Belief in God is not
necessarily a leap of faith

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. — Mark 9:24
Faith is no easy matter. I think most of us can agree on that. It is sometimes difficult to have faith in God. There are many reasons for this difficulty, I suppose.
First, there is the fact that God is not present to us in the way that most of the things that we consider "real" are present to us. In one sense — perhaps the most fundamental sense — when we say "I believe in X" or "I have faith in X," we mean "I believe or have faith that X exists." That’s easy enough for tables and chairs and other human beings. It is not so easy, however, when it comes to God.
"Does God exist?" Well, certainly God does not exist in the same way tables, chairs and other human beings do. In fact, I tend to think that we do better to avoid saying either that God exists or that God does not exist because the categories of existence or non-existence apply to things, like tables, chairs and human beings but not to God.
That is to say, God is not a thing like other things or a being like other beings. God is rather the source of all of these other things and beings. To recognize and acknowledge this means recognizing and acknowledging the complete otherness of God.
The question of God’s existence and the fact of God’s "otherness" are apt to create problems for our faith in a second sense of the expression "have faith in." In the second sense, when we say "I have faith in X" or "I believe in X," we mean "I trust X" or "I can rely on X."
And yet, given God’s complete otherness — God’s complete incomprehensibility from our perspective — it may be very difficult to trust in or rely on God. After all, generally when we say, for example, "I trust her" or "I can rely on my car starting," I am basing my assessment on past performances and my understanding, however rudimentary, of the other person or my car. But can I really say that I have sufficient insight into God’s conduct to be able to trust or rely on God?
This difficulty may explain in part our tendency to anthropomorphize God. That is, we ascribe human motives, emotions, desires, etc., to God in order to make God more comprehensible to us.
We realize, of course, that these things are not literally true about God. We realize that God is other than we are, but we persist in ascribing these human features to God because it enables us in some way to make sense of our relationship with God. Still, there is more to the story than just this.
St. Thomas Aquinas recognized God’s complete otherness and therefore he recognized that our anthropomorphic projections about God are not, strictly speaking, true.
However, Thomas observed that some things we say about God more closely approximate the truth about God than other things we say.
For example, strictly speaking we cannot say that God is either good or not good because those ascriptions apply to created things and beings, not to the creator. And yet, it is more accurate to say, by analogy, that God is good than to say that God is not good.
The reason for this is that our being and our positive attributes owe to our relationship with God. That is, our goodness is a matter of our more closely approximating who God created us to be — the image of God within us. So we can say, by analogy, that God is good even though, strictly speaking, goodness applies only to created things.
What has all of this to do with faith? I began by saying that faith is difficult because we do not encounter God as we do other things. But in Thomas’ explanation there is a hint about how we can relate to God.
We can relate to God as the source of our own goodness and our own higher nature. Therefore, by looking inward for these features in ourselves and attempting to manifest them in and to the world, we are encountering God. Not like a table or a chair that is outside of us, but in the recess of our being and in the manifest goodness of our behavior when it arises from the deepest recesses of our being. So as we come to know our true selves, we come to know God. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road, in Bustleton.