St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER II. "I BELIEVE"
What it Means to Believe
OUR CREEDS begin with "I believe." There are no end of beliefs among men. In all human thinking and living, beliefs are at work and have much to do with the way men act. We find them in politics and in education and in everyday life, as well as in religion. There are people who believe in a protective tariff and others who believe in "free trade." Militarists and pacifists differ in their beliefs; so do Socialists and Capitalists. Vegetarians have strong convictions as to what we should and should not eat. If anyone of us started to make a list of all the things we believe, we would soon grow weary, for we are all great believers. We believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that Lincoln was a President of the United States, that the world is shaped like a ball slightly flattened at opposite poles. We believe that men should have a fair trial whether they be black or white, that if we do not get rid of war it is likely to destroy our civilization. We believe in our friends, in "playing the game" squarely, in the honesty of our banker.
To believe something is to think it true, to be ready to say "yes" to it. To believe in something or someone is to trust them, to be ready to depend on them. There is an important difference between believing that something is true and believing in something. The first has to do with our minds, but may not concern our hearts or wills very much. We can believe that Thomas Jefferson was a President and not care a bit whether he was or not. It does not have anything to do with our lives. But when we believe in something our hearts and wills are concerned. It means that we trust and care.
The word that Christians generally use for this second kind of belief is Faith. We have faith in a bank when we are ready to put our money in it without fear. We have faith in a bridge when we are willing to put our weight on it. To have faith in a friend is to be confident of his loyalty and trustworthiness. The "I believe" with which the creeds begin is first and foremost a way of saying that we put our trust in the Father and in the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit.
These two kinds of belief, holding something to be true and trusting in something, are different, but they are closely related to each other. We can believe in our mind that the limb of a tree will hold us and yet be afraid to trust ourselves to it. But we cannot believe in a friend without believing that he exists and is dependable. We can believe with the mind without having much heart or will in it, but we cannot believe with the heart and will without having some mind in it. So trusting in God always calls upon us to say "Yes" to the question whether God is and is trustworthy.
Religious thinkers or theologians have had these two sides of belief in mind when they have distinguished Faith as the heart's trust in God and The Faith as the things which a Christian believes. A person can have a strong trust in God without having clearly in mind all the Christian beliefs. He may certainly accept with a part of his mind many Christian ideas and not really trust and serve God. But for a strong and growing religious life we need both, the loyal trust of heart and will and an understanding acceptance of the truth about God.
Degrees of Belief
Our believing, like our temperature, has many different degrees. It is low and high. It goes up and down. We "rather suspect," "think perhaps," "half believe," "are very sure," "almost certain," "haven't a doubt." At the bottom is doubt and at the top is sure confidence. We need both. In some things we need more of doubt, in others more of sure confidence. The scientist needs a great deal of doubt so that he won't come to any conclusion until he has tested that conclusion in every way he can imagine. A friend needs a great deal of sure confidence because people only show themselves fully and at their best to those who believe in them. In religion, as in friendship, sure confidence stands high. The great friends of God, like Jesus, are men of much confidence. They trust God with their whole heart and mind and strength, and they call their followers to "have faith." To love God with all our heart and mind and strength and to trust Him with sure confidence are two sides of the same thing.
The Test of Belief
When we want to discover what someone else believes we usually ask him what he thinks! And we usually "take his word for it." Generally people mean what they say. If they did not, language would not be of much use to us. Nevertheless, there is a great difference between saying something and really believing it. Saying that we believe in God is no sure proof that we do believe in Him. We may be liars. Or we may be saying thoughtlessly the "regular thing," what other people seem to expect of us. More commonly when we say we believe something that we do not wholly believe, the trouble is that only part of us believes it. For most of us are not just one person; we are many persons. We have different beliefs when we are doing different things, or are with different "crowds," or are in different needs. It is not very hard when we are among friendly people with fine ideas to think that men are brothers. But it is hard to think so when we are with mean people. There are so many who believe in God at church, but stop believing in Him when they go to work. The part of them that goes to church believes in God. The part of them that goes to work does not.
If we see a person who says that he believes something, acting in a way that goes against it, we decide that he does not really believe what he says. He may be a liar or just thoughtless, or more probably he is double-minded like most of us. If a man believes something wholeheartedly, he will be ready to act on it at any time. So the way men act is the surest test of what they believe. A man who says he believes in brotherhood and acts in an unbrotherly way does not believe with his whole heart. He may believe it on Sundays, but not on other days. Most of us are like the man who said to Jesus, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
Jesus used this test of action with His friends. He asked them who they thought He was. Peter answered that he believed Jesus was the Christ, God's King of men. But again He said, "Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" "Ye shall know them by their fruits." The Church asks those who come to her to say what they believe, but the belief she stands for is of the sort that shows itself in the way we live.
