If you live in the UK you will no doubt be aware that our Government and Revenue and Customs office have made a sizeable blunder... If not then read this from the BBC News! The records of 25 million (including ours) lost after being downloaded onto CDs and posted to another department... the list of ways that this is rank incompetence is endless and I don't want to go over them here... read the Beebs report and the following comments! And all over the land people are crying out that they do NOT TRUST the Government! A Government that spends so much of it's time talking about reducing our civil liberties because of the need increased "security", does not have it's own house in order! etc. etc. Anyway aside from the implications for further data-base centralisation including the proposed ID card scheme this whole sorry saga got me thinking about how we use and understand words like Trust and Faith... as is often the case on this blog, the following is me thinking aloud!
Trust - having complete confidence, being able to rely on something or someone, being secure. Dependance.
Faith - a feeling or belief, that something is true, real, or will happen. Mental acceptance of and confidence in a claim as truth without proof supporting the claim.
One could say "I had Faith in the Governments ability to handle our security correctly and now I have no Trust at all in Government"... in that my Trust (or lack of it) is the result of my Faith being proved to be correct. The difficulty of this particular example is that we generally use the word Faith to mean a positive belief, the negative being an absence of Faith... I guess this is where we might, in a religious context, draw the distinction between agnosticism and atheism... in that an agnostic has no Faith that there is a God whereas an atheist has Faith that there is NO God.
I wonder whether we, the Church, have become careless with our use of language... we often talk to people in crisis about needing to Trust in God, but when you think about it we are asking people in the midst of trauma to have "complete confidence" in God, instead of encouraging them to have Faith... not an easy thing to do either, but perhaps we might find of way of speaking the language of hope, expectation and mental acceptance.. as opposed to trying to convince people to Trust, to feel able to depend upon a future outcome?
We often hear talk of having A Faith meaning a belief/religious system, but I find this unhelpful, because what we really mean is adoption of a belief system or Trust in God as expounded by a belief system, perhaps even simply Trust in the belief system? Faith to me speaks more about hope as Hebrews 11 verse 1 says...
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
I guess one could say we
Trust because of evidence, we have
Faith despite a lack of evidence...
Trust is forensic,
Faith is relational! If I aim to make people
Trust in God, then I get caught up in trying to hide the crap in my life... I mustn't create any doubt or question in the mind of that person... if they see I haven't got it all sorted and got everything working for me, then why should they
Trust in God? I did hear what I hope is an apocryphal story of a Pastor of a large Church in the North of England saying that he had to own the best Car in the city, otherwise why would anyone choose to believe in God who doesn't give his followers the best there is? This is close to the ultimate expression of seeking to get people to have
Trust, and it is almost guaranteed to turn round and punch the leader between the eyes... when for example he or a member of his family gets sick or has a personal tragedy!
Trust I would say comes from a personal life of
Faith,
Faith is about taking risks... "leaps of
Faith" to use the well worn cliché... and
Faith is not static it grows and it faces challenges and it has the capacity to overcome them and grow through it...
Trust it seems to me is more fragile, one challenge can see it collapse as the evidence on which it is based crumbles... for example how many times today have I heard people say that the implications of this catastrophic collapse of Government security means that this particular Government is a dead duck, it can never be trusted again?!
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