Faith Seeking Definition
By Stephen Carter on Jun 10, 2008
The motto of Sunstone is “Faith Seeking Understanding.” But in the latest issue of the magazine, David Richardson questioned whether we follow our own motto when we decide what to publish.
A few issues ago Sunstone published an article by Margaret Toscano that takes a measurement of the progress the Church has made along feminist fronts. Are women treated equally in the Church? Toscano concludes that equality is still a long way off, and that progress is slow going.
Richardson wrote in to Sunstone to argue one simple point. Why would Sunstone publish an article by an excommunicated Mormon who “seems to believe she is more inspired than God’s anointed prophet,” when the foundation of the magazine is faith? Sunstone “must respect the boundaries of faith in which we seek to understand,” Richardson argues.
It’s an interesting point, and worth investigating. What does faith mean? And what might we mean when we say that we must stay within the boundaries of faith?
My computer’s dictionary goes along the lines I think Richardson may be thinking. It defines faith as, “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.” Using this definition, Richardson is completely right in his argument. The Church has set up its doctrines, and to have faith means to accept them. The doctrines are the boundaries Richardson says we should stay within. If you take iambic meter out of a sonnet, is it still a sonnet?
But another definition gives a little more room for interpretation, “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” Personally, it is difficult for me to have complete trust in anything or anyone. It seems like every time I get comfortable with a particular worldview, its weaknesses become evident and I have to start revising again. The only article of faith that has withstood the test of time for me is, “We believe that the world will continue to reveal itself to be bigger, more complicated, more beautiful, more ugly, and more mystifying than we thought it was no matter how smart or spiritual we get.”
I don’t think that this article of faith is uncomfortable within a Mormon context. But the notion of boundaries is difficult to maintain with this kind of faith. Instead of seeing boundaries as lines which we should not cross or whose existence defines us, we see them as lines that are going to change whether we want them to or not.
Humans are meaning seeking beings, we appreciate a story that bestows coherence upon our lives. However, we are also constantly changing beings. The story that works for us one day may not work the next. It’s this basic paradox that I think religion tries to deal with. It tries to introduce us to the unknown while assuring us that there is a structure to existence.
So I guess I’d say that Sunstone is trying to fulfill a similar function. The unknown beckons, the known assures. We need both. Toscano played her part taking a step into the unknown. Richardson played his part assuring us of the known.
Faith lets the paradox play.
Kiskilili over at Zelophehad’s Daughters wrote a wonderful post on the other side of faith. I seized on her statement “instead I made a conscious shift to a focus on fidelity or commitment to God…” as a definition of faith that is action oriented rather than based in belief or trust.
How does fidelity line up with “Faith Seeking Understanding”?
Comment # 1 by Ann | Jun 10, 2008 | Reply
I’ve always thought of the “faith” part of Sunstone’s motto, “faith seeking understanding,” as open-ended or general. “Faith” is not defined as (or limited to) faith in Joseph Smith, Thomas Monson, the Restoration, the Book of Mormon, etc., but it could be. Or faith could be defined by other assumptions. The possibilities are endless (and exciting).
That Sunstone makes room to examine the faith of the Margaret Toscanos and the David Richardsons of the world seems to me the very essense of Sunstone’s motto, faith seeking understanding.
Comment # 2 by Matt Thurston | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
I like this discussion topic and post. Thanks, Stephen. One of the other aspects of the “faith seeking understanding” motto (drawn from St. Anslem) that John Dehlin was emphasizing when he was serving as Sunstone’s executive director is that Sunstone is and is trying hard to feel like a welcoming forum for people of faith. I like that angle on this.
For me, it’s also been tied to what Anselm meant in the first place and what William James also asserted—that there are some things that someone just won’t ever be able to understand without first being open to spiritual truths.
Cheers,
Dan Wotherspoon
Comment # 3 by Dan | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
Ann,
Your comment about faith as “fidelity” hits on something that has also helped me come to greater faith. I played with this angle on faith in my December 2006 Sunstone editorial. Sorry to quote a decent-sized chunk from that earlier writing, but for the chance it might be of worth to someone, I’ll risk being conspicuous like that.
