Chapter 2

Encouraging One Another In The Faith

When the time came for Marnie to give her accountability report to her caregiver group, she shuffled her notes conspicuously and cleared her throat repeatedly. “Next time, she wants to bring up a question about faith,” Marnie struggled to say. “I have a lot of questions about my own faith, and I’m scared they’re going to get in the way of my listening well.” Gently, the caregivers’ group leader, Anne, asked her if she thought it might help to talk a little about her own questions. After a pause, Marnie expressed concern that she might get everybody else as scared as she was. “Could be,” Anne responded, “but I’m willing to trust that God’s Spirit among us will get us through it.”

With affirming smiles all around, Marnie’s peer shepherds leaned forward invitingly, and she plunged in: “The really big question I’ve been asking myself for quite a while is whether I have any faith at all. Sometimes I’m not sure I even know what faith is.” For most of the time remaining that evening, members shared freely their own questions about what it means to have faith, how to know whether we are growing in our faith, and how to tell the difference between faith that is only professed from faith that is truly genuine. Marnie’s closest friend in the group offered an especially insightful comment as the discussion drew to a close: “If we’re going to be listening to someone’s questions about their own faith, we ought to have at least a working definition of what faith itself is. Could Leroy help us with this?” At the beginning of the group’s next session, I gave it my best shot. Together, and with Marnie playing an especially important role in our discussion, we put together the basic content of this chapter.

Faith as Trust and as Belief

Across the centuries and different traditions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), Christians have shared a remarkably consistent understanding of what faith is. First, it is trusting in God with our whole being. Second, it is assenting with our minds to the teachings of the Bible and the Church. (Which church, of course, is a question every believer must answer for himself and herself.) Both faith as trust and faith as assent are frequently referred to in scripture and tradition as acts of believing, as in, for instance, John 20:31, which refers to the experience of eternal life through believing with one’s whole heart that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Believing, in this sense of the word and in the sense of “having faith,” is most importantly a commitment of ultimate loyalty to the God whose message Jesus brought at the cost of his own life. It has both a passive and an active side. “Passive faith” is a capacity to believe that is constantly being re-created within us by God (1 Cor. 13:13). By contrast, “active faith” is “hearing the word of God and doing it.” (Luke 8:21) It proceeds from a conscious decision on our part which shapes our lives both now and forever.

Without a doubt, the primary meaning of faith is a capacity to trust in God completely, and the exercise of that capacity in every kind of situation by conscious decision and acceptance of responsibility for it, whatever its outcome may be, e.g., “even unto the cross.” Questions about faith, in this sense of the word, are questions primarily about the direction of our will, not the capacity of our understanding. The questions are not about what or who, if anything or anyone, may be deserving of our ultimate loyalty and sacrifice, as if we do not already know. Rather, they are about how and where we acquire the courage to place our loyalty wholly in the service of what and whom we already believe with all our heart to be alone deserving of it. (Gal. 6:14; 1Cor. 2:2) As Marnie reflected on her own questions about the Christian faith, she came to see them as about faith in this most basic sense. “What I’m really struggling with,” she said finally, “is trust. I haven’t been able to trust anyone for a long time [her history includes abuse as a child and exploitation in a marriage], and I know Jesus deserves better from me, but I’m afraid to put everything in his hands.” She went on to say that what is helping her most with her trust issues is the experience of deepening relationships with trustworthy people in her group and in her church.

By this time, Marnie had learned enough about her care receiver’s particular faith question to know that it was of a different sort from her own. “She has doubts about a particular belief,” Marnie reported, “and I don’t know enough about the belief [that there are unforgivable sins] to be real helpful to her. Actually, I guess I kind of doubt it, too, but I don’t know why, so I’m worried. Am I in a ‘blind leading the blind’ kind of situation.” Marnie is now having to think about the secondary but still important meaning for “faith,” the assent of our minds to what we have been taught as Christians, and about the kinds of questions which can arise about specific teachings whose meaning may be unclear and whose reasons may be dubious. Out of this understanding of “faith,” the New Testament offers its message (kerygma) about God declared by Jesus of Nazareth, and its teaching (didache) about the implications of that message for the lives of his faithful followers. The perennial task of the church at all times and everywhere is to ensure that its own teachings are congruent with the basic message that the teachings are supposed to be about. From the perspective of faith as assent to the church’s message and teachings, there can be questions about the Christian faith which have to do with the fundamentals of the message itself (e.g., Jesus’ resurrection.) And there can be other questions about the Christian faith which have to do with more specific teachings about that message (e.g., the rapture, abortion, homosexuality, war and peace, etc.)

