Communicating Faith

2. Forms of Faith and Forms of Communication

2 Forms of Faith and Forms of Communication Jeff Astley A piece of advice to examinees that may still circulate in those places where people sit written, unseen examinations, is to begin by questioning the question. If this focuses the student’s mind on what it is that he or she is really being asked to do, the advice is obviously sound. But I have read scripts where it has been taken to its illogical—and imprudent—conclusion, resulting in a lengthy analysis of the range of possible meanings of the question, and the intentions of its author, that leaves the frustrated examiner shouting , “Get on with it.” I hope this does not happen here. But it is a danger inherent in the procedure I have adopted in this essay, which is to attempt to answer the question, “What is meant by ‘communicating faith’?” It is a question I have tried to wrestle with for many years, ever since I took up the post of director of the North of England Institute for Christian Education, an independent ecumenical research center located in Durham , UK, and allied to its university, which was founded in order to forge links between the subject area of Christian theology, on the one hand, and 16 Forms of Faith and Communication 17 the theory and practice of education, on the other. Admittedly, the form the above question has usually taken on the lips of people who first learned the name of my institute is “What is Christian education, then?” But perhaps that is preferable to the assumption that some make that they know quite well what is meant by such a phrase, without noticing that others routinely use the same words rather differently. The problems this can cause are as widespread in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries as they are in Britain. But by now you are probably reflecting that, as I must have had long enough to think of an answer, it is high time that I gave you one. So here goes . . . . Naming of Parts: Faith, Religion, and Christianity Defining religion and specifying a particular religion is not as easy a task as many seem to think. The word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, meaning a bond, obligation, or reverence; it is sometimes said to reflect the idea of being bound (Latin religo) by rules, observances, or objects of veneration . But beyond this minimal agreement there has been much debate about the defining characteristics of a religion. Certain beliefs are often said to mark out the phenomenon, but nontheistic (Theravada) Buddhism is usually taken to be a religion, although in its purest form it is agnostic about the existence of any god or of a life after death, which are the top two entries on most lists of religious beliefs. The most convincing analyses of the nature of religion recognize that it is multidimensional. Sociologists and psychologists of religion identify a range of factors that can be mapped onto Newman’s more conceptual analysis of three aspects: the dogmatic or philosophical, the devotional or properly religious, and the practical or political.1 Ninian Smart’s dimensions of doctrines, myths, ethical teachings, social institutions and practices, and rituals and religious experiences, to which he later added religious artifacts, unpacks the phenomenon of religion further. Interestingly, Smart implies that what makes these dimensions of a religion “religious” is their relationship to “‘ultimate’ value-questions related to the meaning of human life.”2 1. John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church I (1877), in A Newman Synthesis, ed. Erich Przywara (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), 164–65. 2. Ninian Smart, The Phenomenon of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1973), chap. 1; Smart, 18 Jeff Astley Others have made a similar point, even defining religion as “an institutionalized way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively”—comprehensively , in that what is valued is relevant to the whole of life, and intensively, in that it is valued above all things.3 Two implications of these analyses are relevant to our reflections on religious communication. The first is that a religion comprises much more than its belief component, and that in order for a religion to be “passed on” the whole person must be addressed, involving changes in her attitudes and emotions, and her dispositions and motivations toward experience and behavior , in addition to cognitive changes. “Christians are called . . . to live and not just...