Recently, I began a dialogue with a distinguished professional colleague around issues related to the integration of religious faith and psychotherapy. Here are excerpts concerning the role of faith in knowing:

Alvin Plantinga has written on the concept of “warrant” in which he asserts various reasons to consider something knowledge as opposed to merely true belief. That posits a different consideration from Plato’s assertion that knowledge is true belief, thus, to know anything one must also believe it exists or is true. One of the key statements in the Bible is that in order to please God (i.e., enjoy a relationship with God), one must believe that He exists and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” This is Plato’s relationship between knowledge and belief; in order to know God experientially, one must believe that He exists. Along with being a scriptural proposition, we might call this classic epistemology.

In practice, in life, I think there is a point at which a person knows that something is so. It is true, in the sense that it exists, operates in a particular way, it happened, etc. It accords with the facts and is justified by our contexts of life. We may come to such conclusions by exploration of material evidence (empiricism) or by deduction of thought (rationalism). I know that if I leave my laptop running on battery without recharging it, within a few hours I will not be able to use it. I know that spitting in someone’s face will make that person upset. I know the sun will come up tomorrow morning.

In addition, we all work within degrees of probability concerning such things - things we have not yet experienced — and we relate them to our contexts of life to see if they are warranted. Even revelation, which some might accept as a priori, must be interpreted and cohere within our various systems of meaning, which are systems constructed a posteriori. We also compare things we do not know with things we do know; things we have not experienced or cannot experience directly with things we have or can. As we grow up, we learn of object constancy - mom and dad won’t cease to exist if I cannot see them. Further, as we mature, we learn to work with analogies: we reason about this by comparing it to that (thus, we reason about social fields by comparing them to physical fields). We develop a capacity for perceiving and accepting dimensions of our world that we cannot perceive or measure empirically. We might say these “facts” are true because we can deduce them logically or figure them out mathematically, but we have not experienced them directly.

In the face of this, is sacred faith significantly different in quality from mundane faith? I don’t believe so. Paul Tillich claimed faith could be defined as “... the state of being ultimately concerned.” (Dynamics of Faith, p. 1) However, that only begs the question. His definition hangs there like an unresolved note - ultimately concerned with WHAT? Thus, to me, faith is faith and what distinguishes sacred from mundane faith is the context in which it emerges, the catalyst stimulating faith, and the objects it takes in the process (i.e., believing whom or what FOR what).

In his book, Faithful Change, James Fowler uses the child developmental perspectives of Daniel Stern (The Interpersonal World of the Infan> ... and The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Li$>) and compares them with the developmental structures of Erickson and Piaget to indicate how the capacity to believe develops, and in the process shows how faith can take very mundane objects. One of the more interesting features of Fowler’s use of Stern is when he points out that the parental attunement, in which the child realises that the parent is reading the child and responding in rhythm, pattern, resonance, and synchronicity, is a training ground for the appreciation of the experience of contact with another. That sense of the between is an immaterial reality - an experience of the self to which one can attest with analogy or subjective testimony, but is difficult to measure. One must at some point believe it exists.

Thus, when it comes to contact with a Being Who is immaterial in essence to begin with, the encounter can be experienced, but it cannot be measured nor captured for third party investigation. It can only be described and asserted by those who experience it, all of which, of course, is interpreted according to the means by which a person comes to “know” such things. Thus, for one person encounter with God does not fit with the rest of his or her belief system, but for another it’s reality.