As I have come to see it, and as Anne’s caregivers group looked at it with me, the vital center of the Christian message was and is a narrative about humankind’s destiny, a story that begins with creation and proceeds through the calling of a special people to bear a unique witness to the Creator. This calling comes to completion in Jesus Christ’s decisive disclosure of God’s selfhood and will, and in the call to share Jesus’ “gospel,” God’s good news about humankind’s future (Mk. 1:14) with all people everywhere (Mt. 28:19). Just as the Christian faith includes a wholehearted trusting in the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, it also includes a thoughtful believing that the church’s story about God in Christ tells the real truth about human existence in the world. To this latter end the Christian message/story has embedded in it a number of beliefs about God, the world, and humankind’s place in it. Hebrews 11:6, by way of example, expresses the point well, “ . . . for whoever comes to God must believe that he exists and [that he] rewards those who seek him.” (REB) It insists that holding to these and other beliefs is essential to the life of faith. The God of whom the text speaks transcends fantasies about tribal gods jealous of their prerogatives and chronically anxious over the possibility of losing the fealty of those they can momentarily frighten into submission. The God of whom it speaks is the God who is, to whom the scriptures refer strikingly by the very name I AM. (Exodus 3:14)

The Story and the Beliefs: Keeping the Relationship Straight

The beliefs that the Christian story contains make three especially important contributions to the life of faith. First, they identify who the story’s ultimate source is, especially in the assertions that God is the creator of all things and that God’s nature and will are fully revealed in the ministry of Jesus Christ. Second, they set forth the grounds for believing that the story containing them is true; for instance, in the assertions that God kept his word to his chosen people by giving them the land he promised them, or that Jesus of Nazareth cast out demons and healed the sick by the power of God that was in him, or most especially that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead. And third, they succinctly sum up what the Christian story is most essentially about, often in a form that we can commit to memory and confess together in the context of worship.

Immediately after calling his congregation at Philippi to maintain a unity of heart and mind, St. Paul shared in a letter to its members a hymn that in only a few words portrayed the vital center of a Judaism transformed by faith in Christ:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11, KJV)

Similar hymns, containing other core statements of what Christians are to believe about Jesus and his relationship to God, also appear at Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:3-14, 1 Timothy 3:16, and 2 Timothy 2:11-13. Perhaps the most famous of all the earliest summaries of what every follower of Jesus Christ should believe is reported by Paul in his correspondence with the church at Corinth:

. . . the gospel will save you only if you keep believing exactly what I preached to you; believing anything else will not lead to anything . . . I taught you that Jesus Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared first to Cephas and secondly to the Twelve. Next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died; then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles; and last of all he appeared to me too . . . (1 Cor. 15:2-8, Jerusalem translation)

These early hymns and confessional statements are the forerunners of the doctrines and creeds that later came to occupy Christians’ attention with increasing regularity, from the Apostles’ Creed of the late second century through the Nicene of the early fourth, all the way to the proliferation of Protestant Confessions of Faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth. They remind us that though faith is most essentially trust, it is also assent. We place our trust in the mercifulness of a God whose holiness is finally beyond all human understanding and description. But we also give our assent to beliefs about God whose meaning is intended to be as clear as thoughtful, finite human beings are capable of making them. Beliefs deal especially well with questions that the Christian story is better at raising than answering, e.g., of how one reconciles the Bible’s terrifying depictions of God’s wrath with its transporting praise for God’s mercy, how a person of faith can be both freed from and obliged toward the Law, how the Kingdom of Heaven can be both here and far off, or how Jesus the message bearer is also the message himself—to name only a few. As the following paragraphs seek to illustrate, though, a major problem with beliefs is the ease with which they can get detached from the story in which they should remain embedded.

One of my theology students, Harry, once shared with me one of the deepest convictions of his personal faith:

I have to admit that it’s quite a story—the creation of the world in seven days, and all that. It’s powerful, dramatic—just the kind of thing I love to tell to my kids. But when I’m honest with myself, I know that I really don’t need it to know all the way down to my soul that there is a God who put it all together and keeps it together. All I have to do is to look up at the stars, feel the seasons change, and study even the simplest insects’ eye structures. How could anyone not believe that there is a Maker of the heavens and the earth?

