A familiar story: At an adult faith formation class I was teaching at a church, a woman in her sixties raised her hand. She explained that she’s a pastor’s wife and that she felt devastated by the presidency of Donald Trump and couldn’t find her emotional footing. She was wondering if her long-time dedication to progressive politics contributed to the loss of faith suffered by her two adult daughters. They’re good people, she said, and they’ve done well for themselves. But they don’t believe—and they don’t seem to feel like they’re missing anything. One daughter calls herself an atheist, the other an agnostic. Do I think, she asked me, that her liberal Christian faith is partly to blame for this outcome? 

When we listen to the stories of church members, one of the things invisible to polling data but obvious to anyone who has spent any amount of time in church is that the line between the church affiliated and the church disaffiliated is not at all sharply defined. 

I hear these stories often. There are morally and politically conservative versions: it makes no difference; the major plot points are the same. Again and again, parents who have found meaning in faith and in the life of the church discover that their children want nothing to do with Christianity. They wonder where they went wrong. 

What is usually unacknowledged in stories like these is that, very often, religiously disaffiliated children have not failed to inherit their parents’ faith; rather, they have inherited it all too well—they’ve merely discarded its accidental elements. If the Christian faith is understood as a motivator to support progressive political causes, nothing essential is lost if children grow up to be such good Democrats that they no longer need religious motivations. 

Many parents grieving that their children are not Christians are also giving voice to another grief, deeper but unnamed: that there is something more to the Christian faith than they ever learned to grasp or express, but they’re not sure what it is. What they received from church was not the highest expression of purpose and meaning. The vital element of faith has eluded them. 

Consider the inverse. I myself am struck by how much I identify with the experience of my non-religious friends. Except for rare and precious moments, I don’t feel like God exists and is present and active in my life. And even though I believe God is active and present, I also know that faith in God is more than metaphysical opinion. I have often wondered whether, if my Christian friends felt the way I feel, they would call themselves atheists or agnostics. To my relief, they report the same experiences. And yet, like me, my friends consider their faith in God to be the central feature of their lives—their “ultimate concern.” 

When it comes to the state of faith today, the challenge is not just that the neat, measurable categories—religious believer, agnostic, atheist, spiritual but not religious, religiously unaffiliated, and so on—are inadequate. It is also that by focusing on such a narrow set of questions, we leave the most important matters unexamined. 

My most profound flashes of doubt in the existence of God, for instance, have been at church. I’ve sat with philosophical arguments against the existence of God, but none have had the same force as sitting in church and being overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing being said matters, the feeling that the church’s very life screams, “We don’t take this stuff too seriously.” 

Faith is more than belief. Coming to faith is like coming into a powerful gravitational field, being grasped and pulled into orbit imperceptibly, and requiring nothing less than that you entrust your whole life to its mysterious force. My flashes of doubt are not primarily intellectual doubts. They are, rather, a feeling that the centre of my life is without warning losing its weightiness, its gravity, and that it is therefore losing its hold on me, and I my confidence in it, that at any moment I will drift out into the darkness and cold. 

To feel that something has lost its gravity renders the question of its existence secondary: Even if it exists, who cares? The social conflicts we experienced as children felt total and eternal when we were young, but age revealed how small these problems were. These problems lost their gravity. 

When the object of our faith loses its gravitational pull on us, that means it either doesn’t exist or isn’t up to the job of centring our lives; in other words, the loss of gravity entails either atheism or idolatry. Since something always centres our lives, atheism and idolatry amount to the same thing—we all have an ultimate concern and are “atheists” toward the gods of other people, considering these gods idols. 

The vexing puzzle of the Christian experience today is that our talk of God seems biblical and therefore difficult to indict for idolatry, but it has lost its gravity. We are theoretically in proximity to its object, but it exerts no force on us. Even if we keep showing up or keep identifying ourselves as Christians, we find it harder and harder to articulate the necessity and unconditional importance of this faith. It is as though we have settled for an idol. 

Though there are surely exceptions, few people I know feel that they get much out of church, regardless of denomination. Many clergy I know would do something else if they could. They haven’t stopped believing. They haven’t stopped yearning to be grasped by the ultimate in faith. But what they are offered in the life of the church takes no hold of them, nor offers them anything worth holding on to. 

What theological sense can be made of this experience of being adrift within the life of faith? 

