I preached on faith last Sunday, so it was good to see what Simon Barrow has written about faith in a very cleverly-named article, “The God elusion”. Like everything of his I’ve read, it’s worth spending serious time on:
‘Faith’, therefore, is not about submission to proposition, the refusal of reason or clinging blindly to dogma. It is the opposite of these things – it is a letting-go which goes on trusting beyond the ‘full-stop’ of certain kinds of rationalism, because it does not (and cannot) claim the power to impose limits on the love it encounters.
Faith is continual ‘reasoning with a mystery’, without allowing yourself to be deceived into thinking that you can have an adequate handle on either reason or mystery, or that you can abandon one for the other – the temptation of both the ideologically religious and the ideologically non-religious.
How come so much religious talk is impossible for non-believers to understand?
Thanks, Steven.
One reason I suggested this is worth spending serious time on is that it may take a bit of digesting. Not sure I would have felt I understood it at all some years ago.
Perhaps other parts of this blog might be easier to get?