Harry came to seminary from a previous career as an entomologist. Not surprisingly, therefore, his detachment of a particular Christian belief about creation from the biblical narrative could only betray a more general predilection to regard the scriptures as an appendix to, rather than a foundation for, his personal faith. Another student of mine, Art, also focused on a belief more than on the story that contains it, but was led to a quite different outcome.

Art stopped me after class one morning to hand me an index card on which he had written the words, God Became Like Us, So That We Could Become Like Him. I had just introduced this theme in an overview of the second century theologian, Irenaeus. “To me,” Art stammered, “this says it all! I’ve just realized that it’s the sum and substance of everything I believe as a Christian. I don’t need anything else!” I affirmed to Art the importance he gave to this particular formulation of the church’s belief in God’s saving work through Jesus Christ, but encouraged him to keep in mind Irenaeus’ own use of the scriptures in advancing this very claim, especially 2 Peter 1:4. There, the author writes of the promise that through Christ’s righteousness people “might be partakers of the divine nature” (KJV) or “may come to share in the very being of God.” (REB) But for Art, post-biblical formulations of the meaning and truth of the church’s claims about Jesus Christ were beginning to assume as central a place in his personal faith as scientific inquiry and the use of reason had in Harry’s.

Detaching certain beliefs from the story that nurtures them had decidedly different consequences for Harry and Art, long-term. At the end of his second year of study, Harry left seminary to be a biology teacher and to serve the church as an active, informed layperson. “I’ve finally realized,” he wrote me,

that though the beliefs I hold so strongly are pretty much Christian ones, they don’t come from where most of my Christian friends get theirs. It’s because they’re reasonable and not because they’re scriptural that I believe them. The fact of the matter is that very few of the stories in the Bible mean a whole lot to me. What counts is what squares with the sense we have to make of things all on our own.

Almost ten years after Art graduated from seminary, he called to tell me that he had recently been ordained a priest in the Orthodox Church. He went on to say that it was our earlier conversation about Irenaeus that led him to the richness of Eastern Christianity, and especially to one of its greatest theologians, Origen of Alexandria:

Maybe I was reading and hearing things wrong back then, but all I remember from my studies was that Protestantism insisted too much on a very dark and despairing view of human nature. The Orthodox tradition gave me a wholly new outlook: God is working to make us perfect, like him. Being brought to perfection is a process; it’s still going on; and it’s wonderful.

Gradually, Harry absorbed the biblical story of divine creation and redemption into an outlook founded upon personal experience, close observation, the exercise of reason, and the validation of like-minded people who were as reflective as he was and is. Art gathered the same story into a doctrinal scheme whose conceptual ingredients were drawn from the vast learning of the ancient Greeks, and combined with a mystical, allegorical approach to scriptural texts. For him, the “old, old story” rapidly receded, and in its place appeared a soaring vision of cosmic transformation that gathered to itself the wisdom of many peoples and civilizations across a staggering expanse of historical time.

The detachability of Christian beliefs from the larger story in which they are embedded can lead to remarkably different pilgrimages of faith, as the experiences of Harry and Art illustrate. Across Christendom today—and in other religions of the world also—one of the most prominent forms of the detachment is Fundamentalism. Common to all forms of Fundamentalist faith is a rigorous insistence upon adhering to a central core of beliefs—“Fundamentals”—as a sign of saving faith and a guarantor of membership in a community of the truly saved.

Within Protestantism in particular, the Fundamentalist outlook is currently shaping whole denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention in America offers an instructive illustration. It has declared what for all practical purposes is a holy war on everyone who questions vesting control of the denomination’s institutions, finances, programs, and missional outreach only in the hands of those who hold the “right” beliefs. And the current struggle among its members mirrors the wide spectrum of opinion among dedicated church members today about just what role beliefs should play in the formation of Christian disciples.

