Time, Faith And Progress

To struggle with faith is as much a part of faith as anything else.

Throughout history, saints and sinners, rich men and poor men and the powerful and the weak, have all shared the same underlying struggle. Long after we are gone, there will be those who struggle with the angels on Jacob’s Ladder (we have written about some of that struggle, here), faith and meaning.

There is one constant ground rule in our struggle with faith. Time always moves forward. While we may employ the newest and most novel of arguments with God, we cannot go back in time. There are all kinds of miracles God has brought to bear- and there are miracles that never occurred, even when we most needed them. Notwithstanding the miracle of making time stand still (the sun stayed in the sky long enough for Joshua to vanquish his enemies), or the day move faster, God has never allowed us to go back in time.

Why? Because there are no do-overs. There is no shortage of forgiveness and penance, but there are no do-overs, because we must learn to be accountable. It is only by being accountable that we really learn. To learn mercy, we must know the pain of weeping and to know forgiveness we must know the shame of our own deliberate blind eyes and failures. If we were able to go back and ‘fix our mistakes,’ we would never learn the things that validate and confirm us as being ‘made in God’s image.’

This is true for everyone, regardless of professed faith.
As time has progressed, we have come to understand God’s word in new ways. Now, to be clear, we are not talking about recasting God and faith, but rather, we have come to see more facets of our faith, facets that may have been obscured or hidden from most of those that came before us.

When we read or hear stories as children, we understand them in very simplistic terms. Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Hans Brinker’s little Dutch Boy, enthralled us, scared and eventually comforted us, because that is how children see the world. As adults, we see the fables in a more complex- and contemporary terms. In fact, we may understand the fables in very different ways than our grandparents. Faith and God were very different for our grandparents. For example, they saw antibiotics as a true miracle. We can’t imagine a world without them. They are just another pill bottle in the medicine chest.

The same is true of understanding the bible and our faith. We are meant to see and understand faith and the bible in ways that are relevant to us. We are meant to make faith and the bible as current and contemporary as we can, because faith and the bible are as relevant today as they were yesterday. Over time, our understanding of our religious texts have deepened. Ideas that were once easily understood, are now viewed with more texture. Biblical exhortations to violence, once religious benchmarks, have been supplanted by exhortations to do good works and to ‘pursue peace,’ because our understanding of the bible, our understanding of faith and the understanding of what is expected of us, have progressed.

Yesterday, The Anchoress wrote a post, Faith, Reason and Forced Conversions, in which she discusses the forced ‘conversions’ of former Fox News kidnap victims Centanni and Wiig and the meaning behind those forced ‘conversions.’ She touches upon a few very very nuanced realities:

The demand to “convert or die” is not a thinking demand, it is not born of reason. It is culled forth from a dark heart given over to something larger than a human sense or sensibility. It is an unnatural requirement…

The Anchoress also notes,

The re-naming of these two Western men is particularly telling. While it may mean nothing at all to a secularist, it means quite a lot to the Islamists watching the world over, and to the Christians and the Jews, as well, because they too understand it. Abraham, Noah, Jacob, Sarah, even the apostle Peter were all given new names by God, the new names had to do with relationship and covenant. “I shall give you a new name,” is one of God’s promises. To give up one’s name is to give up one’s self. To allow someone else to name you is to count yourself the lesser [emp-SC&A].

To force someone to convert or even acquiesce to another’s faith is to deny the necessary struggle with faith in which we must all engage and participate. To force conversion or subservience to faith is to go back in time because those who make those demands are incapable of living in the present and are themselves weak and dysfunctional. Faith is about progress and greater understanding. It is not about the daydreams of bygone days and the romantic yearning for yesterday’s simpler times.

Faith is about today and tomorrow and the current and real relevance of that faith in our lives. That is the faith we struggle with. Healthy faith prepares us for tomorrow. Dysfunctional faith keeps that tomorrow from being meaningful. That is the faith that is imposed.

Ali Eteraz recently wrote, Fjordman’s Tired Tropes, a post in which he not so gently excoriates Fjordman, not so much for his beliefs, but rather, for the way Fjordman presents his beliefs.

