The Courage of Faith
Some Philosophical Reflections
Steven T. Ostovich
LITURGICAL PRESS
Collegeville, Minnesota
www.litpress.org
Cover design by Ann Blattner
Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
© 2009 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any
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in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint
John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in
the United States of America.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ostovich, Steven T.
The courage of faith : some philosophical reflections / Steven T.
Ostovich.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8146-1872-1 (pbk.)
1. Christian life—Catholic authors. 2. Courage—Religious aspects—
Catholic Church—Meditations. 3. Faith—Meditations. 4. Political
theology—Meditations. I. Title.
BX2350.3.O588 2009
241'.696—dc22
2008047358
In memory of David R. Ostovich, my brother,
a man of courage and faith.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Courage to Believe 17
2 The Courage to Promise 37
3 The Courage to Hope 60
4 The Courage to Love 81
5 The Courage of Responsibility 100
6 The Courage to Think 114
Conclusion 139
Acknowledgments
M
any people have helped give me the courage to write this
book. First among these are my students. They have
pushed me to consider these issues and to do so in a way that is
accessible to a general audience. These students include the undergraduates at the College of St. Scholastica, but I also have
taught in a variety of settings outside the college, including
courses and lecture series for clergy, in churches and synagogues,
and in more secular venues. I want to thank in a special way the
men and women I have encountered in the Diaconate Formation,
Lay Ministry, and Teacher Institute Programs of the Roman
Catholic Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin. You have been a source
of both inspiration and renewal for me for many years. Thank
you, Archdeacon Tim Kuehn for inviting me to northern
Wisconsin.
This book began to take definite form while I was on sabbatical
at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research
at Saint John’s University in Minnesota. My colleagues there
were a source of joy as well as collegial inspiration, so thanks to
Peter and Mary Huff, Bob and Chantal Hurley, Carol Neel and
John Horner, and to Steven Chase. The staff was not only friendly
and helpful but stimulating, especially Donald Ottenhoff, the
current director and superb question-asker; Carla DurandDesmarais; and Elisa Schneider. Thanks also to past director of
the Institute Patrick Henry who remains a kind of superego moving me to get my ideas out in public. It was while I was at the
Collegeville Institute that I connected to Liturgical Press through
vii
viii The Courage of Faith
Hans Christoffersen, and I am indebted to him and the staff there,
especially my editor Lauren L. Murphy. Thank you as well to
Rev. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, Rev. Wilfred Theisen, OSB, and the
monks of Saint John’s Abbey whose hospitality was more than
simply a traditional Benedictine value. Praying with the monks
on a regular basis in the perfectly spiritual space of the abbey
church was a gift beyond understanding.
Much of what follows reflects my training and continued thinking in terms of political theology, a perspective to which I have
been brought by studying with Johann Baptist Metz and working
with John K. Downey.
As ever, I depend on the support and love of my family, my
wife Karen and our daughters, Marta and Rachel.
Introduction
W
ait a minute.” Do you ever hear a little voice inside asking
you to do this? Even if not, this is what I am asking you
to do with me here. I want you to take a timeout to give yourself
the chance to think, to feel, to be open, to pray. What follows in
this book is a series of what I have called “meditations” but could
just as well be labeled “reflections.” I want us to do this together,
and so I ask you to make a brief stop (really a series of brief stops)
in your life. There are traditions of meditative practice that teach
us the discipline to empty our minds of everything. This is hard
work and takes much training and practice. Fortunately for us, I
am not asking you to do something this rigorous. All I am asking
you to do is to empty out some time and space so we can think
about some things together. And when I say “think” I am not
talking about mastering new techniques or learning new content.
No, thinking here will be more a matter of listening to yourself,
to your experience, and allowing your own deep images, ideas,
and insights to surface.
What do I want us to think about? The title of the book pretty
much gives this away, does it not? Let us meditate on courage as
it comes from and leads to faith. You know about our need for
courage already. There are challenges in living a good human life,
and sometimes the difficulties involved in this can be overwhelming. We want to do the right thing, but it is often hard to discern
what that is, let alone do it. We are pulled in so many directions
in our busy lives that we, like the poet William Butler Yeats, are
convinced “the center cannot hold.” Deeper still, we need answers
to our questions about the meaning of our lives, for we cannot
“
1
2 The Courage of Faith
live with constant questioning and doubt as the basis for our
being. We know it takes courage to act, to think, and simply to
be. And so we turn to faith. Faith is the hope that encourages us.
Faith gives us answers to our questions, direction for our lives,
the promise that those lives make sense somehow.
This is where we get into trouble. Faith may give us courage
as we respond to the challenges of acting, thinking, being. But
what are we really looking for in faith? Do we want encouragement or escape? We are tired of the demands of life today, and so
we turn to faith for peace. Our culture makes this easy—we treat
faith as a private matter in a place apart, removed from the demands of everyday life. It is as if religion has been turned into a
service industry. We go to church or synagogue when our spiritual
tanks are low and we want to fill up. We look to our faith communities for the emotional support that makes us feel good about
ourselves again. Here in church or synagogue, at least, I can feel
at home and I can rest. Even God rests on the Sabbath.
But then we forget what the Sabbath is about, that rest for us
is about renewal and about having the strength and courage to
start again. At some level we realize this. We know our faith traditions place demands on us as well as provide rest and support.
And this is one of the reasons why we stay active in our communities, for we know we need the challenge of faith. There is a
lovely phrase, for example, in the Episcopal Book of Common
Prayer, part of a eucharistic prayer, in which we come to the Lord’s
Table asking God to “deliver us from the presumption of coming
to you for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and
not for renewal.” We know we need—and we want—strength,
renewal, and courage.
But what exactly is courage? We think we know, or at least we
think we know it when we see it. But can we get a little more
precise than this? After all, the clearer our thinking about a seemingly simple concept like this, the better. We identify actions as
courageous, or to put this another way, courage is a characteristic
of things we do. And usually these actions involve overcoming
obstacles and threats or at least what most people would recognize
as threatening. But courage also can be used to describe attitudes,
Introduction 3
how we approach the challenges and difficulties we encounter in
our lives. Think of people you know whom you would call courageous not because they have done great deeds or scaled great
heights but because they have endured chronic conditions or
wasting diseases with humor and good grace. Sometimes courage
in others surprises us as we watch ordinary (even shy) people like
us “get up and do what needs to be done,” to paraphrase Garrison
Keillor and his Powdermilk Biscuits. But usually we call someone
courageous based on repeated actions over time—courage is not
a one-time affair.
Think about yourself in your relationship to courage and those
things in your life that have called forth a courageous response
from you. We are strong and brave in defending those we love, our
families and friends. Some of this may be a matter of biology, of
protecting our genes in the case of family—we too can be she-bears
defending our cubs against any threats. We can be trained to extend
this beyond family and friends, for example, in military conditioning that can make us willing to lay down our lives for our comrades.
Sometimes we act courageously because of what we believe, ideas
and principles we might be willing to die for, to bear witness to as
martyrs. And sometimes we can be brought to this point simply
by the expectations of others and the reputation we feel we have
to live up to. Finally, we all have the experience of being discouraged, even of losing our nerve, of failing to meet a challenge.
Courage is a popular theme in our literature and in pop culture,
a theme of books, music, and movies. Do you remember reading
Stephen Crane’s great short Civil War novel The Red Badge of
Courage in high school as I did? What a complicated picture of
courage this book presents. Imagine with me Crane’s hero, Henry
Fleming, joining the Union army in pursuit of glory, enduring
the banality of training and camp life while wondering how he
will respond to combat. And the first day he faces fire, Fleming is
overwhelmed by fear, turns heel, and runs. He rationalizes his
flight with the belief his unit is being overrun by a rebel charge.
Coming across a rotting body, Henry consoles himself with the
thought that at least there will be one fewer corpse that day. He
falls in with a group of wounded soldiers who ask him about the
4 The Courage of Faith
wound he does not have, the excuse for his absence from the front.
