Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans today begins with an affirmation for which Paul is justly famous: “Therefore,” he writes, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” I feel like I’ve written about this before, Dear Friend, so I hope you’ll forgive me if what I’m about to say seems repetitive, but I think it’s important to remember every now and again that, very often, what we think of as faith and what faith really is are somewhat different things.

It seems like we contemporary Christian folks very frequently understand faith as an adherence to a series of truth claims to which we’ve given our assent. To say, “I have faith in Jesus,” is very often understood as, “I believe a series of claims made about Jesus.” The two statements aren’t necessarily opposed to each other, and indeed go hand in hand (hopefully!), but let’s be honest…they are, actually, two different statements; they don’t mean the same things. The first is oriented to a person, the second is oriented to a claim; the first implies a living and transformative relationship with a living being, the second implies a more forensic relationship to a particular data set; the first speaks to where our faith is found and whence it springs, the second speaks to the sorts of things about which we’ve been convinced or that we’ve chosen to find convincing. It’s possible, then, to believe all the claims it’s practicable to believe, and yet not be pitched by any or all of them toward a transformative relationship with Jesus Christ that looks like faith.

Now, I think the claims the Church makes about Jesus are very important, needful, necessary, and true, so I think believing them is important…but I don’t think they’re a checklist the Church offers us by which to evaluate the fullness of our faith. I don’t think our intellectual assent to a thing is productive of faith either in whole or in part—that would be to make an intellective act the means of our salvation, and our tradition (and St Paul) is quite clear: salvation is by grace through faith, not by any work we can achieve, intellective or otherwise. The claims the Church makes about Jesus are a series of invitations to fall in love with the One those claims describe. To have faith in this Jesus is to answer that invitation, to be drawn more deeply into relationship with the Incarnate Word, the Crucified, Risen and Ascended Lord of Love, and to be transformed by and in Christ into the nearer likeness of Christ, loved by God into the sort of people who love with God’s own love. Moreover, to have faith in Jesus is to gradually discover that our faith is Jesus’ own: that the faithfulness of Jesus is the root and ground of our own faithfulness. In this way, our faith in Jesus is really an expression of the faith of Jesus.

So what does it mean to have faith? You’ll forgive me, I hope, for repeating myself again…but my favorite definition of faith comes from Fr James Alison: faith is the ability to relax in the presence of someone who doesn’t just love you in the abstract, but actually fundamentally and completely likes you, delights in you. And that ability isn’t a skill we develop, but a response to that loving regard that loved us before we were capable of loving, a loving regard by which we find ourselves transformed into a people of loving regard. That response— relaxing in the presence of Love, letting down our guard, allowing ourselves to be shaped by Love into a People of Love—that response deepens as we practice our faith, grows as our faith grows, but it’s not a skill or an intellective operation…it’s the shape of a life so rooted in God’s love that it’s transparent to that love.

My Beloved Friend! May God increase our faith this day and every day of our lives!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+