied patristics, that is the writings of the early church fathers, numerous surprises. For example, the Bible itself says nothing about the doctrine of inerrancy, and the generation of Christian leaders (the church fathers) following the Apostles and those who composed the New Testament, clearly did not embrace the notion of inerrancy. In fact, in reading patristics, say from Ignatius of Antioch (35 C. E.-108 C. E.) to Augustine of Hippo (354 C. E. – 430 C. E.) the notion of an inerrant text is not only absent but explicitly disregarded.

One of the amazing things for me personally in reading the patristic writings and historical theology up to the present, is how what any number of modern writers characterize as “traditional” is often actually less than two-hundred-years-old and therefore not really part of the ancient tradition at all; while what they describe as “emerging Christianity” is often already there in the patristics. It can be said, then, that classical Christianity is traditional Christianity; however, in saying this it is absolutely necessary to understand that tradition is not in any way synonymous with conservatism, or resistance to change as a kind of blind rigidity. Tradition is that which has been discovered, or received by one generation and faithfully passed on to another.

How Do We Know Anything?
The disciples of Jesus, students of his teaching and life and heart, were filled with questions: “What,” they asked, “can this mean?” “How should we pray?” “How can this be?” “What is the meaning of this teaching?” “What is the single most important precept to live by?” “What is the one necessary thing?” “How can we know Jesus is the messiah?” “How can anyone possibly be born a second time?” It seems to me that the great haunting question of all philosophy and theology is how do we know anything? How do we know what we know, and how do we know it with any certainty or confidence? How do we know there is a good and gracious God who is ever present to us and for us, how do we know that the God who created the cosmos cares about our little life, how do we know Jesus is the Christ and resurrected Lord of Life, and how do we know our life is meaningful when lived in love for God and others? All human thinking is riddled with finitude and filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, and contingency. And, we are frequently blinded by our own idiosyncrasies and deluded by conflicting desires, obsessions and compulsions. We long to know where we can find a secure hand hold, a solid footing. But, how is it possible to be sure we know what we think we know? These are perennial questions of epistemology, but in certain crucial times, especially amid sorrow, illness, and death, our usual rational explanations become stretched to their limit. These crucial moments make it especially difficult to answer the question and. . . ‘Life constantly undoes our theories of knowing”’

Christian knowing has often been caricatured as “blind faith,” meaning that it is completely disconnected from real evidence and rationality. In one episode of “All in the Family,”  Archie Bunker replied to religiously naïve Edith’s assertion, “You just gotta have faith!” that, “Faith ain’t nothin’ but believin’ what no one in his right mind would believe otherwise!” And it has to be admitted that when one listens to some of the utter nonsense of modern American fundamentalism, Archie’s brutal assessment of faith seems pretty accurate. It just boggles the mind, for example, to think that any marginally reasonable person living in the twenty-first century could believe that the world was created in six literal days –– or even that the Bible says such a thing. Perhaps a clarification of terms might be helpful at this point, particularly in regard to the meaning of the words “faith” and “reason.”

Recognizing Reasonable Reason
So, what is reason? When we talk about reason we may really have what is properly known as “cognition” in mind. “Cognition” is a term that refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding, or in comprehending something. These processes include pattern recognition, memory, sensory perceptions and imagination. Reason obviously involves all of these cognitive functions but reason itself is usually defined a little more narrowly and specifically as the capacity to consciously make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, apply logic, and to adapt or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information. The cognitive functioning of an individual may be at a high level, or it might be extremely low, but what is certain is that to be human, is to perceive and think and reason. And what we think and reason about is absolutely everything –– including thinking itself. That is, we think a lot about thinking and do a good deal of reasoning about reason. And, we spend large amounts of time thinking about faith –– pondering the reasonableness of faith.

