Jesus Jumbles

Ok, so my big final paper is basically some practical tips from sociology and psychology of religion that help us love and appreciate and respect and learn from different religious traditions, and I found these quotes in Fowler's Stages of Faith by someone called Wilfred Cantrell Smith that I just love. Smith does all these word studies of the Latin and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic meanings of their words for faith, and he concludes that

"Faith is a quality of the person, not of the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one's neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of a transcendent dimension."

In other words, even in the early stages of formation of Christianity and Islam and Judaism and all those guys, faith was not about intellectual assent to certain dogmas. Smith says that this idea of faith/belief came about with the Enlightenment and the age of rationalism, and that old time faith was much more about a holistic way of life. Duh. Right? This is not a new idea. I had heard it before, but I had never thought about its implications across faiths. It has to mean that if a Christian finds goodness and loyalty to transcendent sources of value in other religions, the Christian must respect them. Smith says the real question, when experiencing curiosity about the dogmatic beliefs of another religion, is actually

"On what or whom do you set your heart? To what vision of right-relatedness between humans, nature, and the transcendent are you loyal? What hope and what ground of hope animate you and give shape to the force field of your life and how you move into it?"

I love this because 1) it just seems like a more generous and productive way of engaging people from other faiths, and 2) I had kind of come to this conclusion myself several months ago, but in totally different terms. It came when I was figuring out that even though I don't believe in "God," I believe in some transcendent power of goodness that moves the world forward, that I want to devote my life to, that teaches me things I didn't already know and disciplines me to sometimes act against my immediate wants and wishes in the pursuit of something better. I realized that this transcendent power of goodness was just the thing that other people were calling God. God had come to mean something else to me, all these doctrines and obligations and arguments and things I didn't want, but when I dropped all of that, I still found this other thing, and it didn't require any "faith" of me or effort or proof to believe in. It was just this thing that I feel like I've encountered, that I orient my life towards. And knowing that, now I love it, I will call it whatever you want, I have a thousand names for it, and they are all true.

It makes everything else look really different, and Christian or non-Christian or atheist or Buddhist or Muslim no longer really seem like meaningful categories. The meaningful categories are "oriented toward goodness" and "not oriented toward goodness," although to be honest, I don't know anyone that does not at least try to orient his/her life toward goodness, and also, what is goodness? There are lots of goodnesses, I know. But anyway, I feel like ole Fowler and Smith were reinforcing this whole idea, and also rooting it in the way things have always been, which was exciting, which is why I wanted to share. So there. K bye.