On Sunday I offered some initial reflections on pastoral and theological responses to those who suffer from Alzheimer’s, dementia or other conditions which impair their sense of self, and frustrate their capacity to relate to others and to God.
I was encouraged to think about this further while reading David Willis, Clues to the Nicene Creed, and his chapter on what believing means. This slim book is a gem of accessible theology – (see sidebar). Describing how hard it is at times to believe, and how life circumstances, inner changes, and yes, certain forms of affective disability and mental ill health, can make personal faith all but impossible, Willis argues something very close to the last two paragraphs of my post on Sunday. Here’s what he writes, knitted together from three pages:
Faith is knowing by heart the one on whose heart all the members of his body rely. When we feel overwhelmed by doubt…we do not feel God to be in our hearts; but that does not mean that God ever ceases to have us in his heart. Our faith – as trusting knowledge of God’s benevolence is not faith in our faith, nor heartfelt experience of our experience…..
In fact almost as often as not, believers get guided, comforted, compelled, and sustained from day to day by other members of Christ’s body. There are times when we are dependent on what I think we must recognise as the vicarious faith of the community. Often the community trusts on our behalf. We need to recognise – rejoice in, let ourselves be helped by – that vicarious trust of the community to which we belong, in season and out.
All I am insisting on in recognising the comforting reality of the vicarious faith of the community is that since we are united to Christ in his body and since it is finally Christ’s own fidelity on which we rely and who is the author and finisher of our faith, even in our most forlorn and apparent unbelief, we do not fall out of the nexus of sane trust…..The good news includes the belief that ultimately, no matter how far away and with what unimagined twist, the only inevitable thing is sovereign love. (pages 25-27).
Maybe our insistence on faith as personal responsive trust, as an individual, cognitive and volitional response to Christ, can be pushed so far that we overlook those who, for many reasons best known to God, cannot, or do not, believe and trust in such a self conscious, publicly acknowledged way. Yet they are still loved, held, incorporated within the purposes of God’s gracious and sovereign love – and it may be that an important priestly role of all those believers who insist on ‘the priesthood of all believers’, is to hold all those for whom faith comes hard if at all, within the vicarious faith of the community. And perhaps in such cases, the prayer ‘ Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief’, could become, less selfishly and more generously, ‘Lord we believe, help Thou their unbelief’. Because in that vicarious faith, those for whom faith and trust as experience of God is at present impossible, will be enfolded in love, and treasured in hope, within a community where no one’s life is hopeless, no person is unloved, and all are faithfully held and cannot fall out of the nexus of a sane trust.
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