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    Do You Now Believe?: Reasonable Faith in Mark and John
    Do You Now Believe?: Reasonable Faith in Mark and John
    Do You Now Believe?: Reasonable Faith in Mark and John
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Do You Now Believe?: Reasonable Faith in Mark and John

    By Pamela E. Hedrick

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    "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Questions by their very nature are provocative: they provoke answers. Questions emerge from the desires of the human spirit. Questions lead to insight into the new, but those insights can be blocked by preconceptions that obscure present experience, including experience of the divine presence. At the same time, human beings cannot make progress in understanding without some amount of belief, which liberates understanding. Jesus faced these concerns in the people around him, and we face them in ourselves today. By examining the role of questions in the Gospels of Mark and John, we see Jesus's capacity to orient his listeners in their search for meaning, and thus cultivate in ourselves a willingness to believe what we have inherited as well as an openness to new experience, its call to reinterpret beliefs and, if necessary, to change.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPickwick Publications
    Release dateJun 14, 2017
    ISBN9781498246095
    Do You Now Believe?: Reasonable Faith in Mark and John
    Author

    Pamela E. Hedrick

    Pamela Hedrick is a member of the faculty in online theology programs at Saint Joseph's College in Standish, Maine.

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      Book preview

      Do You Now Believe? - Pamela E. Hedrick

      9781610977869.kindle.jpg

      Do You Now Believe?

      Reasonable Faith in Mark and John

      Pamela E. Hedrick

      9938.png

      DO YOU NOW BELIEVE?

      Reasonable Faith in Mark and John

      Copyright © 2017 Pamela E. Hedrick. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Pickwick Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback ISBN: 978-1-6109-7786-9

      hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4982-8659-6

      ebook ISBN: 978-1-4982-4609-5

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Names: Hedrick, Pamela E., author.

      Title: Do you now believe? : reasonable faith in Mark and John / Pamela E. Hedrick.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-6109-7786-9 (paperback) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-8659-6 (hardcover) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-4609-5 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Faith—Biblical teaching | Bible. New Testament—Gospels. | Bibe. New Testament—Theology.

      Classification: BS2585.2 H33 2017 (print) | BS2585.2 (ebook).

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/26/17

      Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: The Reasonableness of Belief

      Chapter 2: The Gospel of Mark

      Chapter 3: The Gospel of John

      Chapter 4: After Easter

      Conclusion

      Bibliography

      To Dave

      Introduction

      Blind faith" is a contentious phrase in cont emporary Christianity. For those who champion it against what they see as a destructive modernism, it is a metaphorical call to arms. ¹ For others, it is at best a mistaken understanding of the New Testament roots of the religion and at worst an insult to genuine religious belief. Many of our committed Christian students for decades have argued for a wide breach between what can be shown with evidence versus what must be acknowledged by faith; when pressed, they admit that by faith, they mean that which one believes without any evidence, and they usually insist on the necessity of blind faith, generally ignoring the fact that even when they profess that so-called blind faith, they cannot seem to keep themselves from continuing to ask questions about it.

      The first-century roots of Christianity are not immune to this controversy: the role of faith or belief in ancient Roman religion,² including the religion of the New Testament, has been a source of debate over the recent decades as well. Some insist that to speak of Roman faith or belief or even religion completely misreads paganism through the lens of Christianity, while others more recently have suggested that the trajectory of insisting on no faith or belief in these religions has gone too far as a reaction against the Christian paradigm and have in their own way veiled important aspects of Roman religion.³ In a sophisticated, complex, and nuanced analysis of Roman religion, one which is a substantial contribution to the field, Clifford Ando argues that Roman paganism was empirically based because it used sense data garnered through experimentation, and on that basis discarded what was not demonstrably efficacious. For what we need urgently to understand is what the Romans had if not faith. The simple answer is: knowledge . . . Roman religion was thus founded upon an empiricist epistemology: cult addressed problems in the real world, and the effectiveness of rituals—their tangible results—determined whether they were repeated, modified, or abandoned.⁴ Ando’s insight here is a valuable one: just because the data does not pass our twenty-first century standards of evidence does not mean that the evidence was not empirical for the first-century participants, who of course had different standards of legitimation. Does, however, his juxtaposition of these pagan religions with Christianity, as well as the characterization of the Romans as not having faith, hold water? Again, it depends on the definition of faith. For Ando, it is an idea held to be true without supporting evidence or verification. Similarly, the correlative to pagan denunciations of Christian credulity (their religion was based on belief!) was again confidence that their practice was based on historical evidence.⁵ Does the Christian apologetic rhetoric he cites from the fourth century, we might also ask, apply to the first century?