This quoted section picks up after I’ve been talking about my own struggle with believing Christological claims. The page numbers refer to spots in Marcus Borg’s book, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), that I’d introduced earlier in my reflection.
Cheers,
Dan Wotherspoon
Comment # 4 by Dan | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
Great thoughts, Stephen. I understand where Richardson is coming from, but if Sunstone defines faith only in those terms, it will be a different thing from what I have known it to be. I appreciate and respect those with faith, but at best I have only hope. Well, hope and charity, on good days. My level of faith has changed over the years, but my identity as Mormon hasn’t. Sunstone helps people like me use our liahonas the best we can, fallibly and honestly.
Comment # 5 by Michael Nielsen | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
Dan, I love your essay.
Is love an aspect of faith? Do the two share some space? Faith is such a positive-leaning ideal. I can’t think of anything that I have faith in that I don’t also love in some way. Faith as fidelity brings other elements that are also positive, such as commitment and steadfastness.
I’m not in favor of a sunshine and rainbows attitude toward the church; I’m not a very good member, all things considered, and the church has real problems. But if the context is Mormonism, and the goal is “faith seeking understanding,” then I would think the direction must lead toward love and acceptance - even if not to fidelity or “belief in.”
Where we veer away from this objective is when we seek to foster change in the institution at the macro level. We can sometimes help make local changes, and our capacity to change ourselves is enormous. But our recognition of and attention to the church’s many faults, flaws and failings doesn’t make us capable of fixing any of them.
Comment # 6 by Ann | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
I appreciate Richardson’s position, but I think the impulse to delineate faith can have disastrous results. The Church teaches that truth does not exist solely within the Church. While the boundary around “the Church” may be hard and fast, truth exists without boundary. While this puts the Church membership in danger of encountering falsehood, it also avoids the pitfall of drawing a circle around doctrine as it’s understood by humans with their misunderstandings and prejudices, and calling all of it true.
To me, conceiving of a diffuse truth and allowing everything in truly requires faith. I don’t think faith necessitates screening ideas at the door, but human failing might (I mean that empathetically, not pejoratively).
Comment # 7 by Nate Housley | Jun 11, 2008 | Reply
There is already a magazine built on censored faith where Richardson can seek refuge, it’s called “The Ensign”.
It is the calling of Sunstone to be more open to ideas that are not “authorized” by the ruling authorities of the church.
Sometimes the authorities get it wrong, like when they discriminated against blacks for almost 150 years.
The church needs the help of independent voices to keep it on the strait and narrow.
Discrimination towards blacks, women and gays is not a family value.
Independent voices help the church to become moral.
Comment # 8 by Gordon Hill | Jun 12, 2008 | Reply
To explain my definition of faith, I’ll have to refer to the New Testament. Christ told his disciples that if they had faith as a grain of mustard seed, they could say to the sycamore tree, be planted in the sea, and it would obey them.
I thought about that very carefully and I gradually realized that it meant that if the apostles decided that it was necessary to plant a tree in the middle of the ocean, then they wouldn’t waste time worrying about how it seemed like an impossible task, they would just go and start planning out how to do it and then do it. It would be as if they commanded and the tree obeyed. This showed me that faith is about doing what you know must be done without cavil.
Then a further lesson. Christ’s disciples ask him to increase their faith. I imagine they expected Him to touch them and say, “Have faith” and that would be that. Instead, He told them the scenario of a servant working out in the fields all day and then coming in for dinner. Christ asks them, does the master say, “Okay, go and rest”? Of course not! The master tells the servant to continue serving, to go and get dinner ready and after serving the master then they can eat. In our modern world, I’m sure some of us would look on that kind of master and say, “How inhuman! How selfish a master to not be thinking of the well-being of his faithful servants!” But the point of the story is that in order to increase our faith, we must go on from one task to the next and that our abilities and confidence increases as we push on to the next thing with that intense focus of “This MUST be done!”
Faith is all about hard work.
Now, as for some of the comments on this blog, I have to say that if the church has problems, it is because the people are imperfect, and the organization is set up to deal with the church needs now and a certain amount of the future. However, the church is improving all the time as the people of the church continue to strive to purify and santify their lives. The church becomes more unified and individuals will see eye to eye when they learn to see things as God sees things. Unity without God is oppression, but unity WITH God is perfect freedom; God will not force unity.