The group includes a mortally wounded friend, and Henry watches
as this comrade dies. One soldier in particular, a man who has
been shot twice, will not leave Henry alone regarding the mystery
of his wound, and Henry ultimately abandons the man as he
succumbs to his wounds. Henry is a coward, abandoning his
friends and letting his conscience die.
Finding out his outfit survived, Henry is plagued by guilt and
resolves to return to them. On the way back to the front, he asks
other fleeing Union soldiers where his outfit might be and is
rewarded with a rifle butt to the head. Now Henry has his wound,
his deceptive badge of courage. But is it deceptive? Henry finds
his unit and joins in their latest assault where he distinguishes
himself in battle, seizing the flag from the fallen standard-bearer
and leading his comrades. And when he hears an officer disparage
his comrades as nothing but “mule drivers” and “mud diggers,”
he resolves to show that opinion wrong, fighting bravely and
helping win the battle. A kind of hero now who has lived up to
the beliefs of his friends and mastered his fear, Henry still is
ashamed of his flight the day before and recognizes the change
in himself as he has survived the “red sickness of battle.”
What a complicated thing this courage is. Henry acts with courage, but it is a courage mixed with shame. It also is hard to separate
out how much of Henry’s courage is due to pride and is in reaction to the insult from the officer, and how much Henry acts
simply to save face before his comrades who think he wears the
red badge of courage. And what does it mean that Henry’s conscience must die before he can act the part of the brave soldier?
How should we think about courage? How can we find clarity
regarding what “courage” means? Let me make a move here that
I will repeat in the meditations that follow in this book: let me
turn to philosophy and philosophical texts as guides to our thinking. Philosophy has a reputation for being difficult, for being hard
thinking about obscure matters. I will look at why this is the case
a little later. But for now do not forget what the word means and
where philosophy comes from: it is “love for wisdom,” and it is
supposed to help us live good human lives. So there may be some
Introduction 5
benefit in turning to philosophy to help liberate our understanding
regarding the complex simplicity of concepts like courage.
Go with me for a moment back to the origins of philosophy in
ancient Greece in order to examine what some of these Greeks
said about courage. What we find in these glorious texts is courage
listed as one of four virtues along with prudence, temperance, and
justice. (In the Christian world, St. Ambrose labeled these the
four cardinal virtues, an appropriate image for how these virtues
can orient our lives like the cardinal points on the compass, but
in Ambrose’s construction this is an allegory for something much
deeper, that is, how virtuous order among human beings reflects
and is part of the moral order of the cosmos put there by God.)
What is a virtue? The word comes from Latin, not Greek, and in
terms of this root means something like “manliness.” As we
struggle to overcome the male-centeredness of our cultural past,
we might better translate the term as something like “humanness,” or better still and along with the Greek original, as “excellence of character.”
What did the Greeks say about courage as a virtue? Alfred
North Whitehead, a twentieth-century philosopher, once famously claimed the whole of the Western philosophical tradition
is simply “footnotes to Plato,” so Plato might be a good place for
us to begin. In the Republic, Plato’s attempt to construct the ideal
city-state, the four virtues including courage are located with
regard to Plato’s understanding of the three-part structure of the
human soul. Plato offers a striking image for the soul: the superior
part is like a little human being, that is, it is the seat of the reason
that should direct our lives; opposite this is a multi-headed beast,
which is Plato’s way of representing our basest level, the level of
the physical desires that pull us in multiple directions at once,
each head of the beast demanding satisfaction; between these two
is the realm of emotion, or what we might consider will, represented by Plato as a lion. Take a moment to put this image in your
mind and I think Plato’s point becomes clear. We are like all animals that are moved to act by the desires of the body, desires for
the things we need to survive like food, clothing, shelter, and at
least with animals like us, sex. Satisfying these desires may be
6 The Courage of Faith
necessary physically, but a life based solely on desire would be
chaos—hence the beast with many heads. To lead a proper, good,
and happy human life, we must live according to the dictates of
that little person in our soul, according to the part that makes us
human and more than animals, according to our reason. The trick
is for reason to enlist the power of the emotions, that middle part
of the soul, the part with the strength of the lion, to control and
direct our desires, and this takes training and practice.
I bet you already can see where Plato is going to locate courage
in the soul given his imagery. Prudence is in that little person
who should be in charge of our lives, giving us the wisdom to
make good judgments. A well-ordered life is one in which the
parts of the soul are balanced (temperance) and each performs its
proper task (justice). Courage belongs to the lion, to the strength
of emotion, and how this can be used by reason to keep desires
in check and our lives in order and on the right path.
So far, this seems familiar. Courage for Plato, as for us, is identified with our power to do the right thing once our reason has
determined what that is. But Plato also gives a definition of courage that might stir us up a bit. Courage is “knowing what to fear
and what not to fear.” Wait a minute here—what is this language
of fear as part of courage and not simply its opposite? Isn’t our
usual understanding of courage framed in terms of stories like
Henry Fleming’s where fear is the enemy that must be overcome
through courage? What, then, can Plato mean by including fear
as an element in his definition of courage? How can courage be
about “knowing what to fear” if courage is about overcoming,
conquering, even denying fear?
To respond to these questions let us turn to the work of Plato’s
student, Aristotle. I think Aristotle will help us understand not
only the ancient Greeks but also ourselves as we consider courage
in its relation to faith. Aristotle did not deny that courage involved
overcoming fear. In fact his view of courage may be limited somewhat in that he believed courage in its purest form belonged only
to the warrior who faces the ultimate fear, death. But Aristotle
has what might be called a more nuanced understanding of the
relationship of courage and fear than simple opposition.
Introduction 7
Aristotle thinks in terms of the same four moral virtues we
have been discussing so far with courage alongside prudence,
justice, and temperance, and it is helpful to start at the level of
what Aristotle means by virtue generally before looking at courage specifically. Here is how Aristotle defines moral virtue in the
Nicomachean Ethics:
Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying
in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a
rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two
vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on
defect . . . while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. (1106b36–1107a6)*1
Clear enough? Maybe not, so let us see if we can unpack this
definition and put it into more familiar language.
First, you will notice that we are talking here about a “state of
character,” that is, a character trait or something that seems to
have become a habit in the virtuous person—virtue is not a oneshot deal. This virtuous person thinks about what she does—the
“rational principle”—and serves as a concrete model of what
virtue is. All this relates to how one learns to be virtuous, a topic
I want to spend some time with a little later.
Right now I want us to concentrate on this language of virtue
as a mean. A word we use for mean in the sense Aristotle is using
it is “average,” that point or place between two ends or extremes
or an intermediate amount. Usually we think about averages in
arithmetic, as in the average or mean of two and ten is six. But
Aristotle realizes our actions cannot be made subject to this kind
of precision, what he calls an “absolute mean.” Our moral lives
are much messier than mathematics, and so Aristotle speaks of a
* The numbers here are page and line numbers for the standard modern
edition of Aristotle’s work. They appear in the margins of most copies of Aristotle’s works and make it possible to find a passage no matter the translation
or edition. This particular translation is by W. D. Ross and comes from Richard
McKeon’s Introduction to Aristotle in the Modern Library (New York: Random
House, 1947).
8 The Courage of Faith
“mean relative to us” or a relative mean. And he gives a sports (!)
example to illustrate what he means. You all know Milo, the great
wrestler, he says, and you know me. Look at us, our physical size,
our lifestyles, and it seems obvious that Milo needs to eat a lot
more than I do. Now two portions of food per meal may be too
little for anybody and ten portions too much. Everyone should
eat more than two and less than ten portions per meal, but while
Milo should eat closer to ten, say eight maybe, I should eat only
four. So we both should eat portions that are between the extremes, but precisely where between the extremes is “relative to
us.” Makes sense, right? Now what does this have to do with
courage?
Courage as a virtue lies between two extremes. On the one end,
there is cowardice and fear to be overcome. But there is also a
problem at the other extreme, what Aristotle describes as rashness
or fearlessness. Remember Plato on this? Courage is not just about
not being afraid; it also is about knowing what to fear. So courage
is a mean between cowardice and rashness, not simply the opposite
of cowardice, and in a given situation we need to think about what
courage calls for from us. This last part is important when we
remember Milo and Aristotle at the table—the mean is relative
to us. As a matter of fact, most of us tend more toward cowardice
than rashness, we are fearful more than fearless, and so we need
to move ourselves closer to the rashness or fearless extreme in
our deliberations and actions. (This may be why we think courage
is simply the opposite of cowardice and fearfulness.) And we need
to pay attention to the situation in which we are acting, the conditions under which we have to choose.