To answer that question, one must answer a prior question about where this gravitas that generates faith originates and how we experience it: What in human experience are we referring to when we speak of God’s faith-generating activity in us? That is, what are we referring to in our own experience that we interpret as God acting on and within us? Can it be described in mundane, everyday language? Can anything more be said than the mere assertion that God acts to give us faith? 

Faith, Authority, and Power 

I referred to faith as being in the grip of an “ultimate concern.” This language comes from Paul Tillich, who may be challenged on a number of points, but not, in my judgment, this one. The experience of faith is not distinctively Christian; it is a universal human reality to find that our lives receive meaning and purpose from something that has an unconditional claim on us. What makes the experience of faith a Christian one is not the fact that we are concerned ultimately, but specifically who concerns us. 

Coming to the Christian faith is not a matter of being convinced to believe in a fact, even a miraculous one like Jesus’s resurrection, but rather a matter of undergoing a death of self and a birth to a new life organized around something outside oneself. Even those who saw the risen Jesus were taken into a life of faith: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” the apostle Paul writes in his Letter to the Galatians. But this same process occurs in all forms of faith. When people sacrifice their health and relationships for the sake of their jobs or are swept up in the ecstasy of national pride and take up arms and risk death or choose to face the firing squad rather than participate in the public lie—such people have died to every other life because something has an unconditional hold on them. In each instance, a person hears, as it were, the words “This alone is worth living and dying for.” And in each instance the one who hears is compelled from the depth of his or her own soul to obey these words freely. That is to say: faith is neither mere belief nor submission to some extrinsic force but a response to authority. 

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul claims that “faith comes from what is heard.” Yet none of the words used to express the gospel are magical. The proclamation of the gospel is not the casting of a spell, and genuine faith is anything but being under some spell or enchantment. Spells and enchantments are exercises not of authority but of extrinsic power. Faith comes from what is heard only when what is heard gives voice to ultimacy—that is, when ultimacy authenticates itself in what is spoken, when its authority is heard. Paul concludes his statement: “and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.” Faith is what happens when we believe we have heard the ultimate speak; faith is our “amen” to its claim to ultimacy, our soul’s repetition of its claim, which is how we obey its authority and carry it forward. To live by faith is to carry forward the authority of what has claimed us. 

In a sense, the pairing of authority and faith names how we relate to reality. To encounter genuine authority is always experienced as an encounter with how things really are; faith is coming to terms with reality while knowing that one has no mastery of it. Power speaks in the imperative—“You must . . . or else”—and therefore speaks in the language of determining or changing reality. Those exercising power in this way require their object to relinquish his or her own will. Authority, however, speaks in the indicative mood—“This is simply the case”—and therefore reveals reality and aims to inspire a response of uncompelled obedience and cooperation. In Hannah Arendt’s words, “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom.” Both power and authority are good and necessary, and both are liable to misuse. But while the abuse of power entails personal violation, the abuse of authority involves lying. With power, one person having more means another person has less; with authority, the one who holds it authorizes, so that, even in the hierarchal relationship between the one in authority and the one under authority, there is no competition. Authority gives permission—first of all permission to believe. No matter what is believed, wherever there is faith, there is authority. 

Karl Barth captures this understanding when he discusses the authority of the Bible for the Christian church, comparing the Bible’s authority for the Christian to that of a child and its mother: “That she is his mother is for this child the situation beyond all uncertainty. . . . This circumstance is the simple fact that in the congregation of Jesus Christ, the Bible has a specific authority and significance.” 

A defining hallmark of authority, as Arendt points out, is that it is not and cannot be established by argumentation and evidence. Accordingly, one may show that faith is reasonable, but faith is established by neither reason nor evidence. To insist that faith answer to reason is to imply that reason has the ultimate, self-evident authority; such an insistence is simply fideism in the cult of reason. Alternatively, those who argue to establish authority, especially their own, are generally authoritarians. And while genuine authority has no need to be authoritarian—that is, manipulatively coercive—because it can inspire free obedience, it is nevertheless understandable that we fear authority and see it as a threat. It is first of all a threat to the ego. 

To acknowledge authority is to admit that you are not the centre of the universe. Faith thus always entails the rejection of anthropocentrism and the discovery that human dignity is found only where our dignity seems to have taken a fatal hit. At its best, anthropocentrism is Kantian, treating human beings as ends and not means, while valuing other things for their usefulness. But ultimate authority says to us, “You are not the ultimate end, but only a preliminary end—and as regards the ultimate end, you are merely useful.” Faith is the discovery of dignity in being a means and not the end. Tillich says that faith is “ecstatic,” involving our standing outside ourselves. There is nothing more unsettling. Misplaced faith means fruitless self-betrayal. True faith in response to true authority overcomes this fear by seeing that true ultimacy leads us beyond ourselves. 

