The plausibility of 1000 Samsons won’t bring me one iota closer to belief.

And that’s because my belief no longer matters to me. I’m not even sure that belief is fundamental to Christianity anymore. Sure, ask most Christians how to define and delimit what it means to be part of the club and they’ll tell you: belief in X. Sometimes X is God, sometimes Jesus, sometimes morality, sometimes being a sinner. Christianity is usually played by these rules. I’m going to try a different tack.

Let’s take a quick stroll down OT lane. God’s interaction with Abraham goes like this:

Now the Lord said to Abram,
“Go forth from your country,
And from your relatives
And from your father’s house,
To the land which I will show you;
And I will make you a great nation,
And I will bless you,
And make your name great;
And so you shall be a blessing;
And I will bless those who bless you,
And the one who curses you I will curse.
And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.
So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him.

Then there’s this account of God and Moses:

God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
..He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

And David:

And David was dancing before the Lord with all his might…

[David:] For You, O Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have made a revelation to Your servant, saying, ‘I will build you a house’; therefore Your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to You. Now, O Lord God, You are God, and Your words are truth, and You have promised this good thing to Your servant. Now therefore, may it please You to bless the house of Your servant, that it may continue forever before You.

So far these accounts surrounding three of the major OT figures’ interactions with God describe their reactions as going forth, fear, and dancing. Belief goes unmentioned (a quick “reference search” shows that the word “belief” is used roughly 20 times throughout the OT). Sure, these stories involve an implicit kind of belief, but it goes without saying.

The New Testament has a slightly different language about interacting with God. I would like to avoid this part of the collected writings but I won’t. In the New Testament, things seem to have shifted dramatically. It’s difficult to turn a page without being called to belief.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also…
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed…
Whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life…
If you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified…

whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned…

I don’t want to resolve this tension, and honestly I’m not sure that I can. But what I can say is that different times call for different measures.

Let’s think on the other side of the tracks for a minute. Our comfortable acceptance of the account given by secularity — we wouldn’t say our belief in it, but something more like we acknowledge it — relies on its own kind of belief, though it often gets talked about as though it doesn’t. For whatever reason, the secular position has a tacit narrative attached to it that it is a kind of neutral state that requires no adherence or belief. It just is. The Age of Secularity has graciously simplified our lives by subtracting the abhorrent burden of the necessity of believing.

What seems to be the case is that the structure of our contemporary epistemological nature doesn’t require belief. The progress of secularization has reduced the demands on our souls such that we no longer have to believe; belief has been subtracted unless we choose to add it back in. This appears to us as a simplification of the older story, where believing was expected and challenging norm. Who can bear the burden of God anymore? Unfortunately, I believe, this is sloppy thinking and a false (alternative?) narrative. Still, it is the mythos we most readily abide by.

So it seems to me that this “reduction narrative” or “subtraction story” (thank you, Charles Taylor) around the role of belief is part of a larger narrative that we call secularity. What I’m advocating then, is that talk around belief might be better off being disregarded. It ought to become a moot point, or at least be sidelined, and need not be the focus of one’s adherence to a tradition, whether it be Christianity, secularity, or something else.

Though I’m overstating my theological position, as it would be seemingly impossible to appropriate the writings of the New Testament without acknowledging terms like belief and faith, I’ll maintain that our current use of language surrounding these words has a deficit. It lacks the sophistication needed to approach these writings. As a culture, we are mislead concerning whatever mystery of faith is behind the veil of language.

All that to say, I prefer to think in terms of adherence and attachment (I could probably do better on the terminology here). It’s not that I believe more in God or Jesus or Samson’s deeds than not. It’s that I adhere to and acknowledge the tradition of Christianity and God as a living force in my life. At the same time, I adhere to and acknowledge the forces of secularity at play in my thinking. Perhaps the question is better put, to which will I give a dominant position?

P.S. Yet. And this is a looming yet.

Yet the issue of plausibility towards belief has been bothering me lately. Without it, what’s left of discourse, and of relational thinking? My stubborn insistence that the tradition lends itself to me and I choose to adhere to it, life-giving and meaningful as it is, feels a bit lacking with respect to my responsibility to humanity. And to myself.