I’m back from a really enjoyable couple of days in Vancouver where I had the opportunity to listen to Miroslav Volf present the 2006 Laing Lectures. His lectures were entitled “A Voice of One’s Own: Public Faith in a Pluralistic World” and it was very interesting to hear his take on how the Christian faith can function in our contemporary world’.
So how does faith function in a pluralistic world? Volf began by identifying two key malfunctions of faith, each prominent in varying degrees across Western Culture. He labeled the first malfunction ‘idleness’ and described it as an extremely privatised view of faith that makes little difference beyond questions of individual morality and family life.
The temptation, he argued, was to see faith as either a ‘performance-enhancing drug’ or a ‘divine band-aid’. The image of the performance-enhancing drug sees God as a kind of blessing dispenser that promises to make us more successful people. Faith is something that we use in order to try to achieve success and we see God primarily in terms of the benefits that he can provide us.
The image of the divine band-aid refers to a faith seen primarily as a consolation for us in our disappointment and failure. This is sort of like Marx’s view of religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’; faith essentially serves as a crutch to help people deal with the failure and pain in their lives. God is seen mainly as someone who can help us deal with whatever afflictions we may be suffering from.
Volf argued that these are both examples of faith that is malfunctioning because they misunderstand what faith is actually for. Both the idea that God wants to make us successful and that God can heal our pain and failure have elements of truth to them but both, in and of themselves, are only part of a much bigger and more complicated picture of what faith is actually for. In Volf’s words, “Christianity is either a way of life or it is a parody of itself.”
Hearing these two malfunctions described was helpful for me because I think both are prevalent both within the Christian world (and probably within my own life if I’m honest). Both of these images point to the danger of an privatised and (in my opinion) irrelevant faith. Details on the second malfunction of faith to come.
