| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
This is how the Apostles' Creed became an obstacle to Christianity for me. However, one thing has become clear about the Christian faith. It is that the Christian faith is not simply a belief in heavenly doctrines or moral teachings. It is that this faith includes a historical understanding of certain events surrounding Jesus, and on top of that, like other religions, it has heavenly doctrines and moral teachings.
At present, it is unclear why historical awareness is attached to faith.
If Jesus Christ as written in the Bible was not who he was written to be, the foundation of this faith would be lost, and those who followed Jesus' teachings would be back to square one. That is what it means when we say that faith rests on facts.
Until then, I had thought that faith was not based on any such "facts", whether earthly or heavenly, but simply about adhering to a certain creed that one judges to have universal values.
Otherwise, this is because even if the "fact" is something invisible and has not yet arrived, a belief based on it would seem to be unable to escape the motivation that it is ultimately profitable to believe it. Isn't that just utilitarianism and happinessism, and not worthy of the name of faith?
I feel that virtue, which is maintained because one is convinced that things one cannot see are true, is worse than the obvious profit-seeking of prosperity for business, because the motive is hidden. Jesus is said to have spoken to the crowd as follows.
The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, "What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops." Then he said, "This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, 'You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'" But God said to him, "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (LUKE12:16-21 NIV)
Here it is utilitarian that God does not call the rich man "You evil" but "You fool." He was not accused of being greedy, but of miscalculating. Is this the right way to criticize to him? Is the aim here to teach that faith should expand the scope of calculation of things to the heavenly world, thereby raising people's ethical standards while leaving their selfish motives intact?
However, this is probably the same idea as the Japanese religion mentioned in the previous section, which states, "If you don't want to get cancer, don't get angry." I wonder where lofty teachings such as the "Sermon on the Mount" have gone, but when I think back, Christianity is a religion that preaches judgment at the end of the world, as is already clear in the Apostles' Creed. Perhaps it is only natural, then, to take the heavenly world into account.
This "fact-based teaching" is also different from "experience-based morality". For example, there is nothing wrong with someone who grew up in poverty using their experience as motivation to do charity work or volunteer. Nor should it be denied that a person who believes that any occupation seen in the town should not be despised maintains that mindset by remembering that his own father was also engaged in such a job. This method of acquiring morality is easy for many people to put into practice.
However, a moral view based on this "so was I" is incomplete as a moral view because it cannot deny the immorality of people who were not in that environment. The 13th century St. Francis is said to have renounced his noble status to live with the poor, and Jesus, although he was God himself, renounced it and died on the cross. (Phil.2:6)
In these cases, a higher morality is recognized than the empathy and sympathy that arises from seeing oneself and others as the same or similar. A morality based on one's own experience is nothing more than a morality, accepted by those of us who are not saints, and far from ideal.
However, what the "Parable of the Rich Fool" teaches is not even such a kind of morality that based on one's own experience. Rather, it encourages people to discern what is truly in their best interest and to live accordingly.
I felt that maybe it was time to give up on Christianity as well. But before doing so, I considered to confront my own conception of morality with Christian ethics. Is it wise and right to live a calculating life while at the same time submitting to what one sees as fact, as in Christianity, or should one still aspire to just live up to our ideals?