Is Faith a Gift?: A Theo-Dramatic Perspective

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. – Ephesians 2.8,9 (NIV)

I have had a few conversations recently with friends where they asserted the notion that faith was a gift from God.  In each instance the notion just didn’t sit right with me.  Upon doing a bit of research and reading here and there, I unearthed a long standing and open theological conversation that’s been running through the centuries regarding just this topic.  I’m ashamed to admit I’d never taken note of it, perhaps because of the fixedness of my own position and understanding in relation to faith.  At any rate I began to reconsider the question or perhaps just consider it, given I’d never given much thought to it previously.  Also after reading texts on both sides of the debate, I wanted to bring a particular set of eyes and ears that I thought might be helpful to my process of thinking.  I wanted to briefly read the question through the eyes of Theo-Drama.  If you’ve read this blog previously, you know I’ve employed this template before as a means of working through a particular thought, text or theology.  So how would this notion of faith as a gift play out if we filter it through the separate notion that existence is a part of a larger story or drama being told and played out on the stage of the world?  Well let’s find out.

First, I must make a quick detour and define what I mean when I use the word faith here.  For that we could go one of two roads and reach the same destination I think.  The first would be a Biblical road.  I am not going to do an entire exegetical analysis here on the nature of Biblical faith, but I will (even with the danger of proof-texting) pull from the writer of Hebrew’s definition of faith.  He or she suggests, “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (NIV)  The key words I want to draw on for my purposes here are “confidence”, and “assurance.”  They embody the notion of trust.  A person who trusts something or someone is willing to place their physical, emotional, or spiritual safety (depending on what one is trusting in) in the care of the thing or individual being trusted.  I trust that the engineers and builders of my car have designed and constructed it to such a quality that it will not explode as I drive it.  To that extent I place my faith in both them and my car. 

The other road is the dictionary road.  Given we are dealing with an English translation of the Bible, the folks translating decided that “faith” is the best translation for the Greek word translated (which we’ll get to momentarily).  Our friends at Dictionary.com assert that our English word faith is “confidence or trust in a person or thing.”  That fits in pretty well with what the author of Hebrews asserts as a working definition.  If I were to expound on the Biblical and dictionary definitions together, I’d say that faith is a confident, assured trust.  Quick and dirty, but fair I think.  Unfortunately for lovers of pith, this simple understanding of faith is in conflict with much of the historical understanding of Christian faith. 

To establish this conflict I’ll have to start with a little bit of Greek, which I suppose is a dangerous course in the hands of one ignorant of Greek; however it’s a course we will take anyway.  The most widely employed Greek word which we translate into English as “faith” is the word pistis.  It’s rooted in the Greek word peitho, which means, “to persuade or be persuaded.”  So in the minds of the New Testament writers, faith contained in it the notion of being Divinely persuaded to trust.  If one is of the mind that these types of word choices are beyond chance and have their roots in Divine inspiration, then Christian faith by its nature, given the object of the faith, is revealed as an interplay between Divine persuasion and the human response to that persuasion.  The conflict then arises in relation to the manner in which people through history have tried to make sense of that interplay. 

Those who tend toward the notion that faith is an entirely gratuitous gift from God tend to find themselves favoring the Divine portion of the interplay as dominant over the human portion.  To be fair there is scripture that seems to bear this out.  For example Paul in the Book of Romans suggests, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith (Romans 12.3 NAS).  Paul also lists faith as one of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5, meaning it’s something produced by the Spirit, not by the individual’s effort.  In addition the verse at the beginning, Ephesians 2.8,9 is also often cited.  Folks who hold this perspective read the line, “and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast,” as referring to faith.  Given I’m going to argue for a different reading, and that this is a blog, not a book, I will not lay out this case further.  I don’t intend to be unfair to it, but to represent it simply and quickly. 

I’m also not going to argue that faith is entirely of human origin.  To do so would be to marginalize the parts of Scripture I find difficult, and what fun would life be without Scriptures that blow holes in your understanding of God? Instead I’m going to argue that faith is a mysterious inter-penetration of both God’s persuasion, and humanity’s trust.  I could go directly to scripture for this, but that’s been done, and would not add to the conversation (though what I’m going to argue I suppose isn’t new, unique, or extra-biblical).  As I wrote earlier I’m going to filter the question through Theo-Dramatic Theory.  For this I’ll be drawing heavily on Balthasar’s understanding of the notion. 