Over against their more Fundamentalist friends and co-worshippers, many “Moderate” Southern Baptists insist that giving doctrines first priority runs counter to the heart of historic Baptist faith, which is reliance upon the scriptures alone. However the current issues within the Southern Baptist Convention are eventually resolved, the debate itself should remind us forcefully of something crucial for understanding Christianity’s central message: beliefs detached from the Christian story can get in the way of letting the story speak to people directly, unless their dependence upon the story which anchors them is recognized and affirmed from the outset.

Beyond question, though, beliefs have indispensable roles to play in the life of faith. They clarify Who it is in Whom we are called to place our ultimate trust and loyalty. They set out the grounds for confidence that the Christian message is true. And they offer vital summaries of what the Christian story as a whole is most importantly about. And so they matter, deeply. At the same time, beliefs are not the whole of faith. Trusting in God and loving all of God’s creatures as God loves them matter too—even more than does either clinging to or repudiating inadequately understood doctrines, dogmas, creeds, and “Fundamentals.”

Beliefs, Pledges, and Praise: Appreciating the “Logic” of Belief

On the surface, core Christian beliefs look very much like assertions of fact—to be sure, of very large “facts”—whose truth can be confirmed by data and close reasoning available to everyone. Certainly, more conservative Christians look upon beliefs this way. According to their way of seeing the matter, the beliefs that we must affirm as conditions of our salvation constitute, literally, the full and final truth about a transcendent order of things that directly influences the course of events, both throughout the physical universe and in human history on our own planet. From this perspective, the primary meaning of Christian beliefs is descriptive in character. Each belief points out some particular feature of the world as a divine creation, and its truth is the correspondence between what it says and what, in fact, is the case about the created order. One of Anne’s caregivers shared that her son’s best friend was struggling with his church’s insistence that the universe was created in six days.

The primary problem with this way of looking at the meaning of core Christian beliefs is its narrowness. These beliefs serve several functions besides description alone and in many situations, within which believers strive to express their faith most fully, putting forward literal truth claims is the furthest thing from their minds. For instance, affirming that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary has always had far more to do with doxology than with gynecology. It is more a way of honoring God’s greatness and Jesus’ uniqueness than it is of chronicling yet another surprising occurrence that happened sometime back and someplace out there, determinable “objectively.” Later on, this section will focus explicitly and more fully on this doxological function of beliefs. It begins, though, with an introduction to another function of beliefs in the life of faith besides those of description and praise, in specific, with beliefs as pledges.

Count me in

Three mornings a week my first year in seminary, routine and ritual became one: a favorite course, chapel, and coffee hour in the parlor. The latter made possible informal conversation between students and faculty members that my classmates and I have cherished throughout our respective ministries. One brief chat that had an especially powerful impact on me followed a chapel service in which I happened to be sitting next to the professor of my morning course. Across several weeks, he had been lecturing on the difficulties of getting behind biblical books to the history underlying them and in the process raised questions about the meaning and authoritativeness of the Christian tradition that many of us, myself included, had not thought about previously. The impact of his lectures was profound, and often disturbing. One fellow student spoke for many of us when he said, “It just seems like everything’s up for grabs now.”

What stimulated my particularly memorable coffee hour interchange was something that occurred that morning in chapel. Side by side at the appropriate moment my professor and I both stood with our fellow worshippers and said the Nicene Creed out loud. It struck me while we were doing this that in spite of all the questions this man of faith obviously had about this very Creed, when he confessed it himself, he clearly meant what he was saying. As we walked together to coffee hour following the service, I said to my professor, “Before you get surrounded, could I get just a minute or two with you to ask you a pretty personal question?” Graciously, he took my arm, whisked me to the coffee pot, poured cups for both of us, and headed us toward a quiet corner of the room before the rest of our caffeine-deprived community made it into the parlor. Our conversation went roughly as follows:

Leroy: This is probably going to sound strange, but you really threw me a few minutes ago in the worship service.

Professor: And I wasn’t even preaching!

Leroy: It was the Affirmation of Faith. I’ve been thinking so hard about so many things in it—(with a smile) thanks to you—that I’m not sure I understand what I’m saying when I confess it.

Professor: Fair enough. But you’re saying I messed it up for you just now, and I’m not getting how I managed to do that.

Leroy: By reciting the Creed so forcefully yourself. How can you do it when you raise so many questions about it?

Professor: It’s the Dean, you know. He makes me say it.

Leroy: (Laughing) So that’s it! After all, isn’t that what you’ve been telling us all along about these creeds? Believe ‘em because the church tells us to. I can handle that. It’ll make everything so much simpler.

