14: Musings on the Life of Faith: Double-Mindedness, Seriousness, Balance, Dying
14
MUSINGS ON THE
LIFE OF FAITH
Double-Mindedness, Seriousness, Balance, Dying
The musings that follow fill some gaps in the view of the Christian life that has been presented thus far.
THE DOUBLE MIND
I expect that when you hear the phrase “living by faith,” you think only of Christians trying to exist with no guaranteed financial support, just as when you hear the word fundamentalism, you think only of a version of evangelicalism that seems to you coarse, crass, combative, crude, and best avoided. Thus noble words get narrowed and debased. Fundamentalism was actually coined to identify the virtue of faithfulness to Christian fundamentals, and “living by faith” was a Reformational way of characterizing Christian existence. That is why Richard Baxter’s treatise The Life of Faith, written three centuries ago, is an analysis of the Christian response to all life situations.
What is the life of faith? Well, what is faith? Do not take seriously the legendary child’s definition of faith as “believing what you know ain’t so,” even when (as happens) unbelieving adults embrace it. The human mind cannot believe what seems false; skepticism rots belief as a chinook turns snow to slush. Scripture is clear that faith is the positive response of the whole person to God’s total revelation, perceived as such.
While it is true that “the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life,” it is equally true that by faith “a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein; and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come” (Westminster Confession, XIV.2).
Faith, then, is an exercise of mind and heart whereby (1) we learn what God tells us in Scripture about himself and ourselves; (2) we shudder at what is said about our lostness without Christ; (3) we thankfully embrace God’s promises of grace to sinners, and the living Christ whom those promises set forth; and (4) we apply to ourselves Bible teaching about God’s work, will, and ways, in order to see what attitudes honor God and what actions will please him in each situation. Faith knows that God shapes all situations as a means to our final good. In light of that knowledge faith seeks biblical guidance on what to aim at, pray for, hope for, prepare for, and actually do; on how to handle one’s relationship to God and to the rest of creation; and on how to use one’s opportunities for glorifying God.
Thus, the life of faith is to be thoughtful, conscientious, and at the same time enterprising. Every Christian’s life should reflect, first in private prayer and then in public performance too, Carey’s famous maxim: “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” Expectation—hope, that is—is a major element in faith. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as confidence about things hoped for.
It is a sad fact that people who profess faith often come short of its fullness. Sometimes knowledge and belief of God’s truth are divorced from personal trust and obedience. That is the “dead” faith of which James speaks in his first and second chapters. Sometimes trust is not guided by truth, so that faith becomes superstition. Sometimes real trust for salvation in the Christ of the Gospel fails to lead us to interpret what God sends by what he says in his Word. That is the vice of “double-mindedness,” which ruins both one’s prayers and one’s walk.
When James says “double-minded” (literally, “two-souled”), he means more than “irresolute,” “undecided,” and “unable to make up his mind,” as various modern versions render the word. He is detecting not temperamental ditheriness, as these translations imply, but unbelief: doubting—that is, mistrusting—the good will of the God whom one relies on for salvation, prays to, and calls Father. The text shows this. Here is the full passage.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproaching, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
(James 1:2-8 ESV)
James’s style is somewhat abrupt, but the flow of thought is clear.
Welcome trials—meaning “temptations”—says James. Why? Because handling trials produces resilience; strains put on our faith and obedience are God’s Outward Bound course, toughening us up spiritually. The maturing that results leads us on to the victor’s crown. So anyone under pressure should ask God for the wisdom needed to keep living right through the times of perplexity and upheaval. Will God supply it? Yes. He is a generous giver, always glad to answer this request.
But the two-minded person, while professing faith in Christ as divine Savior and Lord, panics under pressure, thinks with his feelings rather than his brains, and concludes that since God evidently no longer cares for him, his prayers for wisdom and strength cannot expect an answer. Yet God is unchanging in his love and free from any shadow of inconsistency. Don’t insult him by indulging such unbelief as your attitude expresses, says James.