“Ultimacy” suggests finality, the conclusion or goal of life. But that is only half the story. Faith asserts a rightful claim on the whole of life, and so it is not only our final goal that matters but also our origin. Crowds who heard Jesus marvelled that he spoke “with authority”—that is, as though Israel’s Scriptures originated with him as their author and final interpreter. Likewise, the Gospels indicate that Jesus understood his own authority in terms of his origin: “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me,” Jesus says in John 7. He continues, “You know me, and you know where I am from. I have not come on my own. But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” In fact, in John’s Gospel this authority of Jesus and his metaphysical identification as the eternal Son of the Father are indistinguishable. In John 1 Jesus is identified as the Word of the Originator of all things, the eternal expression of God’s ultimacy—that is, the eternal expression of divine authority, greater than prophets and Moses and the law. 

Arendt observes that the notion of authority, including in a theological sense, originated in the political experience of Rome. The Roman Senate was given authority—but not power!—and their authority consisted of ensuring fidelity to the founding of Rome. In other words, true authority remained with the past, with Rome’s ancestors. The endurance of Rome as Rome was guaranteed by the tradition of carrying forward the founding of Rome—that is, “augmenting” (from which the Latin auctoritas, “authority,” derives), meaning the work of increasing and building on the once and unrepeatably laid foundation. Arendt argues that the church took up this notion of authority with the collapse of Rome, but this sensibility is already present in the New Testament: 

The coming judgment, says Paul, will purge the household of God of those works that are not fitting for its foundation: the church’s members, authorized to build, must carry forward what was first laid down. To do otherwise is to act outside the authority entrusted to them. They are authorized to “augment” only what was founded, and only thereby is the church a habitable household of faith. Only thereby is the authority of Jesus Christ available in their works. Those who come to faith in Jesus as their ultimate end have first come to know him as the founder of all life, to feel his gravity as that which rests beneath all things—the one foundation besides which none can be laid. People come into contact with his gravity through the authority of the church and its members, through their carrying forward what he has founded. 

If this is so, then Paul’s words also shed light on the crisis of faithlessness today, which is a crisis not primarily of secularism or atheism but of authority. The problem is not that people have stopped believing in authority. Rather, there is a crisis of authority and an accompanying crisis of faithlessness—both in society generally and particularly in the church—because the available authorities have ceased to be authoritative. These days, we experience the household of God as being built with quite a lot of wood, hay, and straw, and just as these things cannot survive “the Day,” neither can they convey the gravity of ultimate concern. 

Renewing Contact with Gravity 

The Christian faith is elusive today because the authority of Christian ministry—lay and ordained, word and action—is no longer authoritative. The salt has lost its saltiness. Assertions of ecclesiastical (and, relatedly, biblical) authority today amount to telling people not to trust the evidence of their own experience: some will comply, but most will not. Those who have found a way to hope against hope, to hold fast to faith despite feeling adrift, must move beyond the ease of having the right theological answers and overcome the defensiveness that comes with saying that widespread faithlessness is a ministerial and homiletical problem—that it is our fault. The question Christians must find a way to answer is why we have lost our authority and whether it is recoverable. 

What is most often cited to explain the church’s loss of authority is institutional abuse and corruption. While there can be no doubt that human failure and even malevolence infect the church and devastate faith, churchly sin is not an adequate explanation for the widespread sense that the Christian message is hollow. The church has always been beset by corruption and sin. The woman who told me that her daughters grew out of Christianity but grew into good Democrats said nothing about abuse. It is one thing for someone to believe the church is a force for evil; it is quite another to feel that the church and its message simply don’t matter. Indifference to the Christian message is far more widespread than antipathy toward the Christian community. 

There are at least four primary ways in which the church’s members have compromised their authority, building a household of faith with wood, hay, and straw: (1) unseriousness, (2) illicit innovation, (3) an inattention to how most people experience reality that ensures the Christian message does not ring true, and (4) schism. These four ways also point to the possibility of recovering the authority of the Christian ministry. 

