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2 Theology and Faith In part 1 of Thinking the Faith, Hall describes “The Disciple Community” by way of explaining the nature of contextuality and the necessity of disciplined theological thought to the church, that is, the disciple community. As he notes, “Discipleship is disciplined thought about the faith.” Speaking more specifically of theology as confessional, he writes, “Christian theology is an undertaking of the church, and its mandate is to help the disciple community to make its rightful confession in the world” (1989:69, 107). In part 2, then, Hall looks more specifically at the discipline of theology, and how it relates to seven specific elements: faith, the Bible, doctrinal traditions, experience, prayer, the church, and the world. In explaining the relationship of theology to faith, Hall employs the apophatic approach to describe two alternatives that must be avoided in the doing of theology: fideism and subjectivism. Considering this relationship here allows us to think about the discipline of theology at the very point at which most of us first engage it and the delicate balancing act this requires of us. Source: Hall 1989:248–57. Defining Faith Clearly, faith is an important component of theology. We implied this when we said earlier that theology is confessional. One thinks the faith because one believes, or is at least curious about belief. But what is belief? What is faith? It is necessary, given our North American context in general and the ecclesiastical-religious dimension of that context in particular, to distinguish faith from two distorted conceptions of it. The one is objectivistic and intellectualistic; the other subjectivistic and experiential. For certain Christian groupings on this continent, to “have faith” means to accept a body of doctrine. One assents to the truth of this doctrine on the authority of the church, or of a creedal tradition, or of the Scriptures, or of some 23 less easily defined (perhaps charismatic or “spiritual”) authority. The doctrine may be called “revealed truth”; it may be quite explicitly stated in propositional form; or it may be expressed more nebulously in symbolic, liturgical, or moral practices. Some of those for whom faith means the submission of the mind to established doctrina are able to express the content of their belief verbally in almost mathematical formulas and theory; for others, the acceptance of Christian teaching is articulated in more symbolic ways, indicative of a readiness to accept the authority of an impressive tradition and the guardians thereof. The first type is more characteristic of the Protestant and the second of the Catholic appropriation of this interpretation of what faith means. Both, however, share the assumption that faith is assent (assensus) to religious truth. At the opposite extreme, faith is conceived in terms of a subjective mood, a belief-ful attitude. It is not what one believes that is important here but the posture of believing as such. President Eisenhower was exemplifying this view of faith when he said, “I don’t care what a man [sic] believes, only that he believes.” If the former type of faith is associated with doctrinal and ecclesiastical “orthodoxy,” the latter belongs to circles of less doctrinaire pietism, especially the vaguely liberal and often sentimental sort of pietism which is so prevalent in North American neo-Protestantism. Against both of these popular conceptions, I am assuming here that faith is a category of relationship. It means in the first place “faith in.” It is fundamental trust (fiducia). At least at the linguistic level, both of the classical ecumenical creeds of the church (the Apostles’ and the Nicene) assume this relational posture when they begin with the words, Credo in . . . There is a subjective as well as an objective component in the relational understanding of faith. It is objective in that the “object” of one’s credo lies outside the self: Credo in Deum. It is subjective in the sense that belief involves the decision and commitment of the self: Credo—I believe. Faith is what occurs, from the human side, when we know ourselves to be encountered, judged, and accepted by the gracious God. While the object of our faith (God) is different from the objects of ordinary human faith in other persons who have shown themselves trustworthy, the faith itself is not essentially different. When I say that I have faith in my wife, or my friend, or my lawyer, I am using the word “faith” in basically the same way as when, as a Christian, I say that I have...

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