Seems like common sense, right? But pay attention to how radical
this is for our moral understanding. We like to think in absolutes,
we like to believe that there is a Good that is simply opposed to a
Bad. And we also like to believe there are rules and procedures we
can learn and use to help us determine the correct answer to any
problem. Right is the opposite of wrong. But Aristotle is putting
us in a place where right is not the opposite of wrong but somewhere between two wrongs, where courage is not the opposite of
fear but a mean somewhere between the extremes or wrongs of
Introduction 9
being too fearful or completely without fear. And precisely where
between these wrongs is a relative matter we have to determine
with regard to who we know ourselves to be and the situation in
which we find ourselves. For Aristotle we are like moral archers—
our task is to aim where we think virtue lies between the extremes
and to try to hit the mark. In other words, courage as a virtue demands judgment and, like archery, takes practice.
Aristotle compares virtue to art and notes the ways in which
virtue and art are both similar and different. This comparison helps
us see more clearly what he means by virtue and courage. Positively, virtue is like art in how it is learned. Education in both art
and virtue demands that we learn by doing and by imitating those
who are considered artists or virtuous people. Courage is as courage does. We can examine the principles and theories involved in
either case, but making art and doing virtue are both matters of
practice. Remember above when Aristotle defined virtue as a state
of character, and I suggested that he means this involves the development of good habits—we may surprise ourselves with good
behavior sometimes, just like we can sometimes accidentally produce something of beauty when fooling around with art materials,
but both virtue and art demand more than happy accidents.
Striking here is how different this is from our usual ethical
education today. We concentrate on learning how to recognize
and do our duty, where duty is understood in abstract internal
terms that hold true no matter the conditions under which we
live or act. Or we go in the opposite direction and try to make
ethics a mathematical matter of calculating the effects of our actions and seeing if on balance those results will be beneficial or
harmful. Either way—by abstraction or by calculation—we are
trying to gain control of goodness. Aristotle’s virtue ethics is far
riskier as well as truer to our experience. His definition of courage
as a virtue takes courage to live.
But viewed from another direction, Aristotle’s virtue is not that
strange to us. Think for a moment of the Bible, especially the Torah.
What we find there is literally direction, one way of translating
the word “Torah,” whose root relates to a pointer or arrow—
back to the archer image. Virtue takes judgment, but so does living
10 The Courage of Faith
according to the Torah. The Ten Commandments are notoriously
vague. I should not murder, but what exactly constitutes murder,
and what should I do when murder happens? What constitutes
honoring the Sabbath? I should not work on the day of rest, but
how far may I travel before travel itself becomes work? What if
the synagogue is too far away for me to get there without working? You can see why there is an oral tradition of Torah interpretation as well as the written Torah. Even where the Torah is very
specific in all those case laws that fill up the books of Leviticus and
Deuteronomy and most of Exodus and Numbers as well (“If this
is case, do that”), those laws are based on experience, not on abstraction or calculation.
This necessity of moral judgment to live a virtuous life or the
righteous life according to Torah relates to the difference Aristotle
marks between virtue and art. Artistic activity comes to an end,
that is, the point of art is to produce something, the artwork. Virtue,
however, is never done. Art is about making something, and so the
activity of art has an end that can be accomplished. When you have
painted the painting, the painting is finished and exists as art. Virtue
and goodness are not about making but about doing, and while you
might have done the good today, to be good you have to do it tomorrow and thereafter. You acted courageously here and now, but
to lay claim to having courage you must do so ever and again.
Above I wrote of how we sometimes turn to faith to find rest, but
there is no rest for courage or virtue. Faith and virtue are going to
have to relate in a way other than relaxation and escape.
This is the place where I think we need to turn to faith and get
clearer about what faith means and how faith offers us encouragement. Of course, this is the work of the whole book, but some
things need to be said here about the nature of faith. In the rest
of the book you will see that I work out of the biblical traditions
of faith, so that faith might be defined in terms of the practices
of Judaism identifying God’s chosen people for the salvation of
the world or in Christian terms through the creeds, liturgies,
and other kinds of statements of belief that identify followers of
Jesus Christ. But at this point I want to approach faith from a
more philosophical perspective.
Introduction 11
Immediately we face a problem, however, the problem I alluded
to above regarding the reputation of philosophy and philosophers.
Philosophy strikes most people as difficult, strange, and ultimately
pointless. Philosophers may be considered “deep thinkers,” but
usually this has a pejorative edge to it—philosophers as “navelgazers” who spend more time thinking about thinking than about
living. Let me do two things here in defense of philosophy. First,
if you stay with me, I promise you that by the end of this book
you will realize that everyone philosophizes and that everyone
is a philosopher—you too. Second, and more relevant to our philosophical reflection on faith, let me take us back to the origin of
philosophy. The ancient Greeks realized (and we philosophers too
often forget) that philosophy begins in wonder.
What do I mean by wonder? Wonder is more than the awe we
feel looking up into the starry night sky. And it is more than trying to explain the cosmos scientifically and mathematically. Wonder is the place where awe and the quest for explanation come
together. Think of what it is like to talk with six-year-old children.
They ask wild questions, questions that testify to how their worlds
are still wide open. For example, I remember one of my daughters
asking the question, if the universe is everything that is, is there
an outside to the universe? Or my other daughter, on taking her
ticket to a play she and I were attending so that she might hand
it to the usher herself like a grown-up, observed the ticket itself
was just a piece of paper, not worth much, and wondered why it
could get us into the theater. (And this is not just because they
are the daughters of a philosophy professor!) Children like to
wonder, like to question and explore—they like to think. Now we
cannot stay as children, and our thinking needs direction and
formation, it needs education, but in the process of growing up
some of the joy and creative imagination go out of our thinking.
Philosophy should help us recover our sense of wonder and put
excitement back into our response to reality.
The word “response” is what I want us to focus on next. When
our sense of wonder takes on the character of a response, that is,
when we sense we are being addressed by something or someone
in our experience of the world and we respond to that address, we
12 The Courage of Faith
have faith, a faith that even philosophers can understand. We are
being called. Just think how Judaism and Christianity return again
and again to this sense of being called, of vocation. This is why
we speak of the Bible as the Word of God.
This brings us back to the connection between faith and courage.
There is no courage without encouragement. Remember how we
talked about those things that call forth a courageous response from
us when they are threatened, things like family and friends. Viewed
one way, these things can be said to encourage us, because they call
on us to be courageous in their defense. But the very fact that they
can be threatened, that they need our defense seems to point to our
need for a deeper ground for our courage, something that calls to us
to be courageous in promise and hope and not just threat, something
to make sense of our courageousness. What I want to suggest now
is that this deeper ground, this stronger call, is the object of faith, the
God who calls on us to take risks, to have the courage to believe, to
promise, to hope, to love, to live responsibly, to think, to have the
courage of courage. Faith encourages and demands courage.
Why does faith demand courage? This question will be the
starting point for the first meditation offered below. Right now,
however, I want to point out how we are coming around to the
same point we were above when discussing Aristotle on courage.
Courage as a virtue is not something we finish or accomplish but
something we must show in our actions ever anew. So too faith
encourages us, but faith does not let us rest, despite our desire to
do so as I mentioned above. Let us put this in biblical terms. The
God whose Word is the Bible always remains a divine mystery.
This seems to be a central message of the Bible itself (and why it
is a mistake to refuse to ask questions of the Bible, to look at the
Bible as simply a book of answers—all the while secretly thinking
we already know the answers). Just when we think we know what
God is about in the Bible, when we think we can understand God,
when we think we have mastered the lessons of revelation, God
does something surprising. Jesus certainly challenged the expectations of those around him and still does so today.
