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Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists. Without the word, without meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no longer being able to live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance.
KEY POINT
Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.
For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly. Using rather more traditional language, we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.
Christian belief—as we have already said—means opting for the view that what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen.
The primacy of the invisible over the visible and that of receiving over making run directly counter to this basic situation.
6.
Truth is the only ground suitable for man to stand upon. Thus the Christian act of faith intrinsically includes the conviction that the meaningful ground, the logos, on which we take our stand, precisely because it is meaning, is also truth.
The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself.
I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning.
For knowledge of the functional aspect of the world, as procured for us so splendidly by present-day technical and scientific thinking, brings with it no understanding of the world and of being. Understanding grows only out of belief.
Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not “I believe in something”, but “I believe in you.”17 It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person.
This is critical. First and foremost, we are followers of Christ. We a followers of rule or Maximus. The Way is His way and not a philosophy for LTWL. He is the worthy life.
Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother.
The phrase “I believe” could here be literally translated by “I hand myself over to”, “I assent to”.4 In the sense of the Creed, and by origin, faith is not a recitation of doctrines, an acceptance of theories about things of which in themselves one knows nothing and therefore asserts something all the louder; it signifies an all-encompassing movement of human existence; to use Heidegger’s language, one could say that it signifies an “about-turn” by the whole person that from then on constantly structures one’s existence.
In this process of turning about, as which faith must consequently be understood,
Faith, on the other hand, is first of all a call to community, to unity of mind through the unity of the word.
Ultimately religion is not to be found along the solitary path of the mystic but only in the community of proclaiming and hearing. Man’s conversation with God and men’s conversation with one another are mutually necessary and interdependent.
Originally there was no such thing as a series of doctrinal propositions that could be enumerated one after the other and entered in a book as a well-defined body of dogmas. Such a notion, which today may be difficult to resist, would have to be described as a misconception of the nature of the Christian assent to the God revealed in Christ.
Christian doctrine does not exist in the form of discrete propositions but in the unity of the symbolum, as the ancient Church called the baptismal profession of faith.
It also means that every man holds the faith only as a symbolon, a broken, incomplete piece that can only attain unity and completeness when it is laid together with the others.
Faith demands unity and calls for the fellow believer; it is by nature related to a Church.
Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way.
Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is, not mind existing for itself, but incarnation, mind in the body of history and its “We”. It is, not the mysticism of the self-identification of the mind with God, but obedience and service: going beyond oneself, freeing the self precisely through being taken into service by something not made or thought out by oneself, the liberation of being taken into service for the whole.
Consequently our first task is to consider this question: What does it mean when the believer professes his faith in God? This question embraces the further one: What does it signify when this God is characterized by the titles “Father”, “Ruler of all”, “Creator”?
