CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MATERIAL FACT AND FAITH FACT
In his book, Early Christian Doctrines, J.N.D. Kelly exposes us to the way Christians's minds have always tended to respond to reality. Anytime, throughout history, we have encountered a message in Scripture we did not understand we have been forced to respond to the message in a way that has not gone unnoticed by the world.
Allow me to give you an example that demonstrates what I mean. Dodd discusses in his book the way the early Church responded to the message in Scripture that concerned the Lord's Supper, messages like the one I spotlighted earlier found in John 6:56: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him." Such messages had moved the early Church to take the bread and wine--the eucharist--offered in the ritual of Holy Communion very seriously. Dodd summarized the attitude of the early Church on page 440 of his book: "Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestionably realistic, i.e. the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior's body and blood." But at the same time the early Church Fathers understood the bread and wine to be the real body and blood of Jesus, they also referred to the bread and wine as "symbols" or "antitypes" of Christ's actual body and blood. This apparent contradiction forced Dodd to try to explain the mind-set of the early Church Fathers. Dodd tells us, "It must not be supposed, of course, that this "symbolical" language implied that the bread and wine were regarded as mere pointers to, or tokens of, absent realities." Dodd is telling us that even though people used the language of "symbols", they still believed the reality symbolized by the bread and wine was actually there. He clarifies his point this way: "Rather were they (the bread and wine) accepted as signs of realities which were somehow actually present though apprehended by faith alone."
Please pay close attention to the presence of the word "somehow" in the last sentence. What Dodd is telling us is that even though the early Fathers did not know "how" Christ's body and blood could be present in the wafer and wine, they decided to believe for a fact that His body and blood were actually present. How was this fact created in the mind of the early Church Fathers? By faith. The presence of Christ's body and blood was, as Dodd tells us, "apprehended by faith alone."
Notice please that "faith" in the example given us by Dodd is purely an act of will which results in an individual taking their interpretation of the message in the Bible and placing their interpretation in the drawer of their mind reserved for "facts." "Facts" like the ones described by Dodd can reasonably be labeled "faith facts."
For another example, we can take J.N.D. Kelly's explanation of the process through which the early Church came to conceive Christ's actual body and blood being contained in the elements of the eucharist. He tells us, "Gregory Nazianzen speaks of the priest calling down the divine Word and, using his voice as a knife, cleaving asunder the Savior's body and blood. While admitting that the spiritual gift can be apprehended only by the eyes of the mind and not by sense, Chrysostom exploits the materialist implications of the conversion theory to the full. He speaks of eating Christ, even of burying one's teeth in his flesh. The wine in the chalice is identically that which flowed from His pierced side, the body which the communicant receives is identically that which was scourged and nailed to the cross. Thus the elements have undergone a change, and Chrysostom describes them as being refashioned... or transformed..."
Notice please the sentence: "While admitting that the spiritual gift can be apprehended only by the eyes of the mind and not by sense, Chrysostom exploits the materialist implications of the conversion theory to the full." What we see there is a perfect example of what all the Church Fathers were forced to do with their teaching. Using words, they created images designed to communicate to the reader what the fathers perceived to be taught in Scripture. If they believed Scripture said the bread was Jesus' body, they created images designed to move all the believers to perceive the bread as Jesus' body. But the perception created by the fathers was a perception "apprehended only by the eyes of the mind and not by sense..." The senses of the fathers perceived nothing in the material world that allowed them to understand the reality being talked about in Scripture. The message in Scripture created "faith fact" in the minds of the fathers and their followers, not "material fact."
But "faith facts" are not the only facts contained in the minds of Christians. The drawer in our mind reserved for "facts" also contains "facts" that are formed as we interact with the world around us. How are these facts formed? We use our senses and sense how things are formed. From these sensations pictures of reality are formed in our mind. At a certain point, we become certain these pictures are accurate reflections of reality and we place them in our "fact" drawer. These facts can be differentiated from the "faith facts" I described earlier because these "facts" are formed, not through the process of interacting with a message in a book, but are formed as our senses come into contact with the "thing itself".
Let me give you another example of how we might form a faith fact about a tree. Suppose we read about a tree in a book. And the book described a tree in such a way that a picture of the tree is formed in our mind. We can see that picture of the tree very clearly because our imagination has an amazing ability to transfer words into pictures in our mind. Now suppose we decided to believe that the picture in our mind actually is what the thing "tree" looks like. At that point, we will logically put our picture of the tree in our fact drawer. In this example, the tree in our faith drawer would be a "faith fact."