I referred to the Torah above, and we can look at these first five
books to see the divine mystery at work. We think we understand
Introduction 13
how God works through blood, that the firstborn male is the one of
God’s choosing—this is the point of all those genealogies. But then
we get to Jacob who not only is born after Esau, but gets the birthright and Isaac’s blessing through extortion and deception—he does
not seem to have an honest bone in his body. And yet Jacob, who is
Israel, is the one who wrestles with God (Gen 25–32). Or again, we
are like Moses who, when called by the voice from the burning bush
to lead God’s people out of Egypt, wants the security and power of
knowing who God is, of knowing God’s name, of having a piece of
the divine power and a little control over God through God’s name.
But we, like Moses, have to make do with “Yahweh,” a divine put
off, a promise rather than a divine name (Exod 3).
Mysteries cannot be mastered. We want religion to be about
answers, and it is, but these answers only lead to more questions.
This makes us nervous. We are uneasy with a mystery we cannot
control. Not only do we want answers, but we want God to give
us the answers we want, we want them to be our answers. Instead
we are called to faith, to respond to God’s call—in courage. And
God’s call encourages us to do so.
What follows is a series of six meditations on this topic of courage
and faith plus a conclusion on the need for and nature of judgment.
Each meditation develops a theme within the relationship of courage
and faith moving out of a particular context from our experience.
Keep in mind that these are meditations. They are not the arguments
of philosophers and theologians, but they still involve thinking, a
kind of thinking that asks you to bring your experience to the table,
to offer your insights as you converse with these texts. I am asking
you to think with your whole self and not to fall into the usual and
too-easy dualisms like the head versus the heart, the mind versus
the body. This is where meditations may be more effective than
arguments as meditations ask us to engage and reflect on the whole
mystery of the self and to consider who we are or may be.
I have been doing this kind of work for a long time, for more
than twenty-five years as a college professor of philosophy and
biblical studies and in workshops and seminars. Based on this
experience, I am convinced we like to think and we really want
to think, as I mentioned above. But too much about our lives today
14 The Courage of Faith
keeps us from doing so. We are so busy with the business of our
lives. Worse, we have too many distractions, too many things that
keep us from thinking, too many people who discourage us from
thinking, and too many ways in which thinking is prepackaged
and sold to us, where ideas are made into items for our consumption rather than consideration. Many books do this too, offering
us supposed insights into our psyches for use in our self-help
projects or in our attempts to feel good about ourselves. We deserve better. We have the ability and the right to think for ourselves, and we owe it to ourselves and others to do so.
My teaching always is text-based, that is, we always have some
text before us for our consideration. The same is true of the meditations that follow, and you already have experienced the kinds
of texts we will be looking at and how we will use them in this
introduction and its use of Aristotle, Crane, and the Bible. The
texts we will be using begin with the texts of our own lives and
the experiences we each bring to the work of reading. We also
have the texts of faith traditions whether or not these traditions
are our own, and we will be using the Bible especially. But each
meditation also will ask us to consider a text that may best be
described as philosophical whether or not it is a classic text like
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
These texts are liberating of our thought; that is why they are
part of a liberal education. We all have experience of how texts
can set us free whether or not we have been to a liberal arts college. I come from a working class background. My father was a
machinist, and his brothers were auto workers and steam and pipe
fitters. None of them had more than a high school education, but
I have never had deeper, more serious and important discussions,
discussions often based on books, than I had with my father and
my uncles. This is what I want for us here.
I will be offering you my summaries and reactions to these
texts, but this book is about courage and encouragement: I encourage you to read these books (and others like them) for yourselves.
A few of the books, stories, and essays we will be dealing with use
difficult or technical language, but they all can be deciphered with
patience, goodwill, and effort.
Introduction 15
We will begin with a meditation on the courage to believe. (This
is where the book begins, but you can read the meditations in any
order you want.) We live in a place where faith is easy, where it is
assumed even by those of no faith, and where belief often serves to
make life easier, so easy that faith is easy to ignore and stop thinking
about. Why, then, speak of the courage to believe? Maybe because
we need the courage to ask questions, to make judgments and commitments, and to face the challenges that life presents for belief. Our
text here is a novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus, which tells of the
struggle against plague in the North African port of Oran, Algeria,
and how that struggle can go on even as the characters in the novel
realize their actions make almost no difference.
The second meditation is on the courage to promise. Promises
are important in our lives. When we are children promises are a
way to experience the world as orderly and trustworthy, a trustworthiness that attaches to people and relationships as we mature—or sometimes not. What more can we learn from our ability
to make promises about who we are and how we might live?
Hannah Arendt’s late work, The Human Condition, helps us see
how promises—and forgiveness—are central ways to understand
our freedom in common with others.
Related to the courage to promise is the courage to hope. What
kinds of things do we hope for? How do we deal with disappointments? How does hope free us from the need for guarantees? Can
we live without hope? The poetic observations of Walter Benjamin
(and the Benjamin-influenced political theologian Johann Baptist
Metz) will help us understand hope in relation to memory and
justice.
The fourth meditation is on the courage to love. We like romance and the excitement of new love, but we also turn to those
we love for comfort and security. Love is necessary for our survival. But we have turned it into a commodity, something to exchange for other things we want and need. We are vulnerable in
love, and figuring out how to deal with this vulnerability courageously is the concern of our text here, Plato’s dialogue on love,
the Symposium. Martha Nussbaum addresses this dialogue in
her book The Fragility of Goodness. We will use her text in order
16 The Courage of Faith
to come face-to-face with some starkly contrasting options for
how to live in love.
The courage of responsibility is next, and I will suggest that
responsibility is not only morally important but a key to how we
think and what it means to be human at a very basic level. And
yet responsibility remains a challenge as Søren Kierkegaard’s
haunting reading of the Binding of Isaac (Gen 22) in Fear and
Trembling reminds us.
Perhaps most demanding of all is our need as well as desire to
think, and so we need the courage to think. Modern philosophers
spend a lot of time thinking about thinking. Part of the reason
for this is the continuing influence of René Descartes, whose
Meditations on First Philosophy tries to get at thinking as foundational to our self-understanding and our relationship to God
and the world. We will try to have the courage to move beyond
Descartes and to think without foundations.
Finally, in the conclusion I will recap a theme that runs through
all these meditations, a theme you are aware of already in this
introduction, the need for judgment. What is good judgment?
Why is it different from being judgmental? And how is it basic
to living well? This last question’s concern with living well is the
ultimate concern of this book, and I work from the conviction
that to live well we must have the courage of faith, the faith that
encourages us.
Thinking is work, hard work, sometimes unsettling and challenging work, but it is work we want to do because we know we
are called to do it. What you will find here are meditations as
thoughts for your consideration, not consumption. There are no
recipes to follow or rule books to instruct us in this matter. And
you know already from what you have read so far that the thinking we will practice together does not always lead to answers but
raises relevant questions as we seek the courage of faith.
Meditation 1
The Courage to Believe
All this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the
wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or
hate one does not know.
—Ecclesiastes 9:1
“Everything you’re not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car,”
Dwayne said to Francine. “And I’ll never forget the sign on the front
door of the building where all that torture went on.” Here was the
sign Dwayne described to Francine: DESTRUCTIVE TESTING.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
F
aith gives us courage. And faith encourages us to be brave,
even heroic on occasion. We can face the difficulties in our
lives head-on, because we know that with faith we can move
mountains and we know with God nothing is impossible. Our
belief gives us the courage to do what needs to be done. Even if
we sometimes fail in our attempts to do the right thing, faith gives
us the courage to face our own shortcomings.
And yet I want to suggest that we can get ourselves into trouble
when we speak of the courage to believe. One of the problems we
face in speaking of the courage to believe might be something
that occurs primarily to philosophers, but it is a serious problem
nonetheless. We need to pay attention to our language and the
possible tension between what we think we are saying and what
17
18 The Courage of Faith
we actually are saying. We might end up mixing apples and oranges if we do not pay attention and try to be clear here. What
do I mean? In thinking about the courage to believe we could end
up confusing knowing with willing, truth with desire. Courage
applies to the things we do and how we do them. This would connect courage with what we understand to be our will, and this
makes sense: courage is a quality of our acting. (Think back to
what we said of Plato in the introduction and how Plato associated
courage with the lion part of our soul, that is, with spirit or what
we consider will as distinct from the multi-headed beast of our
desires and the little person of our reason.) Belief, on the other
hand, is a matter of what we know, not what we want, that is, of
our mind, not our will.
