It's Christian Union week next week and the faculty is filled with undergraduates in bright blue hoodies with 'Truth' emblazoned across the front and a line up off implausibly ambitious talks on the back. It's reminiscent of a tour hoodie for a rock band but without the flavour of dark and dingy suburban gigs.
In the student newspaper this week is a letter by the President of the CU in response to an article run last week about a genetic tendency to religious faith. He argues that religious faith is simply one form of the faith that everyone has - in relatives, friends, and so on. It is not some sort of speculative, general philosophical thought or 'worldview'. Specifically, he writes, Christians put faith into Jesus Christ, a specific person like mum, dad or Bob.
This might make Christianity sound like a pretty enormous leap into the dark - who would put their entire repository of religious faith in an individual they, nor anyone they knew, had never met and whose person is unknowable - but he does make an important distinction between religion as <<I think there's something else out there>> and as <<here are the people and creeds I trust in>>
Religious faith can be stimulated by trust in many more people and things than God - in other religious people, in institutions, in books, in prayers, in liturgy, in art, in music, in architecture, in experiences, in religious history, even in the natural world. Faith in one particular divine person can be a culmination of faith in every part of our experience, things that show God in a way that is far more accessible than one messianic figure.
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