What, then, is James’s answer to the double-mindedness that juxtaposes trust in God’s Word about the hope of salvation with mistrust of his Word about his help under trials? Why, single-mindedness, of course, which means believing all that God says, not just some of it, putting faith in his faithfulness about everything, joyfully trusting his goodness at all times, and seeking to honor him by consistent holiness. That is true purity of heart, and that is the only life of faith worthy of the name. How, I wonder, do we measure up?
ARE WE SERIOUS?
The question whether particular people are saved or are converted or are believers is often heard in evangelical circles. We recognize it as a necessary question because it points to the momentous passage from spiritual death to spiritual life that everyone needs. The question brings up the issue in a way that excludes the sacramentalist fancy that merely being baptized makes you safe forever. Not all, however, are happy with the question in this form, for in the first place it seems to assume that everyone who ever comes to faith will have a dramatic Damascus Road experience to testify to, which is not so. In the second place we find that some who testify volubly to conversion experiences that brought them to faith turn out to be hypocrites and frauds. Does the question as to whether people are spiritually alive or dead have to be asked in these terms?
No, it does not, nor has it always been. For half a century, up till fifty years ago, it was regularly put thus: Do they love the Lord? That was a good way of focusing the question, for it zeros in on what people are in the present rather than on what they experienced in the past, and love to the Savior-King who loved us and gave himself for us really is the heart of the Christian life. Before that, in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Anglican evangelicals used to ask whether people had become serious. This also, I think, was a good way of putting the question, once one understood what was implied. Let me spell out the meaning that the question carried.
First, however, a negation, lest we jump to the wrong conclusion at the outset. The question did not mean: Have these folks become somber and long-faced? Have they given up cracking jokes and laughing when others crack them? Do they now take themselves terribly seriously? Yesterday’s evangelicals knew as well as we do that self-centered seriousness and posturing piosity of that sort is unspiritual and unbalancing, if not actually unbalanced. (Did you know the word piosity, by the way? It’s British slang, very useful for puncturing the pretentiousness of the pompous. I recommend that you add the term to your vocabulary.)
The truth here is that if you mortify your sense of humor and lose the ability to laugh at yourself, you are actually screwing down one of the safety valves of your sanity. There is nothing godly about doing that. Such action produces people who are profoundly proud, utterly unrealistic, frequently fanatical, and always intolerable to live with. In the hearts of all who are genuinely holy, along with their intensity in adoring the Father and the Son goes a sense of their own silliness, absurdity, and intrinsic unimportance before the Lord, who as they know could get along very well without them. Their refusal to take themselves too seriously, paradoxical as it may sound, is one expression of their evangelical seriousness.
What did those faraway nineteenth-century evangelicals— Wilberforce, Hannah More, and their circle—really mean when they spoke of people becoming serious? They meant that these folk had begun to reckon seriously with God, Christ, the Bible, the Gospel, their own sinfulness and guilt, and the issues of eternity, which are settled for good or ill by the choices we make now. Serious writers are those who focus on the long-term, deep-level implications of their themes and point up these implications in what they put out. Serious Christians are those who perceive the eternal implications of the life they live now. They make decisions in light of the eternal realities of God’s love and wrath, God’s heaven and hell, which will still be there for us after we have left this world and indeed will still be there after this world itself has ceased to be. That is the seriousness we speak of here.
An essay in Time dealt with “the gravitas factor” (gravitas is Latin for seriousness in our sense and was evidently used because the writer did not think any English word can now be trusted to carry his full weight of meaning). The essay distinguished between public figures whose actions showed them to be thoroughly and far-seeingly serious, like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, as compared with leaders who seemed not to think or care about the long-term effects of what they did, becoming corks tossing around uselessly on the waters of change and crisis, like—well, never mind. Purposeful people like Churchill and Thatcher model for us real Christian seriousness, of which they represent the secular counterpart.
In a narcissistic age like ours, the question of seriousness presses Christians uncomfortably. We can be bright believers, burbling away about our wonderful conversion, and still be living frivolous, unstable, ego-tripping lives. We run from one brief enthusiasm to another, constantly pursuing way-out novelties of belief and behavior and earning for ourselves at home, in church, and in the wider community David Niven’s biting comment on Errol Flynn: “At least you knew where you were with him; he always let you down.” Steady seriousness is one mark of right-living Christians. Am I serious? Are you?