So what is the potential problem here? In confusing knowing
and willing we could end up believing something is true simply
because we want it to be true. Who would do such as thing? We
would! Think for a moment about a belief many of us shared in
our pasts, a belief in something very positive, something we wanted
to be true, something that made us feel the world was a wonderful
and giving place, a belief we held so strongly it affected our behavior
(at least at certain times of the year); we used to believe in Santa
Claus and in preparation for Christmas we adjusted our behavior
accordingly. But no matter how fervently we wanted to hold onto
this belief in a kindly elf in a red suit who brought us presents (of
course we were good little boys and girls), we reached a certain age
where experience made holding onto this belief impossible. Wishing
does not make it so. One mark of growing up and being an adult
is that we recognize this. But do we not still sometimes wish we
could be children again and do we not wax nostalgic for that simpler
time in our lives, that time of simpler belief?
The confusion of willing with knowing, of what we want to be
true with what we know to be true, can be a special problem in
religious belief. Religion deals with truth in the context of our
ultimate questions of the meaning and purpose of existence, and
we desperately want answers to these questions. But we have to
be careful here. Do we want the truth so badly that we are willing
to believe lies? What makes this a vexed issue is that religion
The Courage to Believe 19
speaks of mystery, that is, what is by definition beyond our capacity to know, and we have to make sense of the use of the term
“belief” in this context.
Are you familiar with the term “agnostic”? This word and its
noun form “agnosticism” were coined by the biologist Thomas
Huxley to designate the attitude of some scientists and others living
in a scientific age toward belief in God. Scientists base their beliefs
on experience and have tests to help safeguard themselves from
believing something simply because they want to. This is why we
consider the scientific method the standard of objectivity in our
knowing. Huxley gave the name agnosticism to what he and others
considered the only legitimate position a scientist or scientificallyminded person can take with regard to belief in God: there simply
is not enough evidence to settle the question of God’s existence one
way or the other. Theists affirm the existence of the God of traditional theology; atheists deny that God exists; agnostics say there
is not enough evidence to be either a theist or an atheist, to believe
either “Yes, God exists” or “No, God does not exist.” The very word
agnostic means “don’t know” in its Greek roots.
There is an appeal to agnosticism as an intellectual position
because it asks us to have the courage to be rigorous in our thinking about our experience. This rigor also is an ethical matter,
because as some agnostics maintain, there is no belief that is
strictly private—our beliefs affect our actions even if the connection between belief held and action done is circuitous. But there
are problems with agnosticism as well. It is as if faith, like science,
is about getting the correct answers to the questions we ask (even
if religious questions tend to be about more obscure matters like
the meaning and purpose of life). Faith is about more than answers, however. It is faith that moves us to ask questions to begin
with and faith that gives us the courage to keep going and ask
further relevant questions of ourselves, our world, and our God
as we pursue the truth of meaning. And faith moves us to action.
Faith is something we live, not just something we hold onto. A
belief, in the end, is something we do.
And here we come face to face with another kind of problem
in understanding the courage to believe. Firmly held beliefs take
20 The Courage of Faith
the form of repeated actions, and these actions can become so
much a part of us that they can be called habits. The problem:
does it make sense to speak of courage in relation to something
that has become a habit? Let me explain what I mean here with
specific reference to Christianity as a system of habitual beliefs
in contemporary American life. Does it make any sense to say
Christian faith requires courage in our day, in the world in which
we live? None of us is threatened with even the mildest negative
consequences for espousing Christian beliefs. The United States
prides itself on being both a Christian nation and a secular society.
Either way, belief becomes easy. Either we assume that everyone
is like us and believes as we do, or we privatize belief and make
our beliefs nobody’s business but our own.
But remember what you know of life among the early Christians.
Christianity in its gospel of love and justice seemed to have had an
enormous appeal among the poor and outcast in the Roman Empire
and the Mediterranean world. These were people who were already
suffering oppression, and Jesus can be understood as having a special concern for the economically and politically oppressed like his
disciples—poor and illiterate fishermen from Galilee and women.
Their new faith led them to expect the world to change as well as
their souls, and so they were sometimes suspected of sedition by
the authorities, suspicions that led to active persecution as well as
economic marginalization. In the New Testament we can read stories of heroes like Stephen who died for their beliefs (Acts 7). We
call Stephen the first Christian martyr, a word whose Greek root
means “witness.”
Does anyone we live with today suffer the same kind of persecution? Are we ostracized and oppressed because of what we believe? Do you know anyone who has died for his or her faith? It
seems Christians have settled into the world very well. We no
longer stick out as different from our neighbors even as we claim
to be people of faith in the gospel. True, religious observance has
fallen off in the more recent past, and we have succeeded in privatizing faith as a matter of individual choice only indirectly related
to political life. We are as much a secular society as a Christian
one. But either way, it seems religion really has become an inof-
The Courage to Believe 21
fensive habit—and nothing more. Our beliefs have become so
normal, so habitual that we no longer need courage to live them.
Belief is too easy. Who needs courage?
And yet are there not times when our habits are interrupted,
when our beliefs are challenged, when something brings us up
short and makes us think? Do we not all have experiences that
undermine our faith and call for a response that takes courage, the
courage to believe? We all know suffering and pain can be so great
that our faith in God is challenged. We call divine providence into
question because it does not seem our world was made by a loving
God. Sometimes we wonder if anyone is in control. I want us to
spend some time now with a story about just such an interruption and the courage it demanded, the novel The Plague*1 by the
twentieth-century French writer Albert Camus.
The Plague is set in the port city of Oran on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast (Camus was born in Algeria). This city is visited by
plague in both its bubonic and pneumonic forms with the result
that the city is quarantined, closed off physically from the rest of
the world for ten months. This takes place in the year “194_”
making it easy to identify the plague as Camus’ metaphor for
European fascism and the threat posed by Nazi Germany. But
Camus seems to be reaching for more than simple historical significance in the novel, and it is this more that makes this story
interesting for us. Camus is telling us something about the human
condition.
Camus describes Oran as an ugly city, a city whose climate can
be enervating, a city of architectural insignificance, and one that,
although a port, is oriented in such a manner as to turn its back
on the sea. Moreover, the people of Oran are creatures who live
by their habits. These habits relate to the pursuit of money and
love—or at least sex—and they are not directly the habits regarding faith I was describing immediately above. And yet the situation of the inhabitants or Oran seems much like our own. Even
if we claim to be people of faith, that faith has become such a
* Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Modern Library,
1948).
22 The Courage of Faith
habit, that is, so much a part of the background noise of our lives
that we can safely ignore it and get on with our lives in pursuit
of love and money.
But plague comes to Oran. Slowly at first, manifest in the rats
coming out of their hiding places to die in public, the plague
moves to attack humans as well. Surely this is not possible in a
modern city. At least that seems to be the opinion of the people
of Oran including the civil officials concerned with public health.
It takes courage for Dr. Rieux, the protagonist of the novel, simply
to name the plague for what it is. Faced with mounting evidence
from his own practice and the reports of colleagues, Rieux initially
resists using the word “plague” even though he, unlike his colleagues and the city officials, wants to take strong prophylactic
measures immediately. It is only the old and experienced physician Dr. Castel who is willing to name what must be named if it
is to be confronted. Soon, however, conditions worsen: plague is
announced, the city gates are closed, and the struggle begins.