And there’s so much exciting things to learn still! So many principles to plumb and test and experiment on! So many good works to do and reap blessings for! So many souls to share the gospel with! And so little time! Why do we sit here and doubt and gabble! To work! To work!
Comment # 9 by Michaela Stephens | Jun 12, 2008 | Reply
I like what Stephen has to say, but I do think that in the end it constitutes a kind of dodge. The letter to the editor is raising a question about authority, and the relationship of intellectual discourse to it. Both liberalism and modernism rest on the rejection of authority as an arbiter of belief, conversation, or action. On the other hand, there are precious few religious traditions that don’t have some concept of authority. Certainly, authority is a key concept within Mormonism. One of the things that most annoys me about Mormon intellectual discussions is that authority is fequently pathologized so that it cannot be conceptualized as anything other than a pernicious influence. (This, for example, is one of the chief weaknesses, in my opinion, of Margaret Toscano’s writings.) I think that too often Mormons are willing to appeal to authority to shut discussions down, and are often very wooley headed about what exactly they mean when they use language about authority. On the other hand, a response that simply dismisses the question in favor of an open-ended discussion, i.e. one that denies the claims of any authority, seems at some level to be missing some important and central element of Mormonism. This is particularlly the case of someone like Margaret, who purports to be offering not simply a sociological or political critique, but also a theological one.
Hence, while I like Stephen’s homily, I am not sure that it adequately responds to the questions raised. Of course, that isn’t necessarily a big deal. These are hard questions.
Comment # 10 by Nate Oman | Jun 17, 2008 | Reply
Although he doesn’t say it in his letter, I wonder if part of what troubles Richardson, and moves Toscano’s article out of the category of “faithful in his estimation, is that she moves beyond trying to understand or or articulate a problem in the church and moves to a call for action, for change. This, as Nate suggests, is (rightly) perceived as an assault on a foundational principle of Mormonism–that institutional change happens through a hierarchical exercise of authority. A faith that has room for unauthorized persons to recommend policies is, in some important sense, different from what is typically regarded as “Mormon” faith, which includes as a principal tenet the notion that God governs the church through authorized leaders. While personal revelation and the imperative to be “anxiously engaged” are also strains of Mormon faith, elevating them to primary status disturbs one of the central organizing paradoxes of Mormon faith.
That said, I’d sure like to have Margaret Toscano as my bishop!
Comment # 11 by Kristine | Jun 20, 2008 | Reply
Gordon Hill: I very much resonate to your comments of June 12. You don’t pull your punches, do you, brother, despite the risk that your observations may rattle cages?
Not long ago I came across a note from you that I thought I had lost and then misplaced it again. It was a request for a paper of mine from the 2006 symposium. Apologies for having lost it again. If you will send me your email address to mine: enk33@losalamos.com, I will send an updated version of that paper. Furthermore, I would be honored if you would comment on an early draft of my intended paper “Did Joseph Smith know himself?” for the upcoming symposium.
Eugene
Comment # 12 by Eugene Kovalenko | Jun 22, 2008 | Reply
I know this is the wrong place to write this question, but I want to sign up for the symposium in SLC, but before I can, I need to know more details than just Aug 6-9. What time does it start, how long does it last, what are the sessions? I’ve never been, but I’m excited to go. Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.
Comment # 13 by Jessawhy | Jun 22, 2008 | Reply
Just click below and you’re there:
https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/sidebar/2008-symposium-registration.html
Comment # 14 by Stephen Carter | Jun 23, 2008 | Reply
When will the full tentative program be posted?
Comment # 15 by DavidH | Jun 23, 2008 | Reply
The preliminary program will go to press Friday, and we’ll put it up on the blog and the main site then. The staff is just making the final tweaks before printing.
Comment # 16 by Rory | Jun 26, 2008 | Reply
I think that Nate Oman has this one right, though I’ve always loved the concept of fidelity as expressed in: instead I made a conscious shift to a focus on fidelity or commitment to God
Comment # 17 by Stephen M (Ethesis) | Jun 27, 2008 | Reply