There is a malicious understanding of the life of faith. It goes something like this: to have faith is to believe in certain foundational ideas. The proper result of this belief is a logical and rigorous application of those ideas to all of life. And make no mistake (this understanding says)—all of life will be impacted by a truly rigorous application. Your political agenda will be dictated by faith. The program (and results) of your science will be dictated by faith. Your social role (that of exemplar and judge) will be dictated by faith. Your philosophizing will be an importation and reformulation of faith. And so on.
This understanding of the life of faith is far removed from uncertainty and doubt. Instead, it declares that the real difficulty lies in becoming a person of faith. Once faith has been achieved, once one is converted (shall we say), then the path lies before one, clear and straight.
I offer this summary as a sort of “essence of fundamentalism.” It will be found even among those who include “fundamentalists” among their poster-enemies.
The real visible marks of the fundamentalism I have just described are as follows: First, a coercive treatment of those within the movement (especially those brought up within it) which follows from the general conviction that the implications of foundational articles of faith should be plain to all. Second, a militantly competitive attitude toward all persons, ideas, or movements (both historical and contemporary) that contradict either the supposed logical coherence of the faith-founded life or any individual article of faith or implication of faith. Third, an emotional and psychological dependence upon the foundational articles of faith such that, when those articles are questioned or challenged in any way, the “faithful” are prepared to grasp any argument or any rhetorical device to answer the question or defeat the challenger.
This conception of the life of faith transforms Christianity (or whatever religion its adherents claim) into an ideology—nothing more, nothing less. And the hinge of this transformation lies, I think, in characterizing faith as a foundation.
I offer that we should replace this metaphor for faith with the metaphor of a target.
While fundamentalists might argue that foundation is a biblical metaphor for faith, I counter that it is actually a person (God, and for Christians specifically Jesus) for whom the metaphor of foundation is customarily used. Faith, on the other hand, is a self-commitment to that person which is described far more often as personally unsettling than as stabilizing and programmatic.
The condition (and probably about 99% of the content) of faith is, therefore, humility. The totalizing claims implicit in (even rhetorical) militancy shift the focus of faith from self-abandoning commitment to self-aggrandizing judgment. One’s boat on the sea of life becomes a pirate vessel for hijacking other ships rather than a life raft bound for the distant shore.
But as self-commitment to a person, the “articles of faith” of a Christian have to do with confessing the nature and work of Christ. The life of faith, then, must in the first place have to do with maintaining the vitality and truthfulness of that confession. 99% of the content of faith is humility. Consequently, one of the real characteristics of the life of faith would seem to be self-subversion. I am reminded, in this context, of Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” whose blithe and unreasonable confidence is all too often supplanted, in real life, with a calculating attempt to work out a program for achieving one’s desires that can then be afterwords baptized as the work of God. The knight of faith’s trust in the person to whom he has committed himself is a target for our own behavior; but, continually, before we can approach that model (which is actually the model of Christ himself) we must subvert our multi-form self-trust, our default ideological stance.