For the most part, the characters in the novel courageously fight
against the plague. Doctor Rieux sets up a system of small hospitals
to treat persons dying from plague. Doctor Castel goes to work
developing an anti-plague serum. Rieux is assisted by Tarrou, a
wanderer who is staying in Oran at the time of the closing of the
city gates and who immediately goes to work organizing sanitation
squads to evacuate plague victims from their homes and bring them
to a hospital for treatment. And then there is Grand, a petty clerk
in the civil administration who devotes his off-work hours to keeping the statistics regarding the course of the plague through the
population. All these characters and others fight the plague despite
their recognition of the danger in which they are putting themselves while doing so—Tarrou succumbs to the plague, perhaps the
last to do so before it abates. True, there are those who simply
submit to the plague like Cottard, a criminal on the lam who actually is happy for the presence of plague as it keeps the police busy
with matters other than pursuing him. But for the most part, the
novel offers tales of courage under extreme conditions.
What is the source of this courage? It most assuredly is not
hope. Everyone realizes that there is nothing anyone can do to
The Courage to Believe 23
defeat the plague. At best they can make dying people more comfortable. Hope is reduced to what Camus describes as that “gray
hope” that is “nothing but a dogged will to live” (236). Late in
the novel Rieux recognizes what his hopeless condition means,
“how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what
one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for” in the “bleak
sterility of a life without illusions” (262–63). But a life without
illusions seems to be the only fully human option for us if we are
honest, according to Camus.
A belief in justice as the ground for courage also fails. The
plague is a great leveler of class distinctions as it affects all quarters of the city equally. But even in the face of the equalizing
power of death, inequalities remain: as food and other supplies
run low, the rich still are able to get what they need somehow.
Justice seems to be nothing more than a rigid confidence in
the rule of law as embodied in the character of the magistrate,
M. Othon. Othon’s rectitude is more than an official role; it extends to the way he rules over his family’s behavior in public as
Tarrou observes Othon’s domination over his wife and two children while they are at table in a restaurant. No, courage is not
based on confidence in justice as it is embodied in Othon, a man
Tarrou considers “public enemy number one” (134).
Perhaps love holds the key to courage. We know we could be
courageous in defense of those we love, even of what we love,
people and ideas. But Camus puts love to one side in the fight
against plague. Rieux has the love of his mother to sustain him,
but she has come to Oran to care for Rieux because his wife is
absent in a sanitarium miles from Oran where he cannot visit her
and where she eventually dies. The power as well as the problem
of love is embodied in another character, Rambert, a journalist
who came to Oran to report on conditions in its Arab quarter but
who now is trapped by the quarantine, a quarantine he damns as
separating him from the woman he loves back in Paris. He spends
most of the novel trying to find ways to get out of Oran, at first
legally, then by other means. Camus makes it quite plain that
Rambert is not wrong to love and to live on the basis of love, but
the plague is not about love, and the courage to fight it has other
24 The Courage of Faith
springs. Rambert himself realizes this, joining Rieux in fighting
the plague while continuing to look for a way out of Oran and
finally deciding to stay, even when at last an opportunity to escape
presents itself.
What about faith? Is belief in God the source of the courage to
fight plague? Is this not what we naturally assume? For one character there clearly is a close connection between faith and courage—Fr. Paneloux, a priest. Paneloux is a person of learning and
is in Oran to do research on the desert fathers of early North
African Christianity. He is a natural spiritual leader and is called
on early in the time of plague to explain to the people what God
is up to in this evil (although it becomes clear in the course of the
novel that for Camus Christians are less interested in understanding than in turning to religion as a superstitious way to ward
off plague; Fr. Paneloux even suffers a rupture in the relationship
with his pious landlady late in the book, a woman offended by
the priest’s lack of sufficient interest in the prophecies of St. Odilia
as remedies for the plague).
The sermon Paneloux delivers early in the plague time is well
informed with theological and historical references, but the basic
message is straightforward and contained in his opening statement:
“Calamity has come upon you, my brethren, and my brethren,
you deserved it” (86–87). And the image he uses to convey his
message—the angel of plague coming down from heaven with a
flail, beating out the grain from the chaff through the mechanism
of plague—is so strong that it haunts even those characters in the
novel who do not believe in God. And yet these other characters
cannot help but feel disappointed or even shocked by a worldview
that in the end blames the victims for their suffering as if somehow
human behavior can explain the genesis of plague. They are reduced to hoping that Fr. Paneloux is better than his words.
But what do we think? We do not face plague—or do we? We
too have experienced the evil of suffering. And even though the
scale of that suffering in terms of intensity and duration varies
widely among us, each of us has felt like Ned Racine, William
Hurt’s character in the movie Body Heat: “Sometimes it comes
down so heavy I need a hat.” Sometimes it feels as if life is all
The Courage to Believe 25
about destructive testing. And in these times of our lives there is
a certain appeal to the perspective preached by Paneloux. When
I am honest with myself, I can see how I deserve to suffer. I need
not be convinced of the utter depravity of the human condition
or our absolute sinfulness to realize I should not be surprised by
suffering. The real surprise is just the opposite—that there is
goodness in our lives. A verse of the old hymn “In the Sweet By
and By” sings of thankfulness to the “bountiful Father above . . .
[for] the blessings that hallow our days.” Perhaps these blessings,
these experiences of grace are what we should think about precisely because they are gifts we do not deserve. Besides, Paneloux’s
attitude gives me some sense of control over what happens to me.
If suffering is the punishment for sin, to avoid the punishment I
need only avoid the sinning.
And yet I find myself reacting to Paneloux’s sermon the same
way the other characters in the novel do. I too am troubled by a
calculus of suffering that connects pain to sin. The problem is not
understanding my suffering, you see, but understanding the suffering of others. Perhaps they too are like me, perhaps they too
deserve to suffer. But what about the innocents? For you see there
are innocents despite the doctrine of original sin. Just think about
the children who suffer in our world. Yes, we are all born separated from God, but my mind and spirit still revolt against a
system that can explain away the suffering of children, and I
believe you probably have the same problem.
This is a problem that surfaces in The Plague as well and is
something that changes Paneloux. I mentioned above how the
old physician Dr. Castel was working on developing a serum to
fight the plague in Oran. When the serum is ready they decide
to test it on the young son of the magistrate, Othon, who has
come down with plague. The boy is inoculated, and all the main
characters in the novel gather round his bed to watch the serum’s
effects. The scene is horrific in Camus’ telling, and it stays with
the reader long after it is read. It is horrific for the other characters
because, while they have seen children die of plague, they have
never watched the course of the disease as it ravages a young body
from beginning to end.
26 The Courage of Faith
The serum enables the boy to struggle against the plague
throughout the night—a struggle that, as Paneloux points out,
means his suffering will only have gone on longer. As the heat of
the next day develops, the boy lets out a scream of protest against
his inhuman suffering and then dies. Rieux and Paneloux both
have to leave the sickroom, and as Rieux passes the priest the
doctor protests, “That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know
it as well as I do” (196). Outside they talk, and Paneloux claims
that the child’s suffering was as revolting to him as it was to
Rieux: “That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand”
(196). In response the weary doctor speaks for many of us, as well
as Camus, when he says: “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of
love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of
things in which children are put to torture” (197). Amen.
But now what? The experience has a marked effect on the priest.
Paneloux delivers a second sermon a short time later in which he
tries to come to terms with the boy’s death on the basis of faith.
Paneloux this time includes himself in the community to which
plague has come speaking in terms of “we” rather than “you”
(200). And he is much more careful to distinguish between “needful pain” and “apparently needless pain,” between “Don Juan cast
into hell, and a child’s death” (201). And yet he remains steadfast
in his belief that even when we do not understand, our faith demands that we accept and love what comes as coming from God.
It is the principle of “all or nothing”: either I accept it all, the pain
as well as the blessing, as coming from God, or I lose my faith.
This is more than an abstraction for Paneloux as he realizes
what this means for how he lives his life—and in his case, how
he dies. If faith is everything, a priest must live according to this
principle as a living sign of faith. As a result, Paneloux must respond with a firm yes to the question of whether it is illogical for
a priest to consult a doctor. When he too falls ill, he refuses to
consult Rieux or any other physician. And he dies. One must
wonder, based on the evidence in the novel, whether consulting
a doctor would have made any difference. Rieux knows he has
healed no one. For his part, Paneloux has the courage not only to
The Courage to Believe 27
collaborate in fighting the plague but to follow the logic of his
faith when he himself comes down with it.
