James Fowler, in the opening chapter of his book Stages of Faith, lists a set of questions he developed for a workshop he was leading on the topic of faith:
- What are you spending and being spent for? What commands and receives your best time, your best energy?
- What causes, dreams, goals or institutions are you pouring out your life for?
- As you live your life, what power or powers do you fear or dread? What power or powers do you rely on and trust?
- To what or whom are you committed in life? In death?
- With whom or what group do you share your most sacred and private hopes for your life and for the lives of those you love?
- What are those sacred hopes, those most compelling goals and purposes in your life? (p.3)
Wow.
It seems to me that our present day understanding of "faith" has become so anemic that it looks puny in comparison to the weight of these questions.
What Fowler has in mind when speaking of "faith" is, in his words, "a much more powerful matter than claimed belief in a creed or a set of doctrinal propositions". (p.4)
Ditto for what the Bible has in mind.
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