Apostasy at Breakfast and the Irrevocability of Faith.

It is seven thirty in the morning. The community has just celebrated mass at six forty five. Some of us have been up since five thirty getting everything ready for the liturgy! So most of the students here are knackered and haven’t really woken up, some are non-communicative; others too communicative and/or jolly and others have very short fuses and say what they really think.

One student, M, asked if I had seen a video on Youtube, an interview with a catholic priest from the UK who had converted to Islam (I hadn’t). I could tell M wasn’t convinced by the priest’s story and was of the opinion that he had converted simply because the Muslims he had come into contact with were nice people. Obviously this is not a reason to convert and probably not the sole reason for his conversion. I then noticed another student, J, getting a little agitated and I asked what the matter was. He said;

“How can that guy become an apostate when as a priest he had all of the means of salvation at his finger tips?”

“Yeah he may be wrong,” (althoughI am not sure he was) I said, “but is it a sin if in all conscience you feel this is the truth and the best way of life for you?”

“Well you wouldn’t throw yourself onto a train track and say don’t worry I’ll be ok, or think that was a good decision.”

At this point in the conversation I could tell that J thought this priest was taking an extreme risk and possibly facing an eternity of damnation if he did not convert back to Catholicism. (I say the word possibly because Catholic teaching does state that only God knows the full content of people’s minds, there is the possibility to achieve salvation through grace if not in communion with the Catholic Church.)

There is nothing wrong with the way J replied to my question (although a tad extreme) as he was genuinely concerned about this ex-priest’s welfare and from his perspective, that of a seminarian in his final two years of formation and rightly so.

At this point we get philosophical.

There is a view contained within philosophy – relativism – which holds that all views about everything that has ever been, is, and will be are relative and there is no objective reality or truth (save from the view that everything is relative which is a bit of a contradiction). If this is the case then the ex-priest is perfectly justified in converting to Islam and there will be no consequences, but this is not the way it is with faith and religion. Many believers hold their faith to be irrevocable, which can be seen to be dangerous in for society, but fortunately in the majority of cases not so.

Anthony Kenny a retired philosopher from Oxford and ex-priest defines faith as something more than mere belief in God. He says;

“…it is an assent to a purported revelation of God, communicated through a sacred text or a religions community. It is faith in a creed, not mere belief in God…”

This makes a great deal of sense to me because it is just as rational to believe in a divine architect of the universe as it is to believe in no God, however, faith asks us to do more than that it asks us to believe in a set of dogmatic and doctrinal truths. Which in turn lead to religious disagreements and resulting in the worst case scenario violence.

Coming from this point of view it is obvious that any believer like J would automatically think that direct revelation received from God would trump anything science or philosophy can provide and would unequivocally hold this as objective truth. The problem here is not the belief based on faith as such, because the vast majority of people find that their faith helps rather than hinders them in leading good and fulfilling lives. The problem is to what degree do you commit to your faith and its revelation? Is faith only good if it is a positive influence on us and others? Surely yes! Any belief can be quite reasonable if held with the correct degree of caution and respect for alternatives.

It is becoming more and more apparent to me from both my studies and the people I have met during my time as a student, a teacher and now in Rome the more we try to ascribe characteristics to God the more confused we become. We operate inevitably with human intelligence and human minds. We use words such as ‘believe’, ‘think’ and ‘know’ to give God attributes and qualities, which we say can only be known through direct revelation. It is hardly surprising then, given this fact that we have as many religions as we do because who would not want to claim to have the full truth at their fingertips. We use our language to ascribe qualities to a being that exists outside of time and space, a being complex enough to create the entire universe. The problem is not that we cannot and do not know what goes on in the mind of God, the problem is that we cannot really ascribe a mind to God at all. As humans we can surely only operate within the parameters our bodies and minds will allow and when we try to speak of a being so different and other from ourselves these parameters come to pieces.