      It seems clear that the supposed wide breach between Roman religion and Christianity (similar to another breach that some would argue is not reconcilable, modern science and Christianity) to a large part depends on how one defines faith and the process that leads to it. There is a sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, assumption that faith is what comes into play when all evidence is lacking. Is that true in, for example, any religious system in the Roman Empire during the first century? Is it ever true? Is the choice always faith or reason? Or, in the words of John Henry Newman, is faith certainly an exercise of reason?⁶

      Even the word evidence is problematic. Does it refer to something out there in the external world? Or is it synonymous with reasons, as in I have good reasons for thinking that x? Within the horizon of Anglo-American empiricism, for example, evidence is sometimes taken to mean what is out there, merely extrinsic evidence. In the stories about Jesus, extrinsic evidence would be something like walking on water, a healing or reading someone’s thoughts. Reasons, however, seem to connote for most people a broader and subtler form of justification for belief. Too rarely do religious people have the benefit of understanding what it means to verify and then express their religious experience, so they fall back on mere assertions that will not be of interest to those listeners who would indeed like to understand the foundations of religious faith. Religious people often fail to express their experience in a way that seems reasonable to others. They can have good reasons for their belief without being able to communicate them.

      The argument of this book is that the writings of the New Testament encourage transformation not through some magical blind faith but through a process of questioning that promotes a reasonable interpretation of experience, belief, conversion and transformation. The head and the heart, to use popular images, are inseparably engaged. Human beings hold beliefs based on evidence that they find convincing; our examples from Scripture of that fact will illustrate the dynamic role of the questions that constitute self-transcendence. But human living is never without its concrete context, and so we will take note of what the sociologist of knowledge Peter Berger call the legitimations that make reasonable the reception of the divine benefits and moral transformations that are witnessed in the Gospels and Acts.⁷ In Chapter 1, arguments from theologian Bernard Lonergan, as well as social anthropologist Victor Turner, sociologist Peter L. Berger, and New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson will provide a foundation for examining the reasonableness of belief that we find dramatized in the gospel narratives. In Chapter 2 we will apply those lessons to encounters in the Gospel of Mark, and in Chapter 3 to the Gospel of John. The final chapter contains considerations of how these conclusions about the dynamic of questioning headed toward a reasonable faith might apply to Christian experience in our contemporary world in light of Lonergan’s transcendental precepts: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love, and if necessary, change.

      1. Or sometimes it serves as a purported reason to be morally and religiously opposed to reading their textbook.

      2. Rather than repeating the term Greco-Roman each time, we will assume the profound influence of Greek religion on the Roman religions of the first century.

      3. A helpful and recent discussion can be found in Rives, Religion,

      4

      –

      7

      ;

      13

      –

      53

      and in the introduction by Ando, Roman,

      1

      –

      14

      .

      4. Ando, Matter,

      13

      .

      5. Ibid.

      14

      .

      6. Newman, Nature,

      207

      .

      7. As we shall see later in this chapter, the terms divine benefits and moral transformation as we are using them come from Johnson, Among the Gentiles.

      1

      The Reasonableness of Belief

      The Foundations:Understanding, Judgment, and Reasonable Faith

      How then do we begin to demonstrate the reasonableness of belief, both in our modern culture and in the first century? The challenges from some post-Enlightenment philosophers have raised the issue in ways that are still influencing the debate. In the nineteen th-century Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition, for example, it was widely taken for granted that John Locke was correct in thinking that when one assents to the truth of a proposition, that assent was a matter of degree. Assent was not only dependent upon evidence but also dependent for its strength on the degree of available evidence. Locke thought, and many still think, that if you have weak evidence, then you have a weak assent, and if you have strong evidence, then you have a strong

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