This past week or so I have been thinking through what is for me one of the more difficult themes in the Johannine literature (the books that John wrote in our Bible, the Gospel of John, his letters, and the book of Revelation), that is, the relationship between obedience and faith. For example, in John 14, Jesus tells his disciples, "if you love me, you will do what I command," and in I John 1, John instructs the Church by writing that "this is how we know we are in him: whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did." That is, Christian faith means obedience.
In the past I have considered this relationship between obedience and faith by looking at obedience in many ways as the product of faith, that is, that through the work of the Holy Spirit, my faith produces obedience in me. Put another way: as a result of my faith--because I newly want to and because I am newly able--I begin to lead an obedient life. I am beginning to think, however, that although this description is helpful and true, that there is a deeper discussion to be had about the relationship between obedience and faith for the Christian. Put another way, that obedience is not merely the result or the product of faith.
What I don't mean is this: I do not think it is productive to imagine obedience as some sort of test of faith, that is, that our faith is proven true if a sufficient amount of obedience follows from it. It seems to me that the Scriptures are clear that the only truly obedient one is Jesus himself, and it is only on account of his obedience that we are saved, by our faith in him. This faith is not contingent upon some other further activity, but is, because of Christ, sufficient in itself. There are all manner of soteriological problems which arise if we begin to think about some sort of need for us to trust even a little bit in our own obedience as an addendum to faith. Obedience cannot be related to faith as a test.
What, then, is the most helpful way of understanding the relationship between faith and obedience?
For myself, I am beginning to look at obedience in many of the same ways that I look at the sacraments. What I mean is this: I think that the sacraments are given to us by God in part because he knows that our feelings of spiritual closeness to him are ultimately insufficient to support our Christian life over the long run. Some days I feel very close to God, and I know without question that I am in him and he in me; there are other days, however, when I feel very much more distant and I wonder whether what has happened in my spiritual life is even real or real enough or all of that. I believe that this is part of the reason that God has given us baptism as the sacrament of conversion; God, in knowing our weaknesses, knows that we are prone to self doubt. It is very easy for me to doubt whether I have really been converted, whether I truly, truly, believed when I first believed. God knows that in my dark places I can feel like that, and so he has given me my baptism, something which cannot be doubted as to whether or not it occurred. And he has guaranteed (and the Church has affirmed) that it is his work in baptism of applying Christ's atonement to me, not mine which is important. Baptism is a tangible something that God has given to us with regard to our salvation because he has pity on us and how fragile we can be with respect to the intangibles of life like conviction and feeling.
So too communion. Truth be told, it is pretty easy for me to get to a place where I don't particularly feel anything much at all, let alone be able to rouse within myself active feelings of spiritual closeness to God. There can of course be other factors which produce distance between ourselves and God, and if numbness is our native state as Christians it likely belies a deeper problem, but I am also convinced that there are a lot of really normal reasons for just feeling spiritually nothing. I believe that one of the reasons that God has given us communion is because he knows that the feelings just aren't there. He wants to say, if you can't feel your way to me right now, just take, eat, this is my body, broken for you. God has given us a tangible activity of community and of regularly renewing our relationship with him because in his merciful love he knows that in some seasons of life the intangibles feel so far away.
As far as I can see it, this is one of the very central ways that we understand the sacraments. They are God's gift to us of the tangible, in the midst of our very tangible existence, so that we are never left without something to look at and something to do when it seems hard to remember and hard to feel. God loves us enough to know that sometimes the unseen--even though it is the most real--feels very far away and maybe unreal, and in his great kindness he not only allows but mandates that we should celebrate our life together with other believers and in him in a tangible, physical way.
And that is, I am beginning to think, also the relationship between obedience and faith. I have heard plenty of times that faith is not a feeling, and assuredly it is not, but it is certainly among the intangible realities of our existence. As such, we question it, and wonder about its vitality and sufficiency, and all the sorts of things we do with all the intangibles in our life. So what am I supposed to do when I don't feel too particularly like I have faith, or enough or the right kind of faith? I am supposed to obey. In a certain sense, the obedience is the faith. The chance to obey is a gift from God so that we can do something that correlates to our faith. It's not that our faith needs something to be completed, far from it. It is that we need something, we need to do something. God says that all we require is faith, but knows, as the one who created us as physical beings , that we need a physical something to do to anchor our faith to our daily life in light of the fragility of our experience of intangibles; perhaps today I do not know or feel my own faith in a way that really satisfies me, but I can very tangibly choose to obey, as an act of that faith which I cannot see.
The faith is always that which is most real, but the obedience is the opportunity that is always provided by God so that I can act out my faith even when I don't feel particularly faith-ish. It is in this way that obedience is sacramental, it bears the character of a gift from God of tangible activity so that we can be reassured of his intangible activity in our lives, because true Christian living does not consist in continually just experiencing the mountaintops. And inasmuch as obedience is that which is given to us for the expression of our faith, so too do we find that it is not a thing that is foreign to our flourishing. God's commands to us are commands which make us better people, the kind of people we are meant to be. I think this is why we find many of God's commands echoed elsewhere in human philosophy, because they are demonstrably in step with human flourishing and to our becoming everything for which we were created.
Jesus said, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching." It is a difficult saying, but I think we come closer to understanding this sentence if we read it less as an imperative and more as the announcement of a gift, the gift of the opportunity to obey (indeed, John 14 is all about God's provision for us and about his love as gift). We do not obey as some sort of further requirement to prove the verity of our faith, nor do we merely emanate obedience as a result of already containing a certain measure of faith. And while it is of course certain that in one sense we obey our holy God simply as an act flowing from duty, but so too, for those seasons of life when it is difficult to feel or to understand or to evoke faith within ourselves, we find that God has provided for us by giving us the chance to do something tangible as a way of saying 'I believe': he has given us the chance to obey.
