Faith Development: Faith as Ultimate Concern

The Challenges of Faith in
the Quest for Cosmic Citizenship

1. Faith as Ultimate Concern

What is faith? For purposes of our discussion today we will consider faith to be our attitudes of devotion to that which is of greatest concern to us in life.

In much of the highly competitive developed world, economic success is the god to which many people are devoted. They may go to church on Sunday and consider themselves to be religious but their ultimate concern is with their economic success. Faith is a state of being ultimately concerned; the nature of one’s beliefs is significant in the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.

1780:5 160:5.3 “The object of religious devotion may be material or spiritual, true or false, real or unreal, human or divine. Religions can therefore be either good or evil.”

1088:7 99:3.6 “Many individual social reconstructionists, while vehemently repudiating institutionalized religion, are, after all, zealously religious in the propagation of their social reforms."

Faith is not an act of the rational mind – it is not a creation of the will. Neither is it an act of the unconscious. But it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of our being are transcended. Faith exists prior to any attempt to derive it from something else because any such attempt is itself an indicator of the existence of faith.

We are driven toward genuine spiritual faith by our awareness that we somehow belong to the infinite. Faith is similar to love in that we do not own love like a possession, but rather discover it as a quality of our interpersonal relationships. We learn how to enhance love, how to increase its presence through loyalty and devotion. Faith is like this; we cannot own it like a possession but we experience it as a quality of our orientation toward that which is of ultimate concern to us. And, as is the case with love, we learn how to enhance it and increase its power through loyalty and devotion.
Faith has been described as “the infinite passion” – it is a passion for the infinite.

In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about that which is truly ultimate. In idolatrous faith, finite realities are elevated to the rank of ultimacy. The inescapable consequence of idolatrous faith is deep disappointment, a disappointment which penetrates into the very heart of our existence. Idolatrous faith finds its center in something which is more or less on the periphery. Therefore, the devotion of idolatrous faith leads to a loss of the center and to a disruption of the personality. The ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence only for a certain time. But finally it breaks into the open.

He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life. Where there is true spiritual faith, there is an awareness of holiness. The human heart yearns for the infinite because that is where our finite nature wants to rest. In the infinite, the finite sees its own fulfillment. The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of our relation to the holy. It is implied in every genuine act of faith, in every state of ultimate concern.