more faith in honest doubt... than in half the creeds

"... what does it desire of us, this Meaning of our Life that is revealed and yet concealed? Not to be explained by us - that us beyond us - but only to be done by us..." - Dr. Martin Buber

Buber's quote exemplifies 'the Key'... LIVING it, not merely explaining or talking. Jon read John Baillie's book from the 1950's, "Our Knowledge of God", and found it speaking to him profoundly from a philosophical vantage point. I read it and found this passage in Chapter 7 particularly good (love the Tennyson poem, of course - and we all had the joy of discussing it on his deck overlooking the Miami bay at night, lights twinkling):

"... the central thing of religion is not our hold on God but God's hold on us; not our choosing Him but His choosing us; not that we should know Him but that we should be known of Him. And it would seem that sometimes, even when we deny Him both with our lips and with our minds, He still retains His gracious hold upon us, dwelling within us as it were incognito and continuing to do His work in and for our souls. Some of us would have to confess that even within the circle of our own acquaintance there are professed unbelievers whom we must acknowledge to be, in some very real sense, better Christians than we are ourselves. Of such men we are often inclined to say that though they cannot themselves see God at work in their souls and in their deeds, yet we can see Him there...

Men may continue to believe in God 'with the top of their minds' while consistently denying Him in that part of their souls which governs all their deeds. 'The devils also believe, and tremble'. Surely then it is those whose every desire and deed deny God that come nearest to deserving the unhappy name of atheist, and not those whose denial is an affair mainly of the intellect. We should ask ourselves whether some who profess belief in God are not much more genuinely atheistical than are many of our rationalist and communist friends who take to themselves that name. The real unbeliever is not he whose life witnesses to a belief that he thinks he does not possess, but rather he whose life proves that he does not really believe what he thinks he believes. We might quote:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds. * Tennyson

But it is on certain other words that we should prefer to rely. 'Lord, when we saw thee and hungered, and fed thee? ...And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Insamuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' This cannot mean that we are judged by our fruits rather than by our faith, it can mean only that we are known by our fruits, and that if the fruits are truly manifest, some germ of faith must then be there, however unrecognized."

Currently watching : The Savages