At its heart is the idea that the story or narrative God is telling in history, that is the fall, redemption and restoration of humanity, is being played out in the world as if on a stage.  One could loosely see the Father as the author of this play, the Son as one sharing the stage with humanity, representing and revealing the Father’s vision, and the Spirit as the play’s director, bringing the play to life, directing the actors and action on the stage, and improvising to bring about the Father’s vision.  As members of this stage, we all have “roles” in this play.  Some have more to do than others, but as Stanislavsky said, “there are no small parts, only small actors.”  This however does not mean that our contribution to the story is entirely pre-determined.  On the contrary, just as any actor in a play or film must bring their entire person to a role, their interiority, their subjectivity, their creativity, so we must if we’re to play our part to the fullest on the world stage.  It’s our freely exercised choices which bring life to the role given us by God.  In other words for the drama being played out to have life, the actors must contribute something to the work, and the Father seems, through the Spirit, to expect and encourage our contributions to the story.  What’s in play here is our understanding of the manner in which our finite freedom interacts with God’s infinite freedom.

Granted I haven’t argued exhaustively here to prove my point, but if we assume this construct reflects something of the reality of things, it would mean that humanity has something of themselves to contribute to the drama, including their trust of the God who gave them their role, and though not mentioned previously, also their identity, both of which are tied up in the imitation of the self-gifting of Christ, but that’s another blog.  Ultimately, if one leaves no room for humanity’s trust/faith, then one strikes an almost un-repairable blow to human freedom, which itself runs contrary to much of scripture.  I would suggest human freedom is a Biblical concept.  I would also suggest Biblical freedom is the freedom to do what we ought to do, to employ our God given gifts, and creativity and apply them to the role God’s given us in order to achieve God’s ends.  In the end I will grant that God is ultimately responsible to bring about the ends God has planned, choreographed and orchestrated, and that I see God’s fingerprints all over my life, wooing me, influencing me, persuading me, cajoling me, loving me.  But I also experience my active pursuit of God, which can’t be diminished.  So in the end has God given me my faith, or do I freely, by my choosing offer my trust to God?  For me the answers to those questions are yes and yes, and must be in order to preserve both God’s and humanity’s respective freedoms.

The Darkest Night of the Year

"Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you Good News of a great joy... This day is born the Savior", that is, he who, as Son of God and Son of the Father, has traveled (in obedience to the Father) the path that leads away from the Father and into the darkness of the world. Behind him omnipotence and freedom; before, powerlessness, bonds and obedience. Behind him the comprehensive divine vision; before him the prospect of the meaninglessness of death on the Cross between two criminals, Behind him the bliss of life with the Father; before him, grievous solidarity with all who do not know the Father, do not want to know him and deny his existence. Rejoice then, for God himself has passed this way! – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The musical group Over the Rhine entitled their 1996 Christmas album TheDarkest Night of the Year.  The tone of the record matches the title.  It is Christmas sung from somewhere near St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.  Granted, not everyone will find that appealing, but I have a soft spot for it because anyone who knows me knows that I have a fascination with darkness.  I’m fascinated by our collective instinct in relation to it.  I’m fascinated by the mystery and unknown quality of the darkness, and the potential it has to reveal something of the Being and actions of God.  And I’m fascinated to survey a landscape that God promises will be transformed and imagine what it might look like after that transformation. 

It seems to me most folks aren’t comfortable with the dark, and I include myself in that number.  Leave me alone in a dark unknown room, and the heebie-jeebies that follow have the potential to cause a panic.  So we often try to mitigate the dark, and introduce some level of light into the murk.  I suppose we could ignore it and make due until our eyes adjust.  Or we could sit quietly and wait for a light source to present itself.  Some actually enjoy the dark, and are irritated at any inroads the light might make.  It’s rare though that anyone who prefers a lit room to a pitch black one would be willing to enter a pitch black room and remain there until given permission to leave it, though that of course is the heart of the story we celebrate every December 25. 