Camus brings us face to face with the problem of evil and the
challenge presented by human suffering in a world we believe is
designed by a loving God. The technical theological and philosophical term for this problem is “theodicy”: how does one justify
belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God
given the experience of unjust suffering? This is very much a
Western religious problem as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in
various ways all maintain the essential goodness of God. In contrast, most Eastern religions believe ultimate reality is beyond
those dualisms that characterize existence in this reality like light
and darkness, pleasure and pain, and good and evil. If “God” is
beyond good and evil, evil, like goodness, is simply part of existence here and not ultimately either meaningful or a threat to
meaning. We need to put our thoughts on that place beyond
earthly existence and beyond good and evil. But Western religions
cannot escape the problem of suffering this way given our understandings of God and reality.
Philosophers of religion summarize the challenge of theodicy
by means of three claims, any two of which may be held over
against the third but all three of which cannot be maintained at
the same time while still making sense. These propositions are:
first, evil exists, that is, suffering is a real part of human experience; second, God is perfectly good and loving; and third, God is
in control, that is, God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent
(all-powerful), and eternal (beyond time) and therefore can be
trusted. A further distinction philosophers and theologians make
that we need to keep in mind as we proceed is between moral and
natural evil, that is, between suffering caused by the misuse of
human free will and suffering that is a product of the natural
forces or occurrences. This is the framework within which we can
try to address the problem of evil in a systematic and meaningful
manner.
One kind of theodicy simply tries to do without one of the three
claims made above. For example, St. Augustine famously denied
the reality of evil (dumping the first proposition that evil exists).
28 The Courage of Faith
Augustine reasoned that God created reality and that creation
was good; God therefore did not create evil, so evil could not be
real despite appearances; what we think of as the reality of evil is
really only the absence of goodness, a privation or lack of what
is really real, the good. On the other hand, deists, pragmatists,
and others sometimes go after the third proposition that God is
in control. Looking at God’s handiwork in creation gives evidence
that God is not perfectly in control. For example, we know God
exists because God has left behind traces of divine handiwork in
nature, but dependence on these traces seems to indicate that God
could do the work of creation and of revelation only in a limited
way. In a very different way, this also is the approach of someone
like Rabbi Harold Kushner whose book When Bad Things Happen
to Good People is a wonderfully pastoral approach to the problem
of evil that says God depends on us to collaborate in the process
of responding to suffering and making the world a better place to
live in. In a more philosophically sophisticated way, this also is
the position of process thinkers who seek to redefine the perfection of God’s knowing, power, and relation to time to demand
humans to more adequately play their role as co-creators with
God. Despite the appeal of any or all of these responses to the
problem of evil, they all seem to fall short of a full theodicy.
There are also attempts to stay true to all three of our claims
and still make sense both logically and experientially. For example,
one can take a mosaic approach to the problem of evil: just as in
a mosaic there must be certain dark stones to set off or complement the brightly colored ones if the picture made of stone chips
is to make sense and be beautiful, so too there must be evil to
make clear what goodness is. One needs to take a step back from
immediate experience to take in the big picture if human existence
with its pain and suffering is to be seen as a harmonious whole.
But does this not imply a certain limitation on God? Is this not
saying that God had to make evil in order to accomplish the divine
purpose?
Another class of theodicies might be characterized as free will
defenses of God. Free will is a good gift from God, something so
valuable even angels do not have it, according to traditional the-
The Courage to Believe 29
ology. But the cost of free will is the possibility of its misuse if it
truly is free, and with the misuse of free will comes evil. Again
from Augustine, think of free will like your hand: just because
you can use your hand to do bad things as well as good does not
mean God should not have given you a hand, does it? While this
may be a way to address moral evil, what about natural evil?
It is possible to address natural evil in this kind approach as the
theodicy of the contemporary English philosopher of religion
John Hick illustrates. Hick borrows a phrase from the poet John
Keats to describe this world as a “vale of soul-making.”*2 What
does this mean? He goes back to Genesis and a reading of Genesis
1:26 that is supported by the early church theologian Irenaeus.
The Genesis passage describes how human beings are created in
the image and likeness of God. Hebrew poetry is based on parallelism, so according to principles of literary criticism, “image”
and “likeness” mean the same thing. But Hick follows Irenaeus
in marking a difference between the two terms: we are created in
the image of God but must grow into God’s likeness. This growth
is the point of life on earth. Growth demands free will in this case,
and the misuse of free will is the cost of spiritual growth. Natural
evil simply reflects the human dignity of being created in the
divine image: God does not treat us like pets by putting us into
what Hick calls a “hedonistic paradise,” a perfect world where
everything is pleasurable. No, to grow we must face challenges,
and some of these challenges we experience as natural evil. God
wants us to grow into the divine likeness, and this world with all
its troubles is what is required for that growth.
Hick’s vale of soul-making theodicy seems to answer the question of why a good God who is in control would allow evil to exist
in the world, and it is very popular among my students. You may
find it appealing as well, or perhaps you have thought of something similar. And yet I cannot help but remain troubled. I can
see at least two big problems that undermine this explanation.
* For example, see Hick’s books Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harper
and Row, 1966) or Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1973).
30 The Courage of Faith
First, just from my personal perspective, who is paying the cost
for my maturing into the likeness of God? It seems to me to be
the victims of the evil that I do, the suffering I cause (because
despite my best intentions, I know I cause suffering especially to
those who care most about me). And does natural evil occur simply so that I can grow by responding to it? Do tens of thousands
of people die and countless more continue to suffer because of
the cyclone in Burma and the earthquakes in China in 2008 so
that you and I can do the right thing and help the survivors?
Moreover, the vale of soul-making seems to imply that past suffering was worth it for human growth, but I see no evidence of
this growth and even if I did, I have no right to forget their suffering. As I will claim in the third meditation below, no amount
of future progress can render the dead justice. The vale of soulmaking amounts to saying it is okay to use other people—those
I have injured, the victims of natural disasters, those who have
suffered in the past—for my benefit, and surely using people is
no more right for God than it is for us.
Which is a way of stating my second problem as well. You may
want to say that these concerns are taken care of in the afterlife,
that those who suffer here will receive their blessing later. Hick
acknowledges that his theodicy ultimately demands an afterlife
with its possibility for reward (and punishment) if his theodicy
is to work. Apart from the lack of evidence that there is an afterlife, there is a big problem here: I am living the relatively comfortable life of a university professor who has experienced sorrow
and suffering, to be sure, and who will someday die and go to
heaven (I hope!). But there are children born to the horrible and
fatal suffering of birth defects, whose lives are painful and short—
or even worse, long. They too will go to heaven. How can there
be adequate recompense for them in heaven? It just does not seem
fair that my life has been easy and theirs a struggle, and yet
something in heaven is supposed to even out this difference in
our sufferings here. How is this supposed to work? In the end, I
find this theodicy monstrous.
So what are we to do? Perhaps we would be better off letting
go of God. This seems to have been Camus’ own view, and it is
The Courage to Believe 31
the view of important characters in The Plague as well. Tarrou,
for example, is explicitly an atheist. And yet he admits his struggle
against the plague is part of his effort to become a saint, a saint
without God. It is as if the category of sainthood still makes sense
to him even without God. More interesting, perhaps, is Rieux,
the good doctor who knows he will never win in his fight against
plague. After Paneloux’s first sermon, Tarrou asks Rieux what he
thinks of the learned priest’s words. Rieux responds that perhaps
the issue of belief in God and the attempt to figure out what God
is doing in the world should be put to one side so that we might
get on with the struggle: “Mightn’t it be better for God if we
refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against
death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits
in silence” (117–18).
Rieux’s is a tragic worldview, for he knows the plague can never
really be defeated (a view shared by Camus who ends the novel
with the plague bacillus lying in wait “in bedrooms, cellars, trunks,
and bookshelves” [278] waiting for the day of its return). What
matters is not success but the struggle. Rieux refuses the tag of
“hero”: this is not a matter of heroism but of “common decency”
(150) where what counts is being human and doing one’s job.
