By: Jim Taylor

Two kinds of beliefs


During a slow news week, when Foreign Minister Peter MacKay can grab front-page headlines by travelling to Afghanistan to have Christmas dinner with Canadian troops, my thoughts turned to our own travels.

        Over the last month, my wife and I took three trips by car over high mountain passes.

        At the end of November, we drove to Vancouver and back. The weather forecast predicted heavy snow for the return trip, but we squeaked through just before it.

        The next weekend we drove to Calgary for the christening of our godson’s daughter. The morning we returned home, Calgary got several centimetres of fresh snow. City traffic ground to a crawl. But half an hour west of Calgary, the roads cleared, and stayed clear all the way home.

        You might think someone up there was looking after us.

        Not on the third trip. We set out for the day-long drive to Edmonton, to spend Christmas with our daughter. Two hours out, we were sliding on slush. By the time we reached Rogers’ Pass, the highways department had closed the road completely.

        “Two hours,” said the highway worker in his fluorescent vest. “For avalanche control.”

        In the parking area, snow lay knee deep. Cars got stuck. Strangers pushed each either in or out. Semi-trailers lined up for five kilometres along the highway.

        When traffic moved again, we struggled through blizzards for five more hours before we got a motel for the night.

        Yet I had no doubt that we would get through safely. Does anyone set out on a trip believing they won’t survive it?



Legacy of The Enlightenment

 This kind of trip throws into sharp focus the difference between what we say we believe, and what we really believe.

        Most often, when people state, “I believe…” they mean giving intellectual assent to a proposition of some kind. For example, that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for sins we hadn’t committed yet, that God comes in three flavours, etc.

        This kind of doctrinal belief gained dominance during what historians call The Enlightenment – a period of philosophical ferment in Europe and North America. Thanks to Islamic libraries, the western world re-discovered Aristotle’s logic. Reason became the authority.

        The Enlightenment gave the U.S. its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It prompted the French Revolution’s “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.” It still echoes in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

        The emphasis on reason, coupled with Gutenberg’s typesetting revolution, made it possible to refine religious faith into a series of logical assertions. Theology – which really means “thinking about God”—became a set of teachings which one either endorsed or rejected.



Difference in perspective

 Now, if someone had asked me to endorse a statement that I believed the roads would be clear for 1000 km all the way to Edmonton, I’d have scoffed. Too many unexpected things can happen. The weather can change. Microclimates create their own weather. I could not affirm something I cannot know.

        Nevertheless, I set out with sublime confidence. Or foolhardiness. Because deep down, I believed that all would be well.

        Don’t we all? Somehow, we are convinced that even if there’s an accident, a fire, a crisis, we will emerge from it unscathed.

        There are, you see, two distinctly different kinds of beliefs.

        One kind involves intellectual assent. The other is more like a perspective on life. Typically, it can’t be rationalized. It just is.

        A couple of friends have had cataract operations recently. Both noted how it changed the way they saw. Not just what they saw – the way they saw.

        Dave de Bourcier, a retired pharmacist, put it this way: “With one eye the world is still clouded and yellow, and print is difficult to read. With the other even the small print on the TV screen is clear and readable, and colours are … wow! ... I can’t remember them that vivid!”



The core of our being

Our deepest beliefs have little or nothing to do with religious doctrines. We believe we can trust each other. I believe that I can trust the mechanic who services the car I drive to Edmonton, the bank who honours my credit card, the meteorologists who forecast the weather en route…

        At the very deepest level, we all share a belief in our own immortality – regardless of whatever we affirm in official statements of faith.

        The soldiers Peter MacKay visited in Afghanistan probably believe, despite the known risks of roadside bombs and live ammunition, that they will not be killed.

        For the victims of a Taliban ambush in Kandahar, it must be the shock of a lifetime to discover they were wrong.

        Most of us don’t start re-assessing our underlying beliefs until increasing age makes our mortality all too evident.



Irrelevant haggling

The Christmas season provides an example of the two kinds of belief.

        Intellectual beliefs haggle over the Virgin Birth and whether Jesus was really the direct offspring of God. If so, from whom did he get his male Y-chromosome; or was he the only human to have only half a set of chromosomes?

        At a different level – I think of it as a deeper level, but others might not agree – these questions are irrelevant. Whether Mary was a biological virgin or not, the birth of a baby is always a profound experience for everyone involved.

        The birth of a baby is a sign of hope, a non-verbal expression of faith.

        We have babies because we believe in the future. We believe in a certain essential goodness in humans. We believe that the world will be friendly – if not to me, then to this child. For this infant, things will be different.

        Write that down and it looks ridiculous. Turn it into a series of assertions and it looks pompous.

        But it is what most of us believe, deep in our hearts.

        And it is what Christmas is really all about.

*****************************************
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
*****************************************