With that in mind, I think I’m going to make it a Christmas tradition to post a link to the homily below every year on this blog.  It is a relatively short, but potent review of a story we can tend to be overly familiar with.   It’s also the sermon from which this blog takes its title, Into the Dark With God.  Enjoy.

Whatever is Lovely Part IV: All the World's a Stage

Whatever is Lovely Part IV: All the World's a Stage
The third and final doctrinal lens I want to employ to help clearly see the true, noble, right, pure and lovely all around us, particularly in the arts and pop culture is the lens of theo-drama. This of course borrows/depends heavily on Balthasar’s concept of theo-drama, but I will swerve and sway a bit from the centerline of his thought. What is of use in understanding Paul here is the story God is telling through history, that is the drama of redemption that has been playing out since the construction of this stage we call Earth. If we were to interpret Paul here in the manner of the “straw man” I built in the first part of this blog, then there’s much of the divine story Christians should avoid. Perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate the deception of Jael or Samson’s lack of nobility or the systemic injustices of Solomon or Abraham’s impurity or the vile ugliness and violence of the crucifixion. And don’t mention Song of Solomon. Just don’t.

These segments of the story God is telling recorded in the Bible are not always noble, right, pure or lovely. In fact they’re often the stories of great wrongs committed by those committed to God. The stories aren’t always uplifting, and are often ambiguous at best (read Judges and Ecclesiastes). At worst they curiously seem to lionize racial violence (Joshua), and reveal a God who likes to gamble (Job). These evils and ambiguities however are all a part of the larger story of redemption God is telling. God does not attempt to clean up this messiness. In fact it seems to be central to the divine narrative. So we should explore this muddled tangle of vagaries and see what it might reveal to us about both the story of God and the God of the story.

We are going to work backwards a little bit here, and start with some basic dramatic theory and work toward its intersection with theology and what that means to us practically as we interact with the arts and pop culture texts around us. According to Balthasar one of the benefits of theatre (he meant this to be applied only to the stage, but I believe much of this can be applied to film as well) is that it makes the drama of existence explicit so that it can be observed. It objectifies and makes visible the tensions that exist in our experiences so that we can view them from the outside, yet at the same time still sense them subjectively. It’s as we travel through these tensions as a story unfolds that we reach the “truth” of and at the conclusion of the story. There’s a sense in which this “traveling” through the story, assuming the audience’s suspension of disbelief, creates a space for a type of revelation to occur. Theologian Aidan Nichols suggests this theatrical or filmic journey allows us, “the enjoyment of the projection of what we already tacitly know about human living, on the one hand, and, on the other, an excited anticipation of something further to be discovered, a possible solution to life’s enigma, which the play will implicitly disclose.” In short the theatre (and film) incarnate truth so that it can be encountered in a living, dynamic manner unavailable to other forms and expressions. All of this of course is endowed with a greater weightiness in light of Christ’s incarnation, or put theatrically, after the Son’s appearance as he shared the stage with humanity.

I want to quickly note three outcomes of the Son’s appearance on our stage (all borrowed from Balthasar), lay it over this brief discussion of dramatic theory and touch a few of their effects in relation to our interaction with the arts and pop culture texts. First, the Son’s appearance on our stage opens a dramatic dialogue between humanity and God. God makes Godself intimately relatable to us through the Son’s appearance. God does this not only to open up this possibility of dialogue, but it seems in expectation of it. The Son is set on the stage of human history in the expectation that this divine provocation would result in humanity taking up their end of the divine/human discourse. The second outcome follows the first in that humanity is expected to partake in the drama of redemption. Humanity is on the stage with the Son. We are not spectators but participants with our parts to play. In particular every Christian is gifted a divine role in the story, which we learn and grow into. The third outcome then is that the Christian’s part of the story opens the door to conflict with a world which prefers the status quo. The Christian’s participation in the sacrificial love which has brought about and is bringing about the world’s redemption inherently subverts the world’s structures of power, thus amplifying the existing tension and conflict.