BALANCE
When I lived in England, I never got on well with those people, of whom England had many, whose driving motivation seemed to be fear of becoming unbalanced. These cool cats valued poise above passion and middle-class correctness above gestures of enthusiasm. They eschewed exuberance and looked down their noses at lively folk who now and then went over the top emotionally. Some of these blasé balance addicts were evangelical Christians with whom I regularly rubbed shoulders, and their smooth sangfroid, I am afraid, sometimes made me want to spew.
Was that a balanced reaction? Why, no. Balance like theirs was never my thing. If that shows me up as a blurting vulgarian or an inverted snob, so be it, but I was standing for emotional warmth and what is now called relational transparency. Zealous for that, I denounced the desire to be balanced as sinfully self-conscious and Spirit-quenching.
There is, however, another sense in which balance is absolutely necessary for right living, and lack of balance is ruinous. And it is on that other sense that I want to dwell now.
Balance is the secret of successful tightrope walking. It is also one of the secrets of Christian living. Just as there are always two ways in which a tightrope walker can fall, either to his right or to his left, so it is with the believer. At every point where a policy has to be formed or a course of action planned, two extremes of one-sidedness have to be avoided. It is in that sense that we have to learn to keep our balance— and we are not very good at doing it.
We Christians are in fact abysmally bad at avoiding extremes. We are like pendulums, constantly swinging from one extreme to the other. It is the power of reaction, perhaps the strongest negative force in human life, that causes this swing. It works thus: We see, or think we see, something we dislike, and we recoil from it as we would from a snake in the grass. We keep our gaze fixed on it while we put as much distance between it and us as we can. Walking backwards in this way, we soon reach an extreme opposite to that which set us going, though we are likely not to notice its extreme character because we can only think of what we are trying to get away from. So one-sidedness of one sort spawns one-sidedness of an opposite sort. Balance is not sought, nor is it found. The reaction of man thus fails to work the righteousness of God.
One example of this is the pendulum swing of popular evangelical ethics from legalism to antinomianism and from an ethos of separation to one of worldliness during the past half-century. To me, this evangelical flip-flop is a cautionary tale rather than a story of progress, since each extreme is equally unbalanced and unimpressive. If we set them side by side, this will, I think, become plain.
By legalism I mean not justification partly by works (the Galatian heresy), but a living-by-numbers approach to the Christian life that overlays Christian liberty and love with a kind of Christianized Pharisaism. This Pharisaism sees Christian living mainly in terms of outward behavior—things you do and don’t do, especially the latter. So legalism views holiness negatively, emphasizing abstinence from evil rather than doing good; it is elitist in its readiness to censure Christians who are less addicted to its taboos, and it is weak on neighborly love.
By antinomianism I mean not taking God’s law seriously as a guide for conduct. Situation ethics, which allows purpose to justify action, is antinomian; so is the mentality that leads folk to make moral exceptions in their own favor on the grounds that diligence in keeping some divine commands excuses one from having to observe others. Antinomians are prone to identify inward impulses as promptings of the Holy Spirit even when they go against the law. They need to see that the moral law of Scripture expresses God’s likes and dislikes, so that one can please him only by observing it.
Fifty years ago evangelicals taught Christian living legalistically: “Don’t smoke or drink, cheat, lie, or chew/and don’t team up with those who do.” In those days avoiding the world’s defilements was the main concern. This school of thought discounted the idea that Christians are free to enjoy God’s creation while they try to change the world for the better. Reaction against that thinking has led now to an opposite extreme. Many Christians have uncritically bought into the self-indulgent lifestyle of the secular world. Biblical condemnation of sexual irregularity and the self-serving quest for wealth, pleasure, and power is ignored, and the behavior patterns of most Christians seem indistinguishable from those of unbelievers. In short, ghetto legalism has given way to antinomian worldliness. Reaction? Yes. Recovery of balance? No.
What should we hope for? What should we aim at? Disgust at Christian moral laxity will probably soon spawn a new legalistic rigorism, but that will be reaction again. Shall we ever achieve Christlike balance and involvement in the world on the basis of being utterly different from it? At least, for now, let us try!
