The ongoing disintegration of Christian externals has prompted some to experience what could be called a crisis of faith. At the core of this crisis sits the glaring and palpable discord between internal and external sources of faith.
After all, how is one supposed to nurture an internal faith in Christianity when virtually all Christian externals continue to decay, dissolve, disintegrate and degenerate? How are Christians to maintain their internal faith when virtually all the people and places representing Christianity’s external faith are corrosive and corrupt? Of what use is one’s internal faith if the outside world does not mirror it? Can such internal faith — barely supported or utterly unsupported by exterior factors — even be considered valid?
Christians have grown accustomed to the idea that externals like politics, society, and nations must reflect and align with their internal faith. Or, more accurately, that their internal faith must reflect and align with externals like churches, liturgies, politics, society, and nation.
I say accustomed because the alignment of internal and external Christian faith was certainly the case historically, which has led many to conclude that the breakdown between interiorized and exteriorized faith heralds the inevitable end of Christianity as we know it.
Although this sounds terminal, it does not exclude the possibility of Christianity continuing and developing further in other forms, and I believe this is where Christianity is now. Conventional, exteriorized Christianity may indeed be ending, but a heightened, interiorized Christianity capable of a new religious consciousness may emerge.
However, it can only emerge when Christians overcome the crisis of the external and begin to have faith in their inner faith. In a faith that is noncontigent on externals.
After all, how is one supposed to nurture an internal faith in Christianity when virtually all Christian externals continue to decay, dissolve, disintegrate and degenerate? How are Christians to maintain their internal faith when virtually all the people and places representing Christianity’s external faith are corrosive and corrupt? Of what use is one’s internal faith if the outside world does not mirror it? Can such internal faith — barely supported or utterly unsupported by exterior factors — even be considered valid?
Christians have grown accustomed to the idea that externals like politics, society, and nations must reflect and align with their internal faith. Or, more accurately, that their internal faith must reflect and align with externals like churches, liturgies, politics, society, and nation.
I say accustomed because the alignment of internal and external Christian faith was certainly the case historically, which has led many to conclude that the breakdown between interiorized and exteriorized faith heralds the inevitable end of Christianity as we know it.
Although this sounds terminal, it does not exclude the possibility of Christianity continuing and developing further in other forms, and I believe this is where Christianity is now. Conventional, exteriorized Christianity may indeed be ending, but a heightened, interiorized Christianity capable of a new religious consciousness may emerge.
However, it can only emerge when Christians overcome the crisis of the external and begin to have faith in their inner faith. In a faith that is noncontigent on externals.
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