Functional Faith (3) - Guidance

Returning to Volf’s conception of what a ‘functional faith’ looks like it is important to note that, in his opinion, much of contemporary North American Christianity never gets past the first two features: blessing and deliverance. We either view faith as some kind of performance-enhancing drug or we use it as a crutch so console us in our failures. In both of these cases faith is still idling, it is still malfunctioning.

The third function of a healthy faith is that of guidance. Here the idea is that most of us look to God for help in making decision and deciding how we will order our lives. We want to know what to do and we want to know what things we can leave undone. We want to know how to make important decisions in ways that are faithful to who we believe we are called to be. This is an area of faith that has a lot of personal interest for me because I have struggled with the idea of how precisely God does lead and guide in human decision making. It is also a very prominent concern for many of the students I work with.

Here Volf made the strong statement that our faith should have the final say in all ethical matters, even (especially) in the workplace. The idea of faith providing guidance for personal morality and nothing else is not an option. We believe and we make decisions as whole persons and it makes little sense to split our lives into private and public realms and say that our faith only addresses “what we do with our solitude”.

The classic example is the public figure, caught in some kind of moral failure, who argues that their private life has nothing to do with their public leadership. Most of us know that there is something wrong with this kind of argument, even if we struggle to articulate it in a convincing way. It is simply laughable that character traits, values, and habits that are expressed in ‘private’ have no bearing on a person’s public role. The very fact that this is conceivable to us is an indication of how deeply ingrained the public/private dichotomy actually is.

Volf went on to say that faith does not just guide in the sense of giving us boundaries and limits in the area of morality. We are not merely called avoid what is morally impermissible, we are called to strive for moral excellence. This calling does not restrict moral excellence to the realm of Christian ethics but it does give us the proper motivation to guide our actions.

There are many grey areas here but Volf’s overall point was that a faith that stops at the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question without allowing God to guide our actual decisions is an idle faith. This certainly does not answer all the questions. How do we actually understand God to be guiding our actions? Is it primarily through the Bible? Is it primarily through subjective interpretation of ‘the voice of God?’ Does faith ‘function’ in providing an overarching set of values that will inform our decision making or is there more direct guidance available for individual decisions? These are the questions that Volf’s points here raised for me. I agree with his interpretation of this function of faith but remain a little confused on how it gets expressed practically.