1 - Life before God

Summary

What does it mean to have faith? What are the theological preconditions of a life lived out of faith? Most fundamentally, to have faith means to be determined, in two senses. First, it means to be determined as regards one's convictions – to be confident and persevering in them. Second, it means to be determined as regards one's identity – in the sense of moving from an indeterminate and amorphous sense of self to a more definite, determinate sense. So understood, our “faith” defines us, gives us a determinate identity, which is manifest in the confidence with which we hold and express our convictions.

But such “determination” has its dangers. It can ossify into the apocalyptic determination of presumptuousness – a conviction that we know already who we will fully be, and who we will ultimately become. We feel this temptation, and we feel it as a temptation, because we know we are incomplete, and we feel that that is bad, imperfect; absent such faith, the self may seem not a whole but as a hole, a vacuum that needs filling; much of our manic activity is driven by our panicked recognition that we need to do something to be a self (see Berger 1992: 111). Bad faith is a form of false closure, a pseudo-resolution of our inescapable human openness, during the world.