But take another example. What if we were walking outside and saw a tree, but had no word in our vocabulary to fit to that amazing thing we saw presenting itself to our senses? What is that!? we would exclaim. We would walk around the tree--oops, we don't know what to call it yet: we would walk around this amazing thing; we would put our hands upon it; we would sniff it; we would place our ear against it; we might even nibble on it. And, at a certain point in our investigation, an image of the thing would be formed in our mind. That image would immediately go into the fact drawer.
Now here's where things get strange: it is possible that the image we have just formed in the touchy-feely contact with the amazing thing we have encountered could go into the fact drawer and settle down in the drawer right alongside the image of the tree that had previously been deposited in the fact drawer and the person would have no idea that his drawer contained two different facts describing the same thing.
Nonsense, you say? Not at all, if the thing called tree in the book the person read was actually what we normally call a hippopotamus. If the book was actually describing a hippopotamus and calling the hippo a tree, when the "faith fact" about tree formed by reading the book went into the fact drawer, the image that defined what the tree was supposed to look like was actually the image of a hippopotamus.
So far, the person does not have a problem in his fact drawer. Since the person doesn't have a label for the amazing thing he discovered, the fact called tree that actually is the image of a hippo, can peacefully co-exist in the fact drawer. The problem occurs when our person encounters someone who tells our person that the thing he discovered, and felt, and smelled, and tasted, is called a tree. Blam! Then our person has a problem.
You mean that thing is called a tree! But the book said a tree has four legs, and little beady eyes, and a mouth big enough to swallow you whole. The book was wrong, the teacher says, everybody calls the thing you discovered a tree. What you are describing is a hippopotamus, the teacher concludes. Oh! our person says. You mean there really is something like the book described, the book just gave it the wrong name. Sure, our helpful teacher tells our person, just relabel the facts in your drawer and your problem is solved. This is just one example of how a person can get in trouble with faith facts. There are other examples much more relevant to our lives as Christians, but before I can explore those examples I must make sure you understand the point I am trying to make.
What is the point? Faith facts are real facts: they actually are held to be fact by the people who hold them. But faith facts are also very vulnerable facts. They are vulnerable because they exist only as pictures deposited in our fact drawer, pictures that can be easily dislodged by another type of fact--material fact.
Material fact is the product of the scientific method. Facts formed by the scientific method go into the fact drawer and go thunk when they hit bottom. They have substance to them because we know the exact location in space and time of the thing pictured by the image that is deposited in the fact drawer of our mind. Question my picture of a tree and I can take you to a tree and allow you to see it, feel it, hear it, taste it for yourself. You want to call it a hippopotamus? No problem. I'll humor you and call it a hippopotamus, even though I know most people call it a tree. I'll do this because I want to talk to you about the thing itself. Since we both see the tree, we can call it any thing we agree to call it. Our labels cease to be important to our conversation. We both are looking at the same thing in reality.
And there precisely is the power of material fact. Material fact is formed by interacting with things that anybody can see in the real world around us today. Material fact has the power to displace faith fact precisely because everybody can see the subject of material fact. When there is a contest between material fact and faith fact, faith fact always loses.
Faith fact always loses because reality is more than the pictures we hold in our mind, and material fact is, by definition, a picture of reality. Faith fact does not carry such a definition. Faith fact for an individual can be pure hallucination. We all know it is possible for an individual to believe as fact that which is found nowhere in reality except in the mind of that deluded individual. For this reason, all of us constantly strive to make sure our view of reality, our fact drawer, is filled with images directly connected with the actual world that exists around us. This world, this reality, is understood to include, not only the subjective view of reality contained in the mind of individuals, but also to contain the objective world itself. Only with both of those aspects of reality clearly in view are we actually in contact with the material world in which we live and move and have our being. This is the context within which material fact is formed. The Church has always tended to withdraw from this context and try to take the world with us. Earlier I explained the way the early Church Fathers handled the message in Scripture about the bread and wine. I return to this example because it is a good example of how the Church has historically explained reality. On the one hand, the Church Fathers explained the bread and wine as symbols of reality, but, on the other hand they held that the body and blood of Jesus Christ was actually present in the bread and wine. In so doing, the Fathers created a category of fact that is divorced from an understanding of the organization of aspects of reality--things--in the material world of space and time. The point is, the Church Fathers treated this different category of fact in precisely the same way they treat categories of fact that are formed through interaction with the material "things" found in the present world of space and time. The Church acted as if there is no fundamental difference between "faith fact" and "material fact." Scripture was used by the Church to disengage reason from the material world and the interpretation of events that occur in space and time discernible to all men, and instead reason was employed in constructing a subjective reality divorced from the material world of space and time--a "faith" world as opposed to a real or material or scientific world.
