FOUNDING CONFERENCE

WORKSHOP REPORT: "WHAT KIND OF FAITH LEADS TO ACTION?"

FR ADRIAN LYONS

SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2002

Since the Second Vatican Council, understandings of justice and the actions that flow from it have advanced rapidly, while portraits of faith have not. We have witnessed extreme forms of professing Christian faith while committing public actions contrary to the Gospels, e.g. Chilean generals attending Mass while ‘disappearing’ people. Our accounts of faith are in need of development. Meanwhile, those who work for justice need new forms of faith to sustain them.

In the workshop, we reviewed expressions that come to mind when ‘faith’ is mentioned, e.g. doctrine, the intangibles that hold groups together, worldviews, world religions.

We listed a cluster of words associated with the Latin ‘credo’ and ‘fido’: e.g. fidelity, credibility, credence, incredulity, creed and confidence, and agreed that these cover a broader set of issues than conventional religious faith embraces.

How is Australia doing in relation to faith in this extended sense?

• God-talk is a major problem for many people: no longer credible.
• Perceptions of church are largely negative.
• Vested interests make progress in social justice issues difficult.

What remedies can we suggest?

• Coming to God via a fresh understanding of Jesus and his view of God.
• Articulating ‘God’ in terms of peace and justice.
  
• Showing that Christian faith leads to an appreciation of the value of persons and their environment ­ the whole ambience in which we live (social, etc).

The current context:

• We live in a unique time, with crises everywhere across the planet. Many are interlinked but not all. It’s a tough time for faith of any kind.
  
• We are experiencing “the globalisation of insecurity”.
  
• Passivity and apathy are natural in face of problems beyond our control.
  
• Attempts are being made to impose authoritarian solutions.
  
• Alternatives to this course of action have faced or been crushed.

We identified a particular spiritual problem in Australia, namely fear of difference — especially other persons who are different — a fear intensified at this time of global insecurity. Fear is a faith matter. Indeed the opposites of faith, biblically speaking, are fear and betrayal. Helping people to “Fear not”, and so become less vulnerable to those who manipulate our fears, would be a major advance.

At the end, without time for discussion, Adrian presented his view that there are two faith narratives running through the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

The first sees faith as willingness to accept a call to adventure and risk — in search of a promise that will benefit many others. The call of Abraham and Sara, and that of the Jesus’ disciples, were such instances of faith.

The second sees faith as a matter of holding fast — whether to a Covenant, or to a conviction (e.g. Job’s that he is not being
punished for any wrongdoing), or to a tenet of faith (e.g. refusal to eat pork ­ for which the Maccabee family were martyred). Churches under persecution prize faith of this kind.

Both these portraits of faith have their own validity, and indeed their own times and places. Right now, the second is dominant.
Deciding which of these the church in Australia should be promoting — and exploring the relationships between the two — would allow us to decide which kinds of action flow from the appropriate form of faith. Justice work thrives on the adventurous kind. Those who do not discover this tend to ‘leave the Church’, but continue their action. This argues for a rediscovery of faith as a call to go beyond limits in service of others.