Editorial - Two Kinds of Faith

-JLD

A covenant is a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people responds in faith (BCP Catechism p 846).

The Holy Scriptures of both Old and New Covenants tell the story of how a Judaeo-Christian body of people responded in faith to the relationship God initiated with them. We, who may be said to be an Anglican body of people, adopt our response in faith and call it our normative tradition, meanwhile building our own tradition by responding in faith to the relationship God initiates with us. We affirm that their response contains all things necessary to salvation. We are not always so sure whether our response does or not, though we often feel it has promise.

Urban T Holmes in his singular monograph, "What is Anglicanism?" writes about this Anglican consciousness that it "is a mode of making sense of the experience of God... a particular approach to the construction of reality, or to the building of a world." The Baptismal Covenant according to the use of the Episcopal Church (BCP pp 304f) is one very important way that we respond in faith and inform (ie give shape to) our understanding of our relation to God's initiative - and continuing to make all things new.

It's the faith with which we respond -- there are at least two kinds - that often creates the problem, a problem sweeping the Communion even now. There's the credal or doctrinal faith "we believe" and the covenantal faith "we will." There's the doing here and now, with little direction as to how we go about it. And there's the willing here and now, but with both present and future intention and commitment and clear instructions as to how we go about it. It is the difference between faith as passive acceptance of some, albeit essential content, and faith as active participation in a relationship. The Anglican consciousness seems more a covenantal than a credal way of responding to our experience of God. It's rather like parting the Red Sea.

Samuel Butler is credited with saying "people in general are as equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted as they are at seeing it practiced." The two kinds of faith, credal and covenantal, seem somehow caught up in that statement. It may be safe to presume that some might say the creeds with fingers crossed behind their back. It is not altogether safe whatever to will the Baptismal Covenant without both hands on the wheel.

This ambiguity is revealed by the Baptismal Covenant and its two sets of questions. The Apostles' Creed (the Baptismal Formula) asks for our belief, for passive faith, the part of the Covenant to which we assent. The questions that make up the balance of the Covenant ask for our will, for active faith, and begin with "Will you..." to which we respond, "I will, with God's help." Strangely, we do not ask for God's help for what we believe, but only for what we will, perhaps because a covenant fulfilled is a process, a practice, a life, a relationship in which we choose to engage.

Ironically, the Catechism, itself a form and outline of the faith as belief, is also the source of the definition of a covenant. Faith as assent to doctrine, faith as response to God's initiative all bound in one. The creeds do not spell out beyond implication at best how one must act in response to the affirmations one makes. On the other hand, the covenants are very specific about what one wills to be and to do in the relationship being embraced.

The questions in the Baptismal Covenant embrace the full expanse of the Christian life and way. Nothing and no other is excluded. It is this as editorial premise on which The Covenant Journal was founded and, with God's help, we will to keep it that way.

[The Covenant Journal, Number 28, May 2008]