Seeing Faith
Faith, according to the New Testament and the early church fathers, is itself a way of looking at things and of seeing with a deep seeing. The English word “faith” comes from the Greek term “pistis.” Like a lot of words you might look up in any dictionary it has several meanings; and, is therefore, translated differently in different biblical passages. For example, depending on the context it may be translated as “belief” or as “faith.” Look at Hebrews 11:6:

“Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who approaches God must believe that God exists and rewards those who seriously and passionately seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).

“Without faith (pistis), it is impossible to please God . . .”  Here at the beginning of verse six the writer uses the word “faith” with most all of its meanings in mind –– intellectual assent that something is true; confidence not only in something or someone’s “factuality” but also in something or someone’s reliability, trustworthiness, and dependability; entrusting ourselves to what or who we find reliable; and, faith as loyalty––faithfulness.

“Anyone who approaches God must believe (pistis) that God exists. . .” Here, in its second occurrence, the word “faith” (pistis) is used in its more limited meaning of intellectual assent. It is a common sense and down to earth assertion requiring no effort to grasp. It is even a little comic to think about seeking or searching for what is not there, for what does not exist. It is rather like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“. . . and rewards those who seriously seek Him.”  With the conjunctive “and” the word “faith” (pistis) is implied rather than actually used a third time. In its final implied use in verse six,  pistis again indicates two or more ideas. First it refers again to intellectual belief (to what one thinks true or in some sense factual) and then again to that which can be trusted, counted upon, depended upon, relied upon. Theologically, it therefore also alludes to the faithfulness or trust worthiness of God; that is, we trust what is trust worthy.

An Ancient Faith Paradigm
In verse eight through twelve Abraham and Sarah are presented as a paradigm for how this works in actual life. Abraham and Sarah become convinced that God has spoken to them. The text doesn’t say whether this was in a dream, or vision, an inner experience, or an audible voice; nor, does it tell us anything about what must have been an intense discussion between Abraham, Sarah, their old father and head of the clan Terah, their nephew Lot and his family who went with them, their uncle Laban who decided to stay in Mesopotamia, and their whole large extended family; or by what logic, what reasoning, Abraham and Sarah concluded they had correctly understood and ought to leave family and friends, their country which at that time was the geographical center of wealth and power, break with their culture, and forsake their thriving business. It does appear that the family discussion went on for some time. But at some point they became convinced that their God –– the God honored by their family, whom they probably called El or Elohim, was inviting them to do something incredibly audacious –– to leave everything, and journey to a distant and unfamiliar land without knowing for sure what would happen (Hebrews 11:8-12). Thomas Cahill therefore writes:

So, “wayyelekh Avram (“Avram went”) –– two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before in the long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of Sumer , civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the unknown wilderness under the prompting of his god. Out of Mesopotamia, home of canny, self-serving merchants who use their gods to ensure prosperity and favor, comes a wealthy caravan with no material goal. Out of ancient humanity, which from the dim beginning of its consciousness has read its eternal verities in the stars, comes a party travelling by no known compass. Out of the human race, which knows in its bones that all it strivings must end in death, comes a leader who says he has been given an impossible promise. Out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something –– in the future.

The writer of the Book of Hebrews concludes that Abraham trusted in his God, and God counted it as righteousness. Indeed, this account of Abraham and Sarah’s trust does not stand alone as a single incident but is part of a continuing and progressive story of total reliance on the goodness and fidelity of God. We are not told how Abraham may have responded had he been queried as to his epistemology –– how he knew that his God existed in the first place. Perhaps he would have replied with some version of the moral argument somewhat like Psalms or Proverbs. Maybe he would have presented some form of the cosmological or teleological argument as in the Epistle to the Romans:

“But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being” (Romans 1:20).

What we do know is that in time whatever intellectual reasons Abraham and Sarah might have initially provided were transcended (not contradicted but transcended) as they lived into lives of profound trust. The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book is correct, “The essence of all spiritual progress is willingness (faith, trust, self-surrender).” My point is that reason and faith are essentially one thing –– complimentary ways of knowing. In classical Christianity reason, faith, revelation, experience, tradition, feeling, intuition all represent converging lines of wisdom and of knowing the mysterious reality we call God –– “the one in whom we live move and have our very being” (Acts 17:28).

