…theology, an enterprise that, despite the oftentimes homicidal urgency Christians attach to it, has yet to save anybody. What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that […] I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus. It is simply saying yes to him rather than no. It is, at its root, a mere “uh-huh” to him personally. It does not necessarily involve any particular theological structure or formulation; it does not entail any particular degree of emotional fervor; and above all, it does not depend on any specific repertoire of good works–physical, mental, or moral. It’s just “Yes, Jesus,” till we die–just letting the power of his resurrection do, in our deaths, what it has already done in his. — Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, pp. 24-25.
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
13 responses to “Thought for the day”
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“faith is something that […] I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus”
Thanks for the post, Thinking Reed, and may I state here that I am a fan of your blog.
I can’t say, however, that I like this way of thinking about faith. The clue, I think, as to its difficulty lies in the phrase I quote here. Why won’t Mr. Capon ‘let faith mean’ anything other than ‘trusting Jesus’? And what does ‘trusting Jesus’ entail? Trusting him in a way Mr. Capon thinks appropriate? There’s a lot more unpacking to do here, I think…and we need to know why it is that Mr. Capon is so determined to fend away any other way of thinking about ‘faith’.
We’re dealing, when we discuss faith, for my money, with a difficult beast indeed. Both in terms of the kinds of propositional beliefs and the nature of the cognitive content which might be understood to lie behind sound Christian faith, I think there’s a lot more to say than simply affirming ‘trust in Jesus’. This, to be sure, may turn out to be an element in faith – so far as we have certain ideas clear in our minds about who Jesus was/is and what ‘trusting’ him in practice entails. But it merely, as far as I’m concerned at any rate, meagrely scratches the surface of a much deeper set of issues which Capon seems ‘resolutely’ opposed to considering. This, for me, is to his detriment.
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Otherwise, keep up the good work and thanks!
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I had a thought similar to G. For most of us Jesus isn’t a person with a clear identity, so when we “trust Jesus” it really means trusting an description of him provided by some other source … maybe even theologians!
Unless, perhaps, Capon is taking a high view of the Spirit here, and saying that if you just open yourself to Jesus regardless of whether you know who he is, the Spirit will go to work in you?
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Capon’s point, as I undestand it, is simply that theology–as in crafting correct propositional beliefs about God and/or the life of faith–is a distinctly second-order activity. And that having all your theological ducks in a row is by no means a necessary prerequisite for having faith (otherwise, faith would be another work!). Your theological beliefs can be quite a mess and/or inarticulate, but you can still have faith (the thief on the cross is a good example). Presumably even the most inarticulate faith has some cognitive content–although reflecting on the lives of, say, mentally handicapped people might help put even this in perspective.
Which doesn’t mean, of course, that theology is unimportant or not worth doing.
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I understand what you’re suggesting, Lee, but hasn’t the first move already been made, whether we like it or not? For Capon *has* made a ‘theological’ claim when he writes as he does about faith. And it’s a claim which needs to be substantiated. He can’t, I think, break the circle so simply – the suggestion that ‘theology’ is a ‘second order’ activity, somehow to be ‘removed’ from faith is, for me problematic.
For ‘right theology’ is nothing short of ‘right faith’, is it not? And did not Jesus come to preach ‘right theology’ as much as he did to inspire ‘right faith’? And are not the too inseparable?
Now, as for the remark about ‘having all your theological ducks in a row’, I quite agree in a sense that messy and inarticulate believers can still have ‘right faith’. But they can still too have ‘right theology’ so far as I’m concerned, insofar, that is, as they can truly apprehend the Gospel through the guidance of the holy spirit.
Some cognitive awareness of this theology/spirit is certainly necessary. But is it necessary too to believe in propositional terms specific items/claims? I’m not so sure. And my reason is that I’m not so sure that this is how our hearts, in their very depths, work.
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I think one problem I keep running into with these sola fide claims is that they always seem to be shrouded in metaphor and abstraction. When Capon writes of “saying ‘uh-huh’ to him personally” what does that really mean? Despite the common evangelical language about having a personal relationship with Jesus, it is not personal in the usual sense of the word. It is not personal even in the sense of the thief on the cross, in that he spoke with a person in front of him who clearly spoke back. Some people have that kind of experience of God, but most people don’t. So what sort of action is saying uh-huh to Jesus, really? Ditto with “letting the power of his resurrection do, in our deaths, what it has already done in his.” What does that actually mean? It seems to me you can’t answer these questions without getting into theology, which is why my alarm bells go off when somebody tries to “rise above” such concrete concerns with feel-good vagueness.
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G – I think we’re pretty close to being on the same page here.
