On Christian Faith, by David Mahfood

I recently wrote an article about my experience trying to connect with the divine, which you can find here. My friend David, who has a doctorate in theology, wrote me a rather compelling response. It's worth reading what I wrote to gain the most from his reading, but his words below are worth a read no matter what. 

On Christian Faith a response by David Mahfood

1) You should visit some Dominican friars. 

2) Whatever faith is, for the Christian, it can't be some tacit inference from warm tingling sensations or communal experiences to full-fledged dogma, which you could then pick apart and reason your way into from a skeptical vantage point. Likewise, it's not something you can simply will yourself to have. Scripture insists that faith is a gift, not from ourselves. 

3) One brilliant Franciscan helped me (through his writings) understand faith as an intellectual virtue in the Aristotelian sense, albeit an infused rather than acquired virtue. On the Aristotelian scheme, knowledge is produced when the active intellect abstracts intelligible forms from the particular things it sees onto the passive or receptive intellect. The difference in the case of faith is that the form in question is impressed by God onto the passive intellect, hence it is a supernatural gift. 

It might be that the form impressed just is the knowledge in question, i.e., certain truths about God. But another way to think of it that I've been kicking around for a long time is this: the form that is impressed is the habit of recognizing and accepting truths about God. This would be analogous to the way that we come to trust other human beings or know truths about their inner lives. Through various forms of contact, a person makes an impression in our minds, so that we have something in our imagination about the inner lives, character, desires, etc., that lie behind what they see and say, and in virtue of that impression, when they do or say things that align with that character, or are reported to do so, we believe it. If the impression they form is of a trustworthy sort, then when they tell us things we believe them. 

So anyway I guess I speculatively lean towards the view that what happens in the gift of faith is that God impresses in us a sort of familiarity, so that when we hear truths about God, we habitually believe them, recognize them as true, because of an inner familiarity through contact. Once it's given, our minds possess a faculty which really is ours, because by it we really can believe the truth about God in a reliable way, i.e., we can reliably discern true from false when it comes to God. 

Faith would thus be the first step towards friendship with God, and like the formation of any friendship it requires that we gain a reliable cognitive impression of the character and inner life of the one who we will befriend. It's just that when it comes to God, we can't do this without God's gracious revelation of himself to our minds, and hence in this case it's a supernatural gift. 

This picture is, of course, theologically committed from the start. It's not an argument to a skeptic that they should have faith. But that's really a feature and not a bug: the point is (among other things) a picture of what faith is from a Christian perspective that shows that *given God exists and infuses this kind of intellectual habit*, it would be a rational, reliable epistemic faculty precisely without supplying a proof to available to skeptics.

Judging Faith: Golden Plates and the Virgin Birth

"Don't judge unless you want to be judged, because the standard you use to judge others is going to be used to judge you." - Jesus of Nazareth

While being Mormon is more socially acceptable than it was a decade or two ago, Mormon beliefs are still looked down upon by Christians and non-Christians alike.  As an example, the Broadway show, The Book of Mormon, made fun of the religion in a way that would not have been acceptable if the show had been about Jews or most other religious minorities.

There are several reasons why both Christians and non-Christians have significant issues with the Latter Day Saints.  Christians have trouble accepting additions to their scriptures, Mormons have several additional books that they consider equal or superior to the Bible.  Religious skeptics are hard on  Mormonism because Joseph Smith was a known huckster before he became the prophet of Mormonism.  Other people are annoyed at their door-to-door evangelism.  There are any number of other issues that people tend to make fun of the Latter Day Saints - it all goes together hand-in-hand.  My biggest criticism of Mormonism is the poorly written scriptures that are supposed to have originally been written by different authors, but aside from those taken directly from Isaiah, all look to be written by the same author.  #LiteraryCriticism

Whatever the criticism, the level of ridicule hurled at Latter Day Saints seems unfair to me.  Are their beliefs so much stranger than those of others?  Never mind whatever beliefs comes to mind.  When discussing faith all ideas become relative.  It is just as impossible to prove a virgin birth as it is to prove golden plates.  And neither idea is more plausible than the other.  It only seems so because one is more familiar to us.

Growing up, I heard Church of Christ apologists bash the Latter Day Saints by stating that archaeology questioned their claims concerning Jews on the North American continent.  Those same apologists cast doubt on any archaeology, geology or any other form of science that questioned their own faith sometimes saying, "absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence" or something like that.  The irony of this was completely lost on them.

If we are honest people, we have two choices, we can resort to faith or not.  If we do it is dishonest to judge others who do the same.  Once we believe in a Virgin Birth, we have no right to ridicule those who believe impossible things with no evidence.

My Neighbor's Faith: Diversity in the Latter Day Saints

Typical LDS picture in DC Temple

Several decades ago, the Latter Day Saints could have been described as a racist church.  The validity of their theological reasons for this and the convenient timing of the revelation relieving them of this charge is not the topic of this post.  However, it is important to know that before the Civil Rights movement, the Latter Day Saints taught that people of color were under a kind of curse from God that forbade them from participating in upper-level priesthood roles.  During this era, the LDS leadership received a revelation that God had removed the curse.

Three of the four sisters I spoke with that the visitors center were of Hispanic descent.  Two of them spoke fluent Spanish as was indicated on their name tags, which instead of saying "sister so-and-so", said "hermana so-and-so"  The young people I saw in the building were people various racial backgrounds.  I had two impressions.  (1) Part of the reason there was so much diversity was to reflect the DC culture.  The goal is to be able to connect with and evangelize to whoever walks in the door.  (2) The LDS is becoming a global church and it's younger population is starting to reflect that diversity.

I saw the sum of all these things in the photos on the walls.  Pictures of younger Mormons reflected a lot of racial diversity.  However, the pictures of senior church leadership, the Presidents and Apostles showed an all white leadership (which does not reflect a global church).  The stark contract reflects the radical change in Mormon attitudes towards race over the last few decades.  I expect that within a decade there will be Apostles and Presidents of color.

LDS 12 Apostles

One could judge the Latter Day Saints for their previous views on race, but most churches behaved similarly whether their theology defended it or not - many of them did use the Bible to defend their behavior.  The claim to be the one true church alongside convenient revelation may spark skepticism, nevertheless they should be credited with significant progress towards racial diversity within their ranks.  This is not an easy change to make.