Is Our Belief Christian?
In the city of Washington there is a place called the Bureau of Standards. There the government keeps the most perfect weights and measures that can be made so that the people of the United States can try out their own weights and measures by comparing them with the best standards. Christians have tried for a long time to find a perfect standard for Christian belief. In the early centuries they used to write about what they called the "Rule of Faith." That meant the standard or measure of Christian belief, a yardstick by which people could tell whether a belief was Christian or not. It has been found much harder to discover a perfect measure of Christian belief than a nearly perfect measure of one pound or one foot. For religious belief is alive and growing and, as we have seen, it is very hard to put into words. Our branch of the Church has decided that the standard as to whether a belief is Christian or not is the Bible. That does not mean that everything the Bible says is true and right and Christian. The Bible grew for many hundreds of years and our understanding of it is still growing. But the men who wrote the Bible were always moving on to a better knowledge of God and His will, and they came to the fullest knowledge when they came to know and love Jesus. If any have a sure right to the name Christians, it is those who gave us our New Testament. The best test as to whether a belief is Christian is whether it is true to the mind and spirit of our Lord's teaching as recorded in the Bible.
Why We Believe
It is interesting to try to discover why we believe various things. If we look into our own minds we find that we believe a great deal because someone we trust says it is true. Most of our beliefs about things that happened in the past are largely of this sort. We get our ideas of American history from books and teachers. The same holds of our belief about a great number of things which do not come into our own range of observing. We accept the ideas of astronomers as to the age and size of the stars, the ideas of mechanics as to what is wrong with our automobile engine, the ideas of explorers as to what is to be found at the South Pole or in central Africa. This is called believing on the basis of authority. An authority is a person who knows what he is talking about because he has observed it carefully and shared the knowledge with other good observers. Probably most of what any of us believe comes to us from authorities. This is true in religion as well as in other matters. We begin by believing in God because people we trust tell us about Him. We continue to trust what the friends of God say about Him because they know Him better than we do. They are authorities on the subject of religion.
A second influence on our believing is reason. We believe many things because they seem reasonable to us. By that we mean they fit in with other things we already believe. If we came back to our house after an absence of some days and found the drawers of the bureau pulled out and the contents scattered about the floor, we would conclude that a thief had broken into the house. And if we found a pane of glass broken in a cellar window, it would be reasonable to think that the thief had come in that way. We would accept this belief not because someone told us it was true, but because it fitted the facts. We believe that Shakespeare's "Hamlet" could not have been made by putting a lot of words in a box, mixing them up and then drawing them out at random. So much thought would not come out unless a great mind had put the words together. In the same way men have believed that there must be a mind and will at work in the world. Otherwise the world would not be so full of meaning and good.
Our beliefs are influenced not only by authority and reason; they are also shaped by our wishes and feelings. The study of the workings of our minds by psychologists has made it clear that we are not as reasonable as we like to think we are. When we are afraid in the dark it is easy to believe that there is someone in the room. An anxious person is very ready to think that some ill is about to happen. Anger or prejudice is very favorable to the idea that our enemy is plotting against us. In war time people believe almost anything evil about the opposite side. Likewise goodwill and friendliness are closely bound up with faith in the trustworthiness of other people. What we see and what we think reflects the state of our hearts and the direction of our wills. Good wishes and a good will are needed for belief in goodness.
Though all of these influences go into the making of our beliefs there is another influence that is stronger than any of them. We sometimes say that "seeing is believing." There is nothing that makes us so sure of anything as seeing it with our own eyes, or touching or hearing or tasting it. That is what we mean by personal experience. Authority and reasoning and wishes have to give way when they come up against that. If you see a friend on the street and talk with him, you are sure that he is alive and near even though you had reason to think that he was far away or someone told you he was dead or you feared that he was. The strongest kind of believing in religion is based on "spiritual seeing." Jesus said, "The pure in heart shall see God." He did not mean that they would see Him with the outward eye, but with the inward eye. We see that a fence is white with the outward eye. We see that two and two make four with the eye of the mind. We see that courage is better than cowardice, that kindness is better than cruelty, that "the greatest are the servants of all" with the eye of the spirit. The first Christians saw for themselves that Christ is God's chosen King of men, but that seeing was different from seeing the color of His eyes or the shape of His head. Those who believe most surely and truly as Christians are they who have had the "inward eye" opened by Jesus to see their neighbors and God and themselves as they truly are.
Continue to Chapter III. We Believe in God the Father