I got married to Amanda. We were hitched in August. Being married has been very little of what I thought it would be, but it's wonderful.
I graduated earlier this month. B.A. in psychology, which means I spent a butt-ton of money and 6 and a half years of my life on a worthless piece of paper unless I go to Grad school.
I'm a Youth minister, and it's awesome. I have concluded that I am in ministry because I don't have a strong enough faith to be a layman in the church with a "secular job." I just need to be forced to grow, and ministry does that for reals.
What am I doing right now? Reading a psychology book. Lame, nerdy, but I am enjoying it. It's called "stages of faith," and builds on Piaget's and Kohlberg's work on developmental Psychology. The author, James W. Fowler, actually was a college of Kohlberg's, whose work on moral development I've studied in 3 or 4 different psychology classes. So far, it has succeeded in challenging how I even define the word "faith."
The book is the result of empirical studies done in a similar style to Kohlberg's interviews. The operant definitions he takes from past teachers and thinkers, and those definitions are strikingly different from what I operate under currently.
In this study, Faith =/= Religion =/= Belief. Weird.
These definitions he draws from all say that Faith is basically what we focus our lives on. Religion is a collection of "cumulative traditions" that expressed the faith of people in the past. Belief is the "holding of certain ideas," and this is a way that Faith can express itself.
So, take for example, Paul.
Paul's faith was in the Gospel, "power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." (Romans 1:16, NLT) Everything about Paul's life after meeting Christ was focused on spreading the Gospel, being a living example of the Gospel, studying the implications of the Gospel, and defending the Gospel.
His religion was a collection of traditions established by Christ and the Early Church (communion), as well as some much older traditions from the Hebrews (intimate knowledge of the Torah).
He had beliefs that were expressions of his faith. His faith in the Gospel was expressed in the belief that Jesus Christ is who he said he is, the Messiah, the Son of God. He experienced something transcendent, became very loyal to that transcendent something, and developed concepts and propositions about it. Those concepts and propositions are "beliefs."
How does this change my notion of Faith, Religion, and Belief? Well, it makes my definition of the last two a LOT less ambiguous, but I'm just not sure what to think about their definition of Faith. Faith, as I define it now, is "the assured knowledge that what we hope is going to happen will, in fact, happen." That is a very different definition from "What we focus our lives on."
More to come as I read on.