First, unseriousness. I said earlier that my own flashes of doubt have taken place in church, in response to the communication of unseriousness, that what is taking place does not matter. Churches habitually give in to the temptation to amuse, entertain, and trivialize what’s taking place in Christian worship. Church activities, frequently targeted to families with children, are often indistinguishable from what’s on offer at public libraries. Pet blessings fall into this category: “The Creator of the universe became flesh and died for your salvation—but, yes, by all means, bring your dog to church so those commissioned to preach the gospel can tell him he’s a good boy.” But the truly corrosive forms of unseriousness are subtler. For example, the well-intended trend in my denomination, the Episcopal Church, to admit unbaptized persons to Holy Communion unavoidably robs both baptism and the Eucharist of gravity. It is also common for never-before-seen parents to present never-to-be-seen-again babies to be baptized, and by being too nice to refuse such parents, the church’s ministers tell its members that baptism is not actually initiation and that the church is a place where promises needn’t be kept. The church is a creature of the Word and sacrament: What happens when the church fosters a culture where words don’t matter? A haunting question to consider in view of the quality of much Christian preaching today. 

Not far downstream from unseriousness is the second way authority in the church has been compromised: innovation. Where words do not matter, neither can order. Where there is not seriousness, there cannot be a spirit of stewardship; and where the church’s ministers and members see themselves as proprietors rather than stewards, they are no longer answerable to tradition, nor inhibited from unauthorized innovation. But all human authority simply is stewardship. C.S. Lewis is especially helpful on this point: 

Self-appointed authority does not produce faith. The most palpable example of this kind of innovation is the uncritical embrace within mainline Protestantism of the sexual revolution, which is often and ironically justified in the name of welcoming more people into the church’s life. 

Of course, the motivation, for example, to bless same-sex unions does not come in all cases from a cavalier disregard for the past, but often from an attempt to deal seriously with reality as people know and understand it. This is the third way the church compromises its authority: it doesn’t deal with the world people live in, so its message can’t speak to that world. For most people today, the church’s historic teachings on sexuality and the human body are confusing (at best) and do not ring true. Which is to say, they have lost their authority. A faith that does not ring true, especially in the areas of life most precious to us, is a faith that doesn’t matter for real life. Any religious life that is devoid of a compelling claim to ultimacy is at best a hobby, perhaps useful as a way to meet other people and to pass the time. It cannot command ultimate concern. The only way for the Christian message to command ultimate concern is for it to be shown to make sense of life’s preliminary concerns. Morally traditional Christians must find ways to convey the whole truth of the Christian faith to the facets of life where it currently rings false. 

And fourth, schism. Unlike immediately after the Protestant Reformation, almost all Christians today are happy to affirm that Protestants or Catholics or the Orthodox are truly Christians—and are thereby burdened to explain why their differences actually matter. The partial success but overall failure of the modern ecumenical movement has meant that many members of churches, especially Protestant, have become fundamentally post-denominational in their outlook. When churches can acknowledge that other churches from whom they are separated are equally valid as Christian churches, but don’t overcome the actual divisions, the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all, and the result is a church culture of consumer choice about where to worship and what to believe. But a faith decision based on preference is no faith decision at all—it permits no authority. The agony of those with faith is to respond to authority in this situation of choice. 

In each of these instances the church’s ministers and members must renew contact with the overwhelming gravity that pulled them into faith—to reorient themselves to the church’s foundation and founding. Ecumenically, the difficult task is to struggle toward Christian unity by means of serious theological conflict, not softening differences between Christians but bearing the grief of highlighting them. Similarly, for the Christian ministry to inspire faith, it must act with courage and attentiveness in its actual situation, not at a remove from life, where the faith is meant to be true. This courage requires confidence in the tradition as it has been handed down: the only possibility of authority in the church today is that those who had authority yesterday are still permitted to speak. 

And finally, such speaking will have an effect only if Christian words matter. While I have felt doubt because of unseriousness, I have also been inspired to deeper faith when I have heard it expressed with grave seriousness. When I can trust a minister to speak plainly about the severity of sin, only then are words of absolution and the assurance of God’s love comforting and effective. Preaching, too, must find its way back to the foundation. The best preaching advice I ever received was from the theologian Robert Jenson, whose words to me serve well as a conclusion: If by the end of your sermon you can’t say, “Thus says the Lord,” you will have wasted everyone’s time. For faith to wield true authority, every Christian must learn to speak in such a way that it may truly be said: thus says the Lord.