From a Facebook Conversation

Essay for Bill LaBarre on “Method” for determining what to believe.

I can only interpret "method" as "what I do."  It does not produce proof or utter certainty in the Cartesian sense:  those are forms of control, and as described above regarding the respective positions of 1) God and 2) creatures [us], control of any sort is out of the question.  But, such as it is, this is my “method”.  I listen to the gospel proclamations of the church and meditate on them.  Yes, I have a Bible, but in order to get somewhat beyond my own cultural limitations regarding “what it means to read this book,” I listen to others in the body of Christ (i.e., the Church) who have gifts of understanding and ministry that differ from mine.  They see things that I don’t see until they show me.  Further, I listen to (read) what other Christians from other places and times have written.  Further again, I listen to what non-Christians say regarding their objections to the faith.  This also involves the application and continuing reapplication of reason and observation.  Theology must be tossed back into the refining furnace again and again.

In the complexity of the gospel message there are threads that are more central and others that are more peripheral.  I try to see the harmonies and the dissonances that are in my understanding of the message, and then occasionally pick apart my construct and re-weave to produce a pattern that is more faithful to the central themes.

The most central theme is Jesus the Christ, not a doctrine, but a person.  Of course there are doctrines about Him, but even they point away from themselves back to this person.  Listening here means prayer and getting away from my internal noises.  Listening also means writing small essays like this one, listening to the resonance of these words and whether they faithfully echo my faulty perceptions through the Spirit of God in Christ.

Faith is less a content of belief (although it is that, also) than it is a mode of perception.  The passage from Hebrews 11 that you quoted does not oppose faith to knowledge, but to grasping for control.  It opposes my conceptual control with trust.

Faith thus described still ought to make sense.  We should expect that it does.  God commands us to worship Him with our minds as well as with heart, soul, and strength.  This means that we use them, not leave them at the door of the church.

But faith, as a mode of perception and thinking, also conforms to the nature of our position relative to God.  Demands that God meet our cultural (largely Cartesian) requirements for certain knowledge are inappropriate at several levels.  Aside from being personally insulting and presumptuous, they miss the nature of the object being studied.  If our seeking after knowledge does not conform to the nature of the task at hand, we can no more expect correct results than if we take a magnifying glass to the smell of roses to find what musical key it is in.  Again, this is a category error. 

Instead, the exercise of faith brings the entire man both physically and spiritually into the appropriate place of perception and thought, namely into the activity of worship where God promises to meet His people.  There we hear the proclamation of the gospel from the pulpit (as described in a comment above), and we hear God’s words riding on the words of the liturgy, on the music of the hymns, on the words of the sermon.  God confronts me in my sin, and even more so in the proclamation of forgiveness that we hear in worship.  He confronts me in my incapacity to meet the demands of life, but even more He appears in the prayers of the people as the faithful One who gives us not only the obvious blessings but also the sometimes painful blessings of growth.  He appears in my hunger to touch and hear Him, but He appears even more in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a fore-taste and promise that He is with us spiritually now and will return physically.

This exercise of faith is not mere credulity.  It is an experiment, like sitting in a garden and letting the scent of the flowers approach you so that you can savor them before you make decisions about them.  It asks not merely about the structure of the rose, but about its beauty as such.  It does not merely examine behaviors, but asks if those behaviors betoken a deeper significance.  It is an exercise in humility and openness.

Nor can we, by our actions and attitudes, force God’s hand.  Again, that is to strive for control.

You can probably see why “method” is an awkward word to apply here.  What method do you use for having fun with a friend, or to get to know a prospective friend better?  It’s more like that than physics or biology or geometry.  I can’t construct a satisfactory theology from first principles (after the manner of Euclid) or force God to open up so I can study him (as if He were an oyster).  All I can do is present myself and see what happens.  Sometimes I’m very disappointed with the results.  And then He puts before me a glass of water, or the color red, or a friend’s smile, and these non-proofs, this utter lack of philosophical evidence, convinces me again.