What is true Faith?

Today’s sermon at church by the pastor was about faith. The pastor gave his sermon based on Hebrews 11 and his sermon was titled Faith of the Ancients. The character of Abraham was used as a model of true faith.

What exactly is faith? There seems to be many definition of what faith is. For this sermon in church today, the pastor states that faith is expressed in obedience to God. The pastor points out Abraham’s obedience to God’s command to go into a new land, as well as to God’s test of him to sacrifice his son Isaac. A Christian friend who recommended me to go for deliverance services in order to receive healing from my tension headache tells me that the faith asked of is not so much about believing that God will heal me, but more of an experimental nature of recognizing the possibility that God may heal me. He terms it “experimental faith”.

I was googling about Christian solutions to obsessive compulsive disorder. Okay, the reason is that I suspect that I might be suffering from a certain obsessive compulsive disorder known as “hypochondria” in that I have preoccupative thoughts about health-related worries. I have worried about things like “damage to cardiovascular health due to passive smoking”, “mercury poisoning from breaking lab thermometer”, “electromagnetic radiation from CRT computer screen”, “brain damage from alcohol consumption”, “brain damage from hitting head on floor” etc. Perhaps this preoccupation with my tinnitus and tension headache are also obsessive in nature, and over-proportionate to their severity. These obsessive health-related worries can be quite debilitating as they can occupy my thought for an entire day and last for months. I was thinking that Christianity might offer solutions to my obsessive worries.

There is this Christian psychiatrist by the name of Ian Osbourne who has written a book titled “Can Christianity cure obsessive-compulsive disorder?” He has a website with the address ocdandchristianity.com where he writes information on strategies to deal with obsessive compulsive worries. His proposition borrows from his understanding of a new approach in the world of psychology to deal with OCD named “responsibility transfer therapy” (RTT). The idea of RTT is for the sufferer of the OCD to release himself or herself from the obsessive worry by transferring the responsibility of the worry to another person to handle. For example, a person who worries obsessively about not turning off the gas before leaving the house would delegate that responsibility to check that the gas is turned off to another person, thereby relieving him or her from some measure of that obsessive sense of responsibility to ensure that the gas is turned off. Using this psychology paradigm to describe the Christian approach of trusting in God, this responsibility is here transferred to God. An excerpt from the website below.

“A person suffering from fire obsessions, for instance, turns to God and allows him to take responsibility for the prevention of fire. The individual tormented by contamination obsessions gives to God the responsibility for whether or not he will get a disease. The person who fears she has offended God leaves responsibility for any offense to God….Devout individuals with OCD must work to resist compulsions. In doing so they demonstrate or prove, both to God and to themselves, how much they trust him and love him.”

This Christian RTT approach relies on the notion of faith in God in its method. The writer has provided an excerpt of what faith here entails.

“Theologian Martin Buber illuminates the issue. In his seminal book, Two Types of Faith, Buber begins with this proposition: “There are two, and only two, types of faith: The one from the fact that I trust someone . . . the other from the fact that I acknowledge a thing to be true.” Religious faith, according to Buber, always involves, most basically, either trusting in God or believing in a revealed truth. It is the first type of faith, he is displayed on every page of the Old Testament, as well as in most every sermon by Jesus. It involves unconditional trust in a God who is personal, vital, loving, and trustworthy.

This has great relevance for OCD sufferers. One of the things most puzzling about them is their inability to be reassured about their obsessional fears. People with religious obsessions can be told again and again that Jesus died for them, and that salvation awaits them, yet they still have agonizing doubts. Obsessionals, in fact, have great difficulty in believing in any fact that directly opposes one of their obsessions. OCD sufferers cannot even take as a fact what they see with their own eyes: they can stare straight at a light switch, see that it is off, and yet fear that it is on.  OCD sufferers have a hard time believing in facts. They are doubters. Yet they are very good at trusting in others. It is trust in the person of God—in his power and his mercy—that OCD sufferers must rely on.

For instance, in the case of a person who obsesses that a fire will start in her stove, the right kind of faith is to leave the possibility of a fire with God. If God should, for God’s own reasons, want a fire to start, then he will start one. If he doesn't, he won’t. The wrong kind of faith is to have “faith” that a fire won’t start. For another example. Suppose a person obsesses that he has lost his salvation, and will go to

hell. The right type of faith is to leave his eternal destiny in the hands of God.

