Five misconceptions about faith and how they mess you up.

This post is a work in progress…

If you are a Christian or a seeker and are having trouble finding a satisfying definition of faith, I guarantee you that you are not the only one. There are good reasons why scrapping together a definition of faith is so challenging. The way that we use the word “faith” in our culture is different from the way the biblical writers used it. It was part of a completely different way of looking at the world. When we take words that are originally at home in one worldview and move them into another, their meanings can change drastically. They stop making sense. Here are five common misconceptions about faith that are common in our culture. I find that these misconceptions are shared by Christians and non Christians and create a lot of mess as we attempt to make sense of the world.

Misconception #1. Faith is a “religious” word. It’s only relevant for religious people when they’re talking about religious things. You don’t often hear mainstream scientists talking about the role of faith in science, or hear mechanics talking about having faith in how cars work.

Misconception #2.  Have faith in faith! In this misconception, faith is an “Oprah” word. Faith is something that makes you feel better, or a quasi-magic force that changes reality by its own strength. People say things sentimentally like “You just have to have faith”, without really talking about what we should have faith in. It’s almost as if faith were a feeling that gives us the warm fuzzies to get through any situation. It doesn’t need an object that is worthy of our faith to accomplish transformation as we trust in it (faith in Christ, faith in our own abilities, faith in the law of gravity).

Misconception #3. Jesus runs on a faith tank and we have to fill it up before he can move. When I have enough Faith Points to get to the “make stuff happen” line on the Faith Tank, someone will get healed. Doubt Points lower the level on the Faith Tank. Whatever you do, don’t doubt! Think your happy thoughts! Try as hard as possible to work your faith up so you can get more Faith Points. In this misconception of faith, the quality or amount of faith that we have transforms the reality of our situation. For example, if we have enough faith in Jesus, ourselves, in the universe, in shiny unicorns, etc., then we we will get the outcome we want. This misconception is very common among Christians. It can lead to attempts at manipulating God, guilt or shame for not having enough faith, and treating faith as a work (one of the great ironies of contemporary Protestantism).

Misconception #4. Faith is an “unreasonable” word, or at least unrelated to reason. There’s major cultural baggage behind this misconception, and it’s the reason that misconceptions # 1,  #2 and #5 developed. In Western cultures, we have seen reason as the way to get reliable knowledge about reality. Faith is seen as something less reliable that begins where reason ends. In other words, faith is an unreliable means of knowing/understanding reality. In snobbier versions of this misconception, faith is a substitute for reason or a way of avoiding unpleasant aspects of reality by living in a wishful fantasies.

Misconception #5: “Doubt” is a reasonable word, or at least more intellectually respectable than “faith.” Thus the phrase, “honest doubt” as opposed to “blind faith”. This is also rooted in the history of how we have understood knowledge in the West. For several hundred years until quite recently, many people thought that the way you get to certain knowledge is by doubting everything (particularly anything that you learned from your culture or a source claiming authority, such as yo’ daddy, “The Man”, or the Bible). Once you’ve doubted everything that you possibly can, what you’ll have left are basic facts that are so self-evident that you can’t doubt them (“I think, therefore I am”). If you follow precise rules of logic from your un-doubtable facts, you’ll get to certain knowledge. Everything else (like things you learn from revelation, such as the Bible), doesn’t count as real knowledge.

Another version of this is that the only reliable way of getting knowledge is by input from your five senses, disciplined by practicing the scientific method. Anything that you can’t prove through science doesn’t count as knowledge. In both of these misconceptions, science or reason is seen as something that we practice without using faith. Faith is “subjective”, science and reason are “objective.”

How these misconceptions mess us up:

Many Christians believe that they know things about God or religion by faith, and that they know things about the rest of the world through science, reason, or “common sense.” This creates a split between our Christianity and the rest of our lives. Sometimes, people carry this split so far that they don’t bother to reason about their religious beliefs. This is either because they feel that their faith doesn’t have a reasonable dimension or a fear that their faith couldn’t stand up to reason. On the opposite extreme, there are also Christian subcultures that have insisted that we “prove faith” or “prove the existence of God”, by demonstrating that it lives up to the supposedly objective standards of reason (such as the law of non-contradiction).

More often, I meet people who want to believe, but have doubts. They feel that they are kidding themselves if they try to believe the claims of Christianity in the face of what their reason, doubts, and common sense are telling them.They struggle with a sense that there is something more to life but that they get stuck. Being told to “just believe” feels like they are being told to compromise their intellectual integrity.

Here’s one of my favorite examples of how these misconceptions can play out in Christian cultures: Have you ever been at a Bible Study or in Sunday School, and someone asks a question about God/The Bible/life that there didn’t seem to be a reasonable answer for? Did someone end up saying: “Somethings don’t make sense, otherwise, we wouldn’t have to have faith. If we could just rely on reason, we wouldn’t rely on God.”? I’ve heard this a lot, and I have a theory about the reasoning underneath it:

Premise One: God requires Faith.

Premise Two: Reason and faith are independent.

Premise Three: Reason is the way that we get to knowledge. Or: Reason is the way we get to most knowledge, and faith picks up where reason leaves off.

Therefore: God has to make some things out of reach of reason so we have to rely on Him. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have to have faith. If we could rely on reason for everything, we wouldn’t rely on God.”

This has always evoked a distasteful image of God to me: God puts some things out of reach so that we’ll need Him, because God’ knows that we wouldn’t want to hang out with Him otherwise . He demands that we have faith, which we don’t seem to use in any other area of our life.

What questions about faith do you have? Have you seen any of these misconceptions? How do these misconceptions play out in your life and lives of those around you?

Coming soon: Five ways of thinking about faith that will help you get unstuck.

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