Camus makes the same point in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”*3
Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock up a hill in the underworld
for eternity: he had to struggle to push the boulder up the hill
only to watch it roll back down when he got to the top and then
have to start all over. Sisyphus is the absurd hero for Camus,
condemned to meaningless labor, whose fate is tragic precisely
because he is aware of it. The question Camus raises in this essay
is whether or not it is possible to “live without appeal” (60), without excuses, explanations, or escape, without a God. And the claim
he advances is that of Rieux’s “mad revolt” in The Plague, that
there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
This seems rather harsh and hard, does it not? Is this not the
very reason we believe in God, that is, to flee from having to face
* Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien
(New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
32 The Courage of Faith
the human condition as it is? But in so doing, in turning to God
for solace only, in looking for excuses, explanations, and escape,
are we not being dishonest?
Surprisingly, these very questions are asked in the Bible, in the
book of Ecclesiastes or Qoheleth (in Hebrew). “Qoheleth” is the
title of a master sage and teacher whose reflections on life and
learning are quite challenging. We are used to the comfort contained in the passage that begins “For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven” (3:1), so we forget the
refrain of this book, “vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (1:2). Given
our experience of the world and God, trying to find a meaning to
life is vain in the sense of useless; it is like trying to catch the
wind. The author has been well-trained in the pursuit of wisdom
and has spent his whole life in this pursuit, but in the end the
only seeming benefit of wisdom is awareness: “The wise have
eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness” (2:14). Life is not
fair—“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to
the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (9:11)—and the best we can do is do what we do
well—“Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might”
(9:10). Is this not the attitude of Rieux in the novel? Is this not
the existential faith of Camus himself? And surely this takes
courage, the courage of honesty and of faith.
But there is a further courage required. As we have reflected on
Camus’ The Plague and the human experience of evil, we have
tended to view faith as that which gives us courage. Now it is time
to go back to our concern in this meditation, the courage to believe
or the way in which faith takes courage. This is not a matter of
closing our eyes to the reality of suffering—ours, that of others,
that we cause. It is not a blind faith in God no matter what happens
and no matter whether or not we can make sense of our belief. It
is not about pretending to believe we know what we do not know.
Nor is it a matter of believing because we want to or have to do
so. The courage to believe is something other than all this.
First of all, it is the courage to think in new ways (and not to
abandon thinking). Go back to the example of Fr. Paneloux. Clearly
The Courage to Believe 33
he had the courage to follow the logic of his faith. According to
that logic, the logic of philosophy of religion and traditional theodicies, we seem to be left with the great “all or nothing”: we
either accept what our faith traditions teach us about the perfection of God’s goodness, power, and knowledge, or we let go of God.
But is either option acceptable to us in faith? Do we close our eyes
to the world around us as it is, do we give up our struggle against
the pain and suffering of this world? After all, all of this is God’s
will which must be obeyed. And is the only other option, which
is sometimes hard to tell from despair, a muted courage to fight
on without God? We seem to have reached a dead end to the path
of our thinking and living. But once again I must say that when
we reach a dead end, perhaps it is a sign that we have been following the wrong path and need to start afresh. We need to think
again about the logic of faith and about what it means to think.
Fortunately we have a model for this other way of thinking in
our biblical tradition, a way of thinking that is older than the
Greek philosophy that informs both logic and theology, a way of
thinking that might be characterized as Hebraic, that comes from
Jerusalem not Athens. In the context of our concern with faith in
the face of suffering, this other way of thinking is most apparent
in the book of Job and the way Job himself deals with this problem
and shows us the courage to believe.
Admittedly the book of Job is one of the most difficult biblical
books to work through. The questions asked in this book go very
deep, and it takes courage to read Job with eyes wide open and
without preformed judgments. We know the story—or do we?
Have you paid attention to how even in our English translations
there is a major difference between the opening two chapters and
the end (42:7-17), which usually are set forth as prose, and the
long poem in between (3:1–42:6). The prose story is what we usually think of when we think of Job. This is an ancient and traditional story of the righteous sufferer who is put to the test, in this
case in a bet between God and Satan (the heavenly “Accuser”—the
literal meaning of Satan, and not the prince of darkness). Job,
despite what happens to him and his family and despite the advice
he gets from family and friends, patiently endures and remains
34 The Courage of Faith
steadfast in his faith and is rewarded in the end. This is the story
that justifies speaking of “the patience of Job.”
And this old frame story seems to have been the occasion for a
radical—in the sense of deep thinking—sage to raise some fundamental questions about the wisdom tradition and faith. (This selfquestioning by a sage makes Job similar to Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes,
although their specific issues are different. I am constantly amazed
by and grateful for the way the biblical canon includes not just
wisdom but questions about wisdom and multiple views about God
and the world. I am not sure we would have the same courage to
face ambiguity if we were putting the Bible together today. I suspect
we would go for one side in any issue, the true or right one in our
opinion. And we would be wrong to do so as our thinking and faith
would be impoverished thereby.) The questions this sage asks are
so radical that they seem to have been experienced as a threat by
later generations. The text of Job is corrupt, as if in the course of
transmitting the text later scribes tried to cover over the radical
questions of the book by fiddling with the text—transposing
speeches and inserting a whole new section, the Elihu speech of Job
32–37 that interrupts the flow of the drama between Job and God
and merely repeats what Job’s friends said. Let us see if we can
recover what was experienced as the scandal of this book.
Look at the poem. It is the same basic story of everything—
wealth, family, health—being taken away from a prosperous man.
But what an opening: “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed
the day of his birth” (3:1). These are hardly words of patient
endurance (see 6:8-13 as well). Follow the discussion between Job
and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They are convinced Job did something wrong, because that is the way the world
works: do good and prosper, do evil and suffer. Job is suffering,
therefore he must have sinned. Job is adamant in his conviction
of innocence and refuses to be moved by their arguments. Instead
Job challenges God to show him where he has done wrong. Job
even takes God to court, if you will, as chapter 31 seems to come
right out of legal proceedings of the biblical era. Job is so convinced
of his innocence that he takes oaths that say “If I am guilty, may
these bad things happen to me.” So, for example, 31:7-8:
The Courage to Believe 35
If my step has turned aside from the way,
and my heart has followed my eyes,
and if any spot has clung to my hands;
then let me sow, and another eat;
and let what grows for me be rooted out.
Moreover, he has not just followed the letter of the law but has
acted according to its spirit (for example, 31:16-18). Ultimately
he asks God for an answer, daring God to respond:
Oh, that I had one to hear me!
(Here is my signature! let the Almighty answer me!) . . .
I would give him an account of all my steps;
like a prince I would approach him. (31:35, 37)
And a response is what he gets (in 38:1–42:6). God, speaking
from the whirlwind, from the pillar of cloud that used to be a sign
of God’s presence during the exodus but now is a sign of how God
is hidden, roars:
Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding. (38:2-4)
And so God goes on challenging Job’s view of the world, displaying the might of the Lord of Creation until in 40:3-5 Job is silenced; at which point God proceeds to dump on Job again for two
more chapters until Job concludes:
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes. (42:6)
Job asks our question, and what response does he (and do we) get?
In essence, “Who are you to question me?” And Job is humbled,
silenced, repentant—and not restored.
What is going on here? What is this Job doing? I am suggesting
that this Job is giving us an example of the courage to believe. In
the midst of suffering, he neither closes his eyes and pretends all
36 The Courage of Faith
is well nor abandons God. Instead he has the courage to ask God
why God has abandoned him. “Where are you, God? What are
you waiting for?” The contemporary German political theologian
Johann Baptist Metz, whose work I will explore in more detail in
a later meditation, makes clear what Job is doing here: Job is “asking God to be God,” in Metz’s words. And this takes courage. Not
the courage of the hero—Job is silenced—but the courage of the
person of faith whose belief is so strong he or she is willing to ask
God to be God. Job (and in a different way Camus) has the courage
to live with questions that have no answers while carrying on the
struggle against suffering.
Is this what our faith leads us to? Can we say we have this kind
of courage to believe too?