For centuries, the Church of Jesus Christ thrived in western civilization because the people on this planet had a very fragile relationship with the material world. The only way a coherent world view could be formed in anyone's mind was to depend on the images created by the words in the books. Today, though, we have entered a new age, an age where the world view that dominates the minds of people is no longer formed from books. The world view of people is being formed as people have access to the raw images of reality themselves, fed to them via the word as image, not as word. The reason the world is going to hell is because the Church has not learned to speak to people in this new age with a message that can actually lead anyone but children to Christ.
I know that is shocking. But I mean what I say. Please let me explain. This tendency to create a category of "fact" that is different in species from the categories of fact available to unbelievers, I believe, is the actual root of our difficulty in stopping the world from going to hell. By developing this different category and calling it "fact", we place the world in the position of having to accept our subjective interpretation of reality as their reality. To ask unbelievers to accept our subjective interpretation, "our faith facts," as their ground of being is to ask unbelievers to substitute the subjective interpretation of reality that presently guides them and replace their subjective interpretation of reality with our subjective interpretation of reality. In order for such a transfer to take place, the unbeliever must, like a child, totally lose confidence in their present subjective interpretation of reality, and in this state of absolute crisis, must see in our subjective interpretation of reality a ground of being that offers hope. Presently, the fruit of our evangelistic enterprise is composed primarily of such converts.
Study closely evangelism today and you will see a common strategy in all examples. We look for, and address, only those who have arrived at a point of crisis where their subjective interpretation of reality has proven itself to be impotent in achieving desirable results for the individual. Whether the subject be our own children who have allowed the ideas of the world to intrude on the "faith facts" taught by the church, or whether the subject be the children of the world, our method is the same: to this individual, we offer salvation in Christ Jesus.
But what does this salvation consist of? It consists of a world view composed of our "faith facts," our subjective interpretation of the message in Scripture. We consider ourselves to be "successful" in evangelism when the individual in crisis has substituted our subjective interpretation of reality for the subjective interpretation of reality previously held by the "unsaved" individual.
It is not my purpose to deride such evangelistic enterprises, nor would I suggest they are without merit. I am the product of such evangelistic enterprises. In fact, I could spend many pages outlining the exact process in my life that led me to the point of crisis in my own subjective interpretation of reality. And I could fill more pages with the blessings that came to me because there were Christians waiting to help me by allowing me to participate in their subjective interpretation of reality, an interpretation of reality that reinforced for me my union with Christ Jesus, and through such reinforcement gave me hope that sustained me and supported me and nurtured me as I grew in the body of Christ. God bless such evangelistic enterprises and anoint them with grace sufficient to reach all presently undergoing crisis in their subjective interpretation of reality, grace that will allow those people to receive the "faith facts" revealed in Scripture.
I have no argument with that evangelistic enterprise. But the world is going to hell today because the world is not in crisis. Paradoxically, the very scientific progress that has allowed mankind to reach the truly amazing plateau upon which we now stand has brought most people to a place where, for the first time in history, they can believe they actually understand reality without referring to the God revealed in Holy Scripture. I have an argument with the Church because we have not learned to effectively respond to the challenges presented to our evangelistic enterprise by the new age in which we live.
I am forced to bring this argument because I understand how we look to the world when our ground of being, our gospel, and our relationship with Jesus Christ, is founded only upon "faith facts." There are at least two dramatic and world-changing consequences: (1) we are empowered only to effect those whose subjective interpretation of reality has proven itself to be inadequate to provide hope in this world; (2) we have no meaningful "point of contact" (in the Van Tilian sense) with the new age in which we live. There is a meaningful point of contact available. But we have access to that point of contact only when we understand that our faith is based on a material fact.
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