Functional Faith (4) - Meaning

The last of Volf’s four elements of a ‘functional faith’ is meaning and this completes his portrait of what a healthy faith looks like. This is, in my opinion, the most basic and fundamental of faith’s functions. When faith is operating according to its design it is helping us to understand and interpret the meaning behind the experiences of our lives.

Here the basic observation is that all of us have an innate desire to discover meaning behind the things that we do (or seek to do) and the experiences that we face. It seems to be a uniquely human capacity and longing to go beyond the surface, beyond the appearance of things and into a vague, shadowy realm where we wonder about the meaning (if any) behind it all. But we rarely stop to wonder why this longing, this relentless drive is a part of who we are as human beings. None of us are content with ‘the facts’, we all need to interpret them and to impose some kind of meaning on them.

So this is the function that faith in God (or whatever else we put our trust in) seeks to provide. From the Christian perspective, faith in God provides a point of orientation around which we organize our hopes and aspirations, our disappointments and failures, our efforts and our struggles. The meaning behind all of these realities of life is tied up in the story of a good world, created by a good God that is struggling to retain its true image, an image that has been lost and distorted due to human sin. This struggle has been overcome by the God of the universe taking on the sin and pain of the world and overcoming it by love. The cross is overcome by the resurrection, death is swallowed up in victory.

This provides the interpretive clue that explains the frustration that we all experience living in a world where reality does not often meet expectation. It also helps us to understand and celebrate those moments when we get glimpses of the healing that will one day characterize all that God has made.

This also gives meaning to the things that we do here and now. God’s purpose is simply this restoration of all things. We can have confidence that nothing that we do that contributes to that goal (whether in our own personal lives or in the lives of the world in which we participate) will be lost. The fear that we have is that everything we work for is for nothing, that everything will be buried under the ‘rubble of history’ and that we ourselves will be forgotten and that the whole thing will have no meaning. It is our faith in a God of resurrection makes all the difference in the world.

“Every act of faithful service, every honest labour to make the world a better place, which seemed to have been forever lost and forgotten in the rubble of history, will be seen on that day to have contributed to the perfect fellowship of God’s kingdom… all who have committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labour was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed kingdom.”

Lesslie Newbigin, Signs Amid the Rubble, 47.