Beyond Reason
We may debate the intellectual merits of God’s existence all we want, and in some ways such intellectual reflection is even necessary. As Thomas Oden noted, “No one can be required to believe absurdities. The mind is God given and has a responsibility to reject falsity. . . . Christian faith opposes anti-intellectual obscurantism as much as it does extreme skepticism.” At the same time classical Christianity insists that beyond this mental or intellectual reflection is living moment by moment and day by day in a conscious connection of trust in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine Bishop of Hippo, who is thought to be among the last of the classical scholars, experienced three “breakthroughs” which can be found in his Confessions as well as other literary works. These breakthroughs or “conversions” may be thought of as intellectual, moral, and religious. Augustine identified as an intellectual conversion the ability to differentiate between that which can be grasped by the five physical senses and that which can be grasped by the mind or intellect alone. Intellectual conversion results in the awareness that the reality of material things is caused by something that is not physical; and, therefore is a reality that can be grasped only by intelligence. Furthermore, intellectual conversion leads to the two things most worth knowing –– God and soul. However, to live justly requires a second kind of conversion which may be considered as moral. Moral conversion enables us to see, know, feel, and do the good –– to act in a way that is consistent with wisdom as a way of life. The third “conversion,” religious conversion, as Augustine described it, enables us to love God with our entire being. It is religious in the original sense of the meaning of the word “religious” as that which binds the soul to God. “For Augustine such a binding in the Christian religion does not involve a restriction but an expansion of one’s freedom as well as a perfection or completion of the other two conversions.”

The classical Christian thinkers, and their present day heirs, are not inclined to a one workshop, one theory, one method, one way of seeking truth and knowledge. While using logic, employing the techniques of the scientific method, and all the cognitive processes by which we usually define as “reason,” their concept of “reason” is characterized by the principle of congruity or what is sometimes referred to as “comprehensive complementarity.” Following the tenet of congruity or comprehensive complementarity, simply means that the search for knowledge does not depend on any single approach, argument, or method, but rather that an explanation which gathers a great many disparate facts and accounts for them intelligently from multiple ways of knowing is more likely true than one that accounts for fewer facts and is limited to a single methodology.

Remembering the Question Before Continuing
With the Age of Enlightenment it became more and more common for secular philosophers to juxtaposition reason over against faith and revelation. But it is a contrast which often obscures more than it enlightens. More and more psychologists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists embrace what has always been known by saints, sages, mystics and ordinary men and women living every-day life; namely, that the way of knowing anything is multifaceted; and, that “pure reason,” by itself simply does not exist. Indeed, there are ways of knowing, as suggested by the famous humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, that transcend but do not contradict objective reason as scientifically defined. Similarly Thomas Oden observed:

The study of God and delight in knowing God requires a mode of understanding that transcends simply empirical data gathering, logical deduction, or the dutiful organization of scriptural or traditional texts into a coherent sequence. It involve a mode of knowing from the heart. . . Faith’s knowing is distinguishable from objective, testable, scientific knowledge, although not necessarily inimical to it. It is a form of knowing the embraces the practical question of how we choose to live in the presence of this Source and End of all. . .

To all this classical Christianity says, “Yes!” for classical Christianity remembers the primordial question which Stephen Hawking once suggested is, “Why was the universe made?” He said in A Brief History of Time, “We are very close to knowing how the universe was made. But if we knew why we would know the mind of God.” Classical Christianity knows the question is closer, more personal and intimate than what Hawking thought –– knows the question for each of us is: “Why was I made?” And, therefore knows that the answer 42 must equal, in the words of the Catechism, “To know, love, and enjoy God forever.”