Camassia – I think for Capon saying “uh-huh” to Jesus means simply believing his promises. The thief on the cross is actually an excellent example: he says to Jesus “remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” and Jesus says “today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Obviously, for us, those promises are mediated by the church. Paradigmatic examples include the pronouncement of the forgiveness of our sins in baptism, the confession/absolution, and the promise of forgiveness and new life in the Eucharist.
I take it that Capon’s statement that “theology …has yet to save anybody. What saves us is Jesus” is unimpeachable, though, isn’t it? Does anyone want to claim that having correct theological beliefs is what saves us? I agree that believing in Jesus will certainly entail and involve theological beliefs; I don’t think Capon’s denying that. But it’s Jesus who does the saving, not our beliefs about him.
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OK, but … sorry to be a pest here, but believing Jesus’ promises isn’t really that simple, is it? Behind that belief lie beliefs about who he is. When the thief said, “remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” he is expressing an already-formed concept about Jesus having a kingdom and what that kingdom is like (presumably based on Jewish theology about the Messiah). The other thief who mocks him presumably doesn’t have those beliefs and acts accordingly, so he gets attacked by birds.
This is why the question of who does the saving gets so snarled for me. It’s like if I fell into a canyon and you came along and dropped down a rope for me to climb. My beliefs would affect whether I actually grabbed the rope — whether I believe I can trust you, whether I believe the rope will hold, whether I believe I can get out myself, whether I believe you’re actually real or a mirage created by my trauma. So if I in fact grabbed the rope and all turned out well I would certainly say, “Lee saved me!” But I also wouldn’t demote my beliefs to a “second-order activity,” the implication being they were somehow less important, because they determined whether or not I actually got out of the canyon. So as to whether theology ever saved anybody … not by itself of course, because theology does no good if there’s no theos involved. But if it actually makes the difference between being saved and being damned, it amounts to the same thing.
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Good points. (Though, I assure you, I am not a mirage!)
I think one question worth considering is whether being saved by Jesus is like having someone throw me a rope at the bottom of a canyon or if it’s more like laying at the bottom of the canyon with broken arms and legs and having someone climb down and carry us out on his back…
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True, but that way lies universalism!
Seriously, if you think anything separates the saved from the damned, it’s going to be critically important. The rope analogy is based on how the separation is usually explained to me (and the only real alternative is hard predestination, as far as I can tell).
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What Capon would say–and I’m not sure how far I want to go with him on this–is that we need to get away from “transactional” understandings of salvation. That is, the idea that, in order to “get saved,” I have to do something or have something zapped into me (by, e.g. “making a decision for Christ” in evangelical-speak, or being baptized, or whatever).
Rather, he says, we should think of the salvation accomplished once and for all time (indeed, since the beginning of time–the “lamb slain from the foundation of the world”), and see these things – the incarnation, the sacraments – as visible signs of that one mystery of salvation–that God has already done all that’s necessary. What Jesus does isn’t to make available a previously unavailable salvation, but to act as a sacrament of God’s presence and activity that was there all along.
As he says elsewhere:
“Jesus’ words and deeds are not the actions of some agent who does a number on a world that hasn’t had the benefit of his activity before. They are the actions of a God incarnate who has been around since before the foundation of the world and who now sacramentally reveals what he’s been up to since square one.”
Now, like I said, I’m not sure I’m willing to go all the way with Capon here, but I think it’s an interesting way of thinking about it.
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It is an interesting idea, though it seems to be stretching beyond recognition the standard English meanings of both “save” and “accomplish.” To say that I was “saved” definitely implies a temporal sequence where “I once was lost, but now I’m found,” so to speak. (Unless you mean it in the sense of saving money, but that seems like sophistry.) Also, according to Capon’s Wikipedia entry at least, he believes we can reject salvation, which makes it difficult for me to simultaneously believe that salvation is already accomplished. To get back to my analogy, if I refused to take your rope, you wouldn’t go around claiming you’d saved me — only that you’d tried to.
Is he going for an Eastern Orthodox thing where God gathers in everybody but some don’t like it? Or some Theosophist thing where we already have everything we seek, we just have to become enlightened enough to realize it?
(And can you tell I’m having a slow day at work?)
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Another good point – do we want to avoid “transactionalism” at the cost of rendering Jesus’ person and work merely a revelation of what was already the case, rather than efficacious in its own right?
Regarding the rejection of salvation – I think that’s a problem Lutherans have too (and Capon, despite being an Episcopalian, is pretty Lutheran in his theology). The whole attempt to skate around Calvinist-style double predestination by saying that we can reject salvation has always struck me as fishy.
(And you’re not the only one having a slow day/couple of days at work!)
A Thinking Reed 
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