DYING
In today’s world death is the great unmentionable, just as physical sex was a hundred years ago. Apart from cynical paradings of a sense of life’s triviality (the Grateful Dead; “he who dies with the most toys wins”) and egoistic expressions of belief in reincarnation (the New Age; Shirley MacLaine), death is not ordinarily spoken of outside of medical circles. To invite discussion of it, even in the church, is felt to be bad form. It has become conventional to think as if we are all going to live in this world forever and to view every case of bereavement as a reason for doubting the goodness of God. We must all know deep down that this is ridiculous, but we do it all the same. And in doing it, we part company with the Bible, with historic Christianity, and with a basic principle of right living, namely, that only when you know how to die can you know how to live.
There is a great contrast here between past and present. In every century until our own, Christians saw this life as preparation for eternity. Medievals, Puritans, and later evangelicals thought and wrote much about the art of dying well, and they urged that all of life should be seen as preparation for leaving it behind. This was not otiose morbidity, but realistic wisdom, since death really is the one certain fact of life. Acting the ostrich with regard to it is folly to the highest degree.
Why has modern Protestantism so largely lost its grip on this biblical otherworldliness? Several factors have combined to produce the effect.
First, death is no longer our constant companion. Until the twentieth century most children died before they were ten, and adults died at home with the family around them. But nowadays deaths in the family are rarer, and as often as not happen in hospitals, so that we can easily forget the certainty of our own death for years together.
Second, modern materialism, with its corollary that this life is the only life for enjoying anything, has infected Christian minds, producing the feeling that it is a cosmic outrage for anyone to have to leave this world before he or she has tasted all that it has to offer.
Third, Marxist mockery of the Christian hope (“pie in the sky when you die”) and the accusation that having a hope of heaven destroys one’s zeal for ending evil on earth have given Christians a false conscience that inhibits them about being heavenly-minded.
Fourth, modern Christians are rightly troubled at the cultural barrenness, social unconcern, and seemingly shrunken humanity that have sometimes accompanied professed longings for heaven. We have come to suspect that such longings are escapist and unhealthy.
Fifth, man’s natural sense of being made for an eternal destiny, the awareness formerly expressed by the phrase “the greatness of the soul,” has largely atrophied amid the hectic artificialities of Western urban life.
How then should Christians think about death—their own death, to start with? Surely as follows:
1. Physical death is the outward sign of that eternal separation from God that is the Creator’s judgment on sin. That separation will only become deeper and more painful through the milestone event of dying, unless saving grace intervenes. Unconverted people do well, therefore, to fear death. It is in truth fearsome.
2. For Christians, death’s sting is withdrawn. Grace has intervened, and now their death day becomes an appointment with their Savior, who will be there to take them to the rest prepared for them. Though they will be temporarily bodiless, which is not really good, they will be closer to Christ than ever before, “which is better by far” (Phil. 1:23).
3. Since believers do not know when Christ will come for them, readiness to leave this world at any time is vital Christian wisdom. Each day should find us like children looking forward to their holidays, who get packed up and ready to go a long time in advance.
4. The formula for readiness is: “Live each day as if thy last” (Thomas Ken). In other words, “Keep short accounts with God.” I once heard Fred Mitchell, Overseas Missionary Fellowship director, enforce this thought shortly before his own instantaneous homecall when the plane in which he was traveling disintegrated in midair. Mitchell lived what he taught, and his biography was justly given as its title the last message radioed by the pilot of the doomed aircraft— Climbing on Track. I hope I never forget his words.
5. Dying well is one of the good works to which Christians are called, and Christ will enable us who serve him to die well, however gruesome the physical process itself. And dying thus, in Christ, through Christ, and with Christ, will be a spiritual blossoming. As being born into this temporal world was our initial birthday, and as being born into God’s spiritual kingdom was our second birthday, being born through physical death into the eternal world will be our third birthday.
Dag Hammarskjöld was thinking Christianly when he wrote that no philosophy that cannot make sense of death can make sense of life either. No one’s living will be right until these truths about death are anchored in his or her heart.