The Importance of Mystery for Faith

These last few years I have really come to appreciate the importance of mystery for faith. On the one hand, I think most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that God is beyond our feeble human comprehension. I am less certain that we actually live out this belief.

I really believe that I will have to spend some time in heaven with a dunce cap on my head. How many times have I thought I have "captured" God's thoughts in my puny mind? Balancing out this goal of faith humility with my confident affirmations of faith seems a delicate task. It seems like we are always struggling to walk this fine line between essentials and non-essentials. It's like there should be a kind of footnote on all my thoughts--"These thoughts come by the grace of God by way of my limited human understanding."

But I think there is another very important reason to recognize the mystery of our faith, one in addition to our need to give God His due and acknowledge our feebleness. When we stake our faith on things that, in the end, are not a part of faith, we run the risk of endangering our faith if we begin to doubt those things.

For example, I'm convinced that one of the main reasons there was so much opposition to translations like the NIV when they came out was because many had bound their Christian faith inappropriately to a particular wording of the King James Version. When this was called into question, their faith became insecure.

In some of the lines of Paradise Lost, you can hear Milton's questions in the voice of Adam as he contemplates the emptiness of space. We are hearing the crisis that ensued when people finally became convinced that the earth went around the sun and that the earth was not, apparently, the center of the universe. Milton wrestles just a little with the insignificance of humanity in a vast universe.

One of the problems is that our Christianity is almost always incarnated in the form of a contemporary cultural understanding. In other words, it is always very difficult in some areas for us to see the difference between what in our faith is passing and what is transcendent. We can see differences between us and the world, but we often have difficulty seeing the places where we are conformed to or inappropriately impacted by the world.

An underlying sense of mystery is a valuable safeguard for our faith in such instances. We draw the core small and have strong beliefs on the rest, but we stake our faith on the core and place the rest under the heading of "mystery." If something challeges our faith in this category, we acknowledge our feeble understanding and leave it to the mysterious omniscience of God. Not that the form of our faith was even necessarily wrong--but I remind myself that my faith ultimately does not stand or fall on that particular issue.

What is the core? No one can lay any foundation other than that which is laid: Jesus Christ. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ, will come again! It is the existence of a God who cares and acts on the world, it is the atoning death and resurrection of Christ, that is essential to Christian belief. If we go much beyond these, we have entered areas where we can be mystified and yet our faith still stand.