Dear Organlearners,
Winfried Deijmann <winfried@universal.nl> writes:
> I have one question to you ( and others interested in the topic). How
> would you describe the difference between trust in the future and faith in
> the future?
Greetings Winfried,
I believe that your question is very important. But it is also
difficult (complex) to answer. thus we will have to do some systems
thinking here.
Your question has two sides to it:
(1) What is the difference between trust and faith?
(2) How does this difference appear with respect to the future
You do not ask us to give an account (content, details) of our trust
in future and our faith in future. In other words, you do not ask us
to "look in the crystal ball and say what we see". Thus I will not
look into the crystal ball and say what I see there.
I will try to answer the two questions from my point of view.
(1) What is the difference between trust and faith?
To give an account of this difference, we have to study the
relationship between faith and trust. There are four possibilities:
* A disjuncted (casual) relationship means that not only they have
different origins, but that there is apparently no relation
between them. We can disregard this possibility since whenever we
deal with faith, trust often enters the picture.
* A conjuncted (regular) relationship means that although they have
different origins, they influence each other regularly. We can
disregard this possibility because they do not have different
origins, they both originate in the mind.
* An implicated (essential) relationship means that they have the
same origin, but that one is more complex and thus entails the
other.
* An equated (identical) relationship means that they are equivalents
(synonyms), thus meaning exactly the same thing. We can also rule
out this possibility.
It seems that we have to investigate the implicated (essential)
relationship further. The question to ask is: which one is essential
to the other one? Now, for me trust is essential to faith because
faith ceases to exist when trust disappears. Conversely, we can have
little, if any, faith and yet trust a lot. To see it in another way,
trust is part of faith. Thus faith is more than trust because it
consists of other things than merely trust. One such a thing is
reason which Ben Compton have pointed out so eloquently.
Should faith consists of trust and reason, then what is the
difference between trust and reason? Again we have four possibilities
which we can work through as above. I think that the actual case is
the second possibility: they have different origins, but influence
each other regularly. My reason originates in my mind and nowhere
else. Thus the thoughts which I have to trust must originate
somewhere else. This often makes them unreasonable and even
irrational.
I have two sources for such trusting thoughts: God and fellow
humans. Whose thoughts should I trust? On 16 December 1969 something
very important to the rest of my life happened. Me and my wife were
attenting with a crowd of 10 000 other people a yeraly gathering
called The Day of the Covenant. The second speaker was a Senior
Cabinet minister of the apartheid goverment. He began his speach with
the following words (freely translated into English: Whether the
goverment is right or wrong is not the issue, what is important is
that you must trust the goverment. It was as if biting ants were
crawling all over me and a fire consuming me from the inside. Five
minutes later I grabbed my wifes hand and we left the stadion, 10 000
pairs of eyes burning in my back.
What I did not know at that time, was that this minister was one of
the three highest ranking officials in a very secret society which
ruled South Africa from behind the curtains, namely the Broederbond.
What I also did not know, was how secret societies operate and how
diffuclt they can make life for anyone who became an obstacle in
their path. Well, I and my wife had to learn many hurting lessons.
But the greatest lesson which I learnt and which did not hurt me at
all was what the Bible had to say about trust. It is very, very
clear on this point: trust only on God and never in anything else.
(Check it out yourself, using a concordance.)
I became deeply troubled why I should trust only God. It seemed to be
so irrational because I was trusting so many other things and people
in my life. I prayed to God to teach me the answer. That lesson took
15 years to complete. God, the Creator, wants me to be creative and
thus image Him. By trusting anything else, such trust impairs my
creativity. Most important in my creativity is its coherency and
consistency. They have to be judged by both my mind and heart.
Let me summarise the above before I go to the second question. Again,
I am not proclaiming anything as a preacher. I merely write down the
answers to my own questioning to help painting the rich picture of
faith.
Faith is a quality of knowledge. Perhaps it can be described the
cutting edge of my thoughts. Thus faith concerns some of my
thoughts. I may also call them my personal beliefs. Some of these
beliefs originate externally from other sources (God and other
humans). I have to trust these external beliefs in order to derive
any value from them. The other beliefs originate internally in my
mind and permeate the four levels (experential, tacit, formal and
sapient) of it. I have to reason with these internal beliefs,
questioning them day by day to ensure their validity. To symbolise it
in the shortest manner:
faith = trust + reason
Needless to say, there must be complete coherency and consistency
between trust and reason for faith to be authentic. The final judge
of this authenticity of our faith is not our minds, but our hearts.
(2) How does this difference (between faith and trust) appear with
respect to the future?
We have to think of our thoughts about the future and especially
those thoughts which are the cutting edge about the future.
Our trust in the future concerns those thoughts about the future
which did not originate in our own minds. They can originate
from God or other people. In other we words, our trust in the future
concerns what other sources has to say about the future.
I personally try to base my trust in the future in what God has to
say about the future. But I have to be very careful because God
speaks through humans. Humans (including me) may easily prcolaim
their own thoughts as the thoughts (Word) of God. Thus we have to
know how to differentiate between the thoughts of God and that of
humans. (Maybe we should one day have a dialogue on this issue.)
Our trust in the future is an essential part of our faith in the
future. If our trust in the future dies away, our faith in the future
reduces to our reason about the future. This faithless reason about
the future is in my opinion a pityful state of the mind.
But what about a faithless trust in the future? Is such a thing
possible and how will it look like?
Something unprecedented is happening in the history of humankind the
past 20 to 30 years. For millenia humans excercised their reason in
terms of a simplistic conception of reality (its present and its
past). However, we are now realising that reality is not simplictic,
but complex. Thus our reason fails to deal with this present
complexity. The so-called post-modernists are very aware of this
failure.
The ramifications of this failure of reason into our faith is
immense. If our reason about the future dies away, our faith in the
future reduces to our trust in the future. Since we have to depend on
external sources for trustfull thoughts, we dirft aimlessly and
hopelessly around, not knowing ourselves what the future will bring
next. This is what a faithless trust in the future is about.
How can we counteract this pityful faitless trust in the future? I
often use the following motto:
Trust in God and systemize your reason..
How can we trust in God? How can we systemize our reason?
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
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