Believing

Can you go to church without believing? Of course you can, and more people than we think do. But for many, belief is the price of entry, and a price that they are unable or unwilling to pay. So what does belief involve?

‘To believe’ has a familiar and ordinary sense. We say, ‘I believe that the flight arrives at 8.50’. Used like that, it means we are uncertain about a fact. But the uncertainty can be cleared up. I can look at the website, and then belief is replaced by knowledge.

The Church doesn’t use ‘believe’ in quite that way. It isn’t an inferior kind of factual knowledge. It isn’t to do with uncertainty about something that might be settled one way or another, if only all the evidence were in or we argued long enough. It’s worth noticing that the creeds don’t talk about believing that, but about believing in; not that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

This makes a difference. It suggests that statements of belief are not facts in the usual sense, neutral descriptions of the world. Suppose they could be established as facts: would that be the end of belief? No, because believing in is more than acknowledging a factual truth. Of course, something must be true for belief to be possible. But the kind of truth that is the object of belief can’t be separated from commitment.

People say of (usually ex-)politicians, ‘I believed in him.’ Not that he existed, or even that he was a good politician. More: I invested something of myself, some trust. That is why people so often feel betrayed.

But people don’t commit themselves to belief for no reason. You need to be shown something, something that speaks to the truth of where you stand in your life, in the lives of others, and in the world. That is the truth that we live from, deeper than the neutral truth of fact. For Christians, what we have been shown is Christ. It is Christ that makes belief possible. It is through what we are shown in Christ that we can believe in God (not the other way round). And since showing is the point, belief begins, not in argument and proof, but in a readiness to look.