The OCDer is called to a deep kind of faith: trust in the ultimate power and mercy of God. We can be greatly consoled by a confident hope that God will prevent an obsessional fear from being realized, a hope that is based on our trust in God's mercy and love. But we can't have factual certainty.”

I appreciate the distinction made by the theologian in the excerpt above. Basically, it is a distinction of faith about the factual certainty of God doing something according to one’s wishes, and a ‘milder’, less demanding sort of faith of simply trusting in God. However, a question I want to ask is what kind of faith is actually asked of in the bible. And here, I can quote two scripture giving different answers. There is the one in Hebrews 11 which seems to indicate faith of the kind that requires belief in factual certainty of the fulfillment of the request to God – “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” Then there is the account of Jesus healing the leper in Luke 5. In that account, the leper begged Jesus “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean”. I thought that the faith expressed by the leper, as connoted by his words is more of the ‘milder kind’ in the sense that he has faith in the power of Jesus to heal, but he still leaves as a question of whether he would be healed on the basis of Jesus’ willingness to heal. Now, I will highlight that there is still a thin distinction between the faith described here with that ‘milder’ version of faith in the Martin Buber excerpt above. The leper expresses his faith in Jesus ability to heal, whereas Martin Buber’s ‘milder’ faith simply expresses trust in God given any circumstances, even if things go against the desired wishes of the person holding onto this faith. (Trust me guys, there is even more of such mind-numbing delineating of concepts and definitions in law studies, and some law school students who quite inadvertently develop a habit to see a need for clarification of such delineation in whatever they discuss. I see that theologians may come second in the running for such vain inquisitions)

Personally, I think the ‘milder’ kinds of faith is more reasonably to be asked of a person than a faith demanding a belief in the certainty of the fulfillment of the request. I mean, why does God have to require that his subject believe whole-heartedly that he, God, will do what the subject want before he does what the subject wants? It seems idiosyncratic to me.

In this website containing Philip Yancey’s synopsis for his book “Prayer – Does it make any difference”, Yancey concludes on that question of prayer with “I now see it [Prayer] not so much as a way of getting God to do my will as a way of being available to get in the stream of what God wants to accomplish on earth.” I don’t think Yancey is necessarily theologically substantiated in his drawing up of priorities of the different functions of prayers. I would like to think that I can and should use prayers to make God do the things I want him to, and that this is as equally important an aspect of prayer. There are many examples of such prayers in the bible where the prayee (pardon the legalese) is requesting God to do something that he wants. But I like how Yancey realistically acknowledges the predicament that believers face in having their prayers go unanswered and things not going according to their prayer requests, perhaps the reason why he came to, in my opinion, a disappointing conclusion that the priority of the function of prayers is more of to understand God than to expect a fulfillment of the prayer request. And I appreciate that he does not take the condescending tone that some Christians might take towards another believer by suggesting that that believer’s prayer is not answered because that believer did not have enough faith in God, or that that believer “did not ask for God to come into his or her heart”. A harsh logical understanding of scriptural passage may lead to such conclusions in my opinion.

Law school starts tomorrow for me, and I can’t say that I am feeling too prepared to deal with school given my prevailing conditions. I did experience a lot of difficulties for the past few semesters because of the tension headache, and perhaps, as what I suspect, from obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety disorder. Word has it that these conditions are chronic. But I am hoping for this phase to pass and for my mind to be more settled so that I can concentrate on my law studies. I am not sure whether Ian Osbourne whom I mentioned earlier is being truthful or simply trying to be encouraging, but I like what he wrote in his website about how “three of the greatest luminaries in the history of the Christian

religion: Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Saint Therese of Lisieux” suffered from obsessional fears indicative of OCD as well, in particular, fear of loss of salvation. Martin Luther, progenitor of the protestant faith I know. John Bunyan I have heard of but am not too familiar, and the third one I have not come across (but I should read up on since she is so venerably described by the author, and to ensure that I come off as well-informed in case one of those smart aleck Christians start questioning me on my knowledge of Christian history). I am amused by his identification of disorders based on his study accounts of these historical figures and his thesis that “All three, even more remarkably, after receiving unhelpful advice from their church elders, found a way to conquer their tormenting thoughts through faith. Each found the same solution: Trusting absolutely in God’s power and mercy. In psychological terms, they transferred the responsibility for their obsessional fears to God.” Perhaps I may come to find a similar sense of relief from being able to trust God more.