Professor: There you have it. Now please collect your A for the course, go home, and make no more trouble.

Leroy: Okay, I promise. Somehow, though, I get the feeling you haven’t quite shared all you might want to share on the subject.

Professor: I’ll recommend an A for you in pastoral care also. Before I do that, though, consider this: Ever since I became an American citizen, one of my greatest joys has been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. For me, affirming a creed is like that. This, too, is a declaration of loyalty—in this latter case, to the church.

Leroy: But surely not in the sense of “my church, right or wrong.”

Professor: Of course not. We’re not saying “my country, right or wrong” when we say the Pledge of Allegiance either.

Leroy: For some reason, I’m thinking about college and having to learn a password and a special handshake as a part of getting into a fraternity.

Professor: Ah yes, the American “frats.” I know so little about them. Passwords? Handshakes?

Leroy: Really secret stuff. Whispering the password to another member when you offer him the handshake tells him you’re one of the brotherhood.

Professor: You may be on to something here. What you’re saying does suggest a connection with the ancient creeds. Knowing them and saying them is more than a little like letting members of a group know that you’re one of them.

Analogies between pledging allegiance to a country’s flag at a public event, sharing a password at a fraternity initiation, and saying a creed out loud in church bring out something very important about faith as the holding of beliefs. Most especially, they serve as a reminder that doctrines, dogmas, creeds, and articles of religion have other roles to play in the life of faith besides making objectively true statements about God, the world, and humankind’s relations with both. As do pledges of allegiance and secret passwords and handshakes, the beliefs that we share as Christians call us to declarations of loyalty, to one another and to the whole community of faith—past, present, and future—whose reason for being is to serve the cause of Christ in the world. Assenting to what one is called to believe as a Christian is a way of sealing one’s commitment not only to God, but to all of God’s people at work for God on behalf of God’s creation everywhere. Or, as a member of a confirmation class once put it: “So when we stand up and say the Apostles’ Creed in church next Sunday, we’re gonna be saying, ‘Count me in.’”

It is by no means a new idea that core Christian beliefs are about loyalties as well as facts. Just how deeply this idea has shaped Christian practice can be seen in how the church refers to its own definitive statements of what members are expected to believe. In specific, Christendom’s most important ecumenical creeds and confessions of faith are consistently called “symbols”, e.g., Symbolum Romanum (the Apostles’ Creed), Symbolum Nicaenum (the Nicene Creed). There are two good reasons for designating these expressions of faith as symbols. First, like all symbols, creeds and confessions of faith convey by words and images important truths about reality and human experience of it. By means of precisely chosen words, these symbols of the faith represent the church’s best efforts through the centuries to convey to the world succinctly and accurately, though always incompletely, what it understands most fundamentally about God and God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. Second—and this is the primary emphasis of the present section—like some but not all symbols, creeds and confessions contain just those words whose correct use is a condition for acceptance by the fellowship from whom the symbols derive meaning and to whom the symbols give life. Learning the symbols is a marker of readiness for initiation; using them correctly is a marker of membership. In these senses of the word, symbolon meant not only a signifying word (standing for or representing something or someone), but also a password.

Lost in wonder, love, and praise

Sheila, another member of Anne’s lay caregiver group, shared with me her awestruck reaction to a just concluded hospital room visit with Helen, a terminally ill care receiver in her early thirties. For several months, Helen had angrily demanded answers from Sheila to the one faith question for which good answers are always difficult to come by: “Why me?” Repeatedly, Helen cried out to her caregiver: “I’m a good person, Sheila; I’ve tried to live a good life; my husband and children need me. Why, Sheila? Why is God letting this happen to me, now?” With her care receiver’s permission, Sheila and I, along with Sheila’s peer caregivers, talked regularly about how best to help Helen cope with her illness, its likely outcome, its consequences on those she loved most, and a faith challenged to the breaking point—Sheila’s as well as Helen’s. Sheila was a very effective caregiver during Helen’s physical and spiritual decline and received as many appreciative words from Helen as she heard vitriolic ones, e.g.: “I know I’m not much of a Christian now, and that I’m really hell to be around. I’ll never be able to repay you for all that you’re putting up with from me.” Lately, though, Sheila had begun to feel like a failure: “I can’t seem to find in me the answers that Helen needs and deserves.”