So what does all of this mean then for our creation and consumption of the arts and pop culture texts? I want to first note that the stage and the screen to an extent imitate the incarnation. They embody story in a manner similar to the way the Son embodied the divine story, and so any truth they reveal is an embodied narrative truth. Drama is one of the languages God chose to use when communicating with us (one could make the case it’s the primary language), and so should be respected even when employed by non-divine hands. If we assume the arts, particularly here drama and film, reveal a kind of human impulse to imitate, consider and respond to the greater divine drama that is ongoing all around us, reflecting them as a mirror, or microcosmically reframing the divine story through the eyes of the playwright or screen writer, then we are witnessing the human divine dialogue in progress. Note that the writer doesn’t need to intentionally set out to accomplish this. The divine drama is ongoing whether or not humanity perceives it. Any story we tell participates in some way in that story. So when we partake in a drama or film we are witnessing at least the human part of the divine dialogue, though often we are graced to witness the divine part of that dialogue in humanity’s stories as well.

I will leave this here for now and address what all of this put together means for those choosing to follow Christ and interact with our culture and the arts it produces while still only considering what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable in the last part of what has turned into a very long blog…

Wasted Beauty

While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. – Mark 14.3-6 (NIV)

I would venture to suggest that most folks who have been involved in an artistic endeavor have wrestled with the notion that the resources used to create could have been better employed for a more practical purpose. It is a very sensible and human instinct. Resources are finite and must be managed and rationed. And there are those without physical resources who would find the money that paid for that paint or that guitar or that camera a great help in paying for their food, clothing and shelter. This is the case made by those present at the meal in this scene in the Gospel of Mark. There are more practical uses for this expensive perfume. Did she have to use all of it? Wouldn’t half of it have made the point? Use half, sell half. Better yet, use one quarter, sell three quarters. They believed the perfume applied in this way was wasted. But Jesus pushes back at their contention asserting that they have witnessed something beautiful, and yet have not recognized it as such. I think we miss much that is beautiful today for the same reason I believe Jesus’ fellow diners missed it then. We fail to understand that beauty is wasteful, and thus fail to appreciate the wastefulness of beauty.

Jesus later in the same story states that this woman, “…poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial.” (NIV) This dinner scene takes place just days before Jesus will be crucified, during Holy Week. There is a sense in which the lavish, profligate use of this perfume gives a picture of what Jesus will do for humanity a few days later. Von Balthasar sees this Divine gift of the Divine self to humanity as a “squandering”, recognizing the recklessness with which the Father gives Himself away, resulting in the “divine recklessness of the Son, who allows himself to be squandered.”
This notion of squandering can be seen as extravagant, decadent, and magnanimously generous. It’s the Father giving Himself to the world through the obedience of the Son. Charles Colson coined what I think is a great phrase to describe this, “hilarious generosity.” This is a ludicrous gift, in that it is an over abundance of generosity, but what else has God to give to humanity than Godself? Everything else has been created by God and has already been given to humanity.

Humanity’s response to this gift however can tend to be skeptical and cautious at best, and is often openly hostile. It’s because of this response that this Divine recklessness and self squandering can also be seen as wasteful, misspent, frivolous and perhaps often fruitless. God knew this generosity would be abused and misused, as was every kindness God’s ever shown to humanity, and yet God chose to “waste” God’s over abundance on some who would never appreciate that abundance nor recognize that anything was actually given. However it is this act of hilarious generosity in the face of this lethargic, cynical and at times antagonistic response to the gift that is the heart of beauty.

This over abundance, this grace, is God’s attractiveness. These generous acts are what reveal what is in God’s heart. The Son’s actions through his life, consummated by Good Friday leave the Father’s heart exposed for the entire world to see, and what is divulged is a heart that will go to inconceivable lengths to reveal a committed, determined, intransigent love. If it were not for the Son who was willing to be squandered and wasted we would not know this. This wastefulness is the heart of God’s grace, and the heart of God’s attractiveness, thus is the core of God’s beauty. All Christian endeavors, be they artistic or more practical, should then remember that a resource’s most practical use isn’t always its best use.