From his Scandinavian perch, which renders him influential solely because no one else has the requisite English speaking ability to occupy it, has only one lesson to impart: Islam is an Evil War Machine seeking to conquer Europe while the “true” owners of the Continent cannot fight back because they are too corrupted by the legacies of Communism.

Shopenhauer told Europe that Reason was weak and insignificant, eventually comparing it to a lame blind man. Fjordman is the post-modern kitsch version of Shopenhauer’s pessimism. The glass is half empty; no, no, it is altogether empty, and it is those immigrant Muslims in Europe, and those Jihadis Muslims in the Middle East, and those post-Communist conspirators around the world, who have drank it, and as a consequence of this, war is the most likely outcome, so let’s all prepare for the forthcoming apocalypse (which given European military might will mean the massive destruction of all things remotely Muslim, which is too bad because killing is never easy).

Eteraz wryly notes that Fjordman’s faith is really no diferent than that of the radical and backward looking Islamists Fjorman abhors (there is a certain irony here. Eteraz is clearly more repulsed by violent and backward looking radical Islamists than is Fjordman. They are part of his immediate world. Fjordman can go home at night and drown his sorrows in meatballs and glogg).

The distinction is not a small one. Eteraz, looks forward- he not interested in what was yesterday. Of Fjordman he states,

…Islam and Jihadis are synonymous. In the same piece quoted above he makes a casual leap from “Islam” to “Jihadis.” Lost in this quantum leap of absurd proportions are the hundreds of millions of altogether apathetic and blameless Muslims (who are blown up in Iraq, Tanzania and Kenya and whose businesses are extorted by the so called Militias of Allah) who also consider Islam their religious home. Lost in that leap are the innumerable reformists, jurists, writers, novelists, film-makers, and every day heroes. His problem is the same as that of any other avowed Islamophobe: the inability to understand that his best bet of engagement with Islam will occur via the same Muslims whom he does not even recognize exist. But I didn’t write this to speak about the selective myopia that strikes some members of the right blogosphere when it comes time to conflate Islam with Jihadis. That is not something for me to ‘fix.’ There will have to rise among the right those who are capable of more nuanced thinking. Thankfully there are already such people. May their lucidity triump over this other myopia.

What is important is that Eteraz does not allow Fjordman to frame the issue. Eteraz, ever looking ahead, frames the issue in relevant and realistic terms- we have to deal with reality and not the romantic notion that we can go back in time. Muslims are in Europe and in America. Reality.

Anchoress sees the radical- and backward looking Islamists as a threat to us all. Eteraz sees Fjordman and western reactionaries as equal threats. They are both right. Unless we can all look forward, we are all destined to look backward- and if that happens, faith becomes meaningless. The Catholic Church was recently excoriated by many conservatives for their stated position on illegal immigration, that the Church would offer help to all who needed it, in any way they can. Clearly, the Church is looking at reality and looking ahead. The 10-12 million illegal aliens that are already here are not going away- and they are not invisible or disposable. They are a separate and distinct issue from border security. We cannot go back in time- not just for ourselves, but for the following generations. They will learn, by our example, how we must look ahead, always, if we and our faith, are to be relevant.

Eteraz and Ancoress are on the same page, really. Their observations are not at loggerheads. They each understand that in order for faith to be relevant and meaingful, faith must look forward.

Looking forward also means making mistakes. That is the nature of progress.

One Scandinavian feminist insisted that Muslim violence against women was the fault of the women because they dresses to provocatively- as if all Muslim men were beasts and could not control themselves- or even more simply, were unable to avert their gaze from the temptresses that surround them.
Conversely, an Australian cabinet minister demanded that Muslim immigrants change their ways and assimilate. He didn’t ask, mind you, he demanded. If there were ever a classic guarantee of grief, a demand to assimilate, rather than an extended invitation and outstretched to integrate and participate, is it.

Accommodations are always reached by those in the middle. Those that espouse political and radical extremes are always relegated to the periphery and always end up being rather ineffectual, surrounded by marginal players.

Like real art that stands the test of time, we will find a way to make room for each other that will stand the test of time. That may infuriate the extremists, but in the end progress will not be denied.

That has always been true in the past and that will always be true in the future.

It’s all a part of moving forward.