When Sheila called me that morning, Helen’s physical condition had taken a dramatic turn for the worse even as her spiritual condition turned for the better, and it was the latter that had almost overwhelmed her in the presence of her care receiver. I asked: “Do you think you could get some of the conversation down on paper to share with your peer group tonight?” Sheila answered: “It’ll do me good to try.” What follows is a brief section from the more extensive dialogue that Sheila shared that evening:

Helen: (Very weakly) Hi, Sheila, I’m glad you’re here. I do have things that maybe we could talk about, but before we do, do you think it would it be all right if we just prayed together for a little while?

Sheila: I’m glad I’m here, too, Helen. Prayer? I think it would be very all right. (Pauses) I know you usually like me to begin, but right now I’ve got a feeling that you just might be wanting to do that yourself.

Helen: I think I do. (Helen begins to pray, softly) God, all I want to do is praise you and thank you . . . you made everything . . . in everything . . . blessed me with . . . life . . . and . . . (Helen’s voice is cracking) family to love . . . holy . . . holy . . . (Helen drifts off to sleep.)

Sheila: (After waiting patiently for Helen to awaken) Welcome back, dear one. You seemed to sleep so peacefully.

Helen: I’m been feeling so much at peace now. It seems as if, all of a sudden, I don’t want to be mad at God anymore. All I want to do is praise him. Like, sing the doxology, you know?

Sheila: Feel like singing it now?

Helen: That’s just what I feel like doing right now. (As Sheila and Helen begin to sing quietly together, a nurse who has just entered the room joins in) . . . flow, Praise Him all creatures here below . . .

When Sheila finished her report that night, a member of the group quietly started humming the doxology, and then the others sang it aloud together: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow . . . .” Two weeks later, the members attended Helen’s funeral as a group and received tearful words of gratitude from her husband for their prayers and their love. “I know I can go on because Helen felt so loved by God at the end. All her questions and all her anger were gone, just gone. And it’s because of Sheila and all of you.” Sheila responded for the group, Jerry, God has been with all of us in so many ways these past months. We’re so thankful to him for Helen, and for you, and for all the two of you mean to us.

As I continue to think about Helen at the pain-wracked end of her life, I keep returning to the integrity with which she kept hurling at her caregiver one of faith’s most profound questions: “How could I have deserved this?” And I keep giving thanks for the patience and love Sheila showed in listening to Helen dismiss curtly and rightly the “answers” that others unwisely chose to offer her, e.g.: that there are evils that not even God can overcome; that we have no right to question how God chooses to apportion or withhold benefits; that even the worst suffering serves a greater good. Early in her illness, Helen’s physical pain was exacerbated by her struggle to reconcile believing in an all-powerful, loving God with the harsh facts of her unjust suffering in a world supposedly under God’s wise and benevolent governance. Finally, though, she achieved inner peace with respect both to her condition and her faith, not by abandoning her struggle with the belief’s logic, but by entering more deeply into the logic itself.

Helen’s prayer in the presence of her loving caregiver—a gift that Sheila says will go with her for the rest of her own life—bears strong evidence of a remarkable change in this terribly afflicted but wondrously comforted young woman in her final days and hours on this earth. Her faith in God clearly had become less an assent to statements about God’s characteristics and work, some agonizingly in conflict with others, and more an expression of pure, unbounded praise and thanksgiving. “Blessed . . . life . . . family . . . love . . . holy . . . holy . . . holy.” Words that had once served the purpose of description became sighs of glorification.

There is a time-honored principle in Christian theology for defining and understanding the role of belief in the life of faith: Lex credendi est lex orandi. The rule of faith is the rule of prayer. Or, what people are to believe must be most fully evident in how they pray. The principle is most especially evident in the very first words of the Lord’s Prayer, hallowing the One in whose embrace alone human beings have life in this world and the next: “Even your very name is holy.” And it was powerfully present in Helen’s almost inaudible prayer before drifting into a few minutes of sleep. “Holy . . . holy . . . holy.” Beliefs do assert things, and in this respect they do take on the appearance of claims to truth about which it makes sense to ask questions, to pursue evidence, and to consider alternatives. But they also sing praises, before whose sounds the anguish of doubt, the din of debate, and the fine points of dogma give way.