Two Sides of Belief

Anonymous wrote, regarding the author of a blog I read regularly:

"you lost a lot of belief and you have lost faith but not compliteley. How do you do that? don't you believe or not believe? i know we can have lotsa doubts, but don't you either believe or not believe?losing heart and losing confidence make sense, but not really losing belief. am I totally crazy here?"

I then added my two cents:

No, Anonymous, you are anything but crazy! You have pointed out a critical aspect of our faith.

Here's what Tom Morris says about faith/belief in Philosophy For Dummies: (Incidentally, Morris is a Christian who taught at Notre Dame for 15 years to packed classrooms.)

"There are two sides to belief, a SUBJECTIVE side and an OBJECTIVE side. The subjective side is just the mental state of conviction. The objective side is the content of what is believed, a claim or representation about reality that philosophers refer to as a proposition."

So belief has a "what" side and a "how" side. The "what" is that objective side, that grounds us and keeps us from sinking under the tempests of our emotions. The "how" side is the subjective side, the part that transforms the truth of objective content/claims into "live," personal, experienced/passionate truth.

Our Enemy (Satan) is constantly alert to ways to get us off balance. One of his favorite ways is to get us to think that belief is simply assenting to objective claims, and ignoring the subjective dimension. James has nailed this one, in James 2:19, when he writes,

"You believe there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder."

So it is not enough to just intellectually affirm what is true. We need to trust Jesus, the Person who is Truth. Demons can't do that, so that is why they shudder.

But the Enemy also has another strategy: to get us off balance by making us focus on ourselves, instead of on Jesus. His first strategy works really well among fundamentalists, who think that what is most important is our heads, not our hearts. His second strategy works really well among postmodernists and existentialists, who think that what is primary in us is our hearts, not our heads.

So this second strategy is to make us focus on our own doubts and feelings, and hold the lie that "if we don't feel it isn't true." That is to make belief only about How and ignore the importance of What. Either way, the Enemy wins.

Again, James counsels: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perserverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."

Mature faith involves BOTH head and heart, which then are able to work together to produce fruits, the habits of character and good works that mark us as disciples of Jesus Christ.