a translucent faith

Some Christians are full of overwhelming confidence and certainty in the way they live and present the truth. It’s all about knowing the faith and sharing it with others. For them, the truth is an apparent and undeniable thing, shining brightly like sunlight through a clear window. Faith, for such individuals, is pretty much transparent. Though admitting a minimal amount of uncertainty, this type of person spends most of the time exclaiming and living by the rule that life is pretty much easy to decipher. As a result, he/she is somewhat dogmatic. Faith is transparently obvious.

Others take a different approach. Coming from a much more skeptical perspective, doubt and uncertainty are the fundamental principles of life. Truth, if it exists at all, is handled in a cautious and tentative fashion. Faith, then, is basically opaque, for even if one accepts the possibility of a universal Reality, His/its identity, character, and ways are somehow locked behind an impenetrable wall of reductionistic driven and pluralistic influenced obscurity. Some take this so far as to embody relativism, while others are not quite so radical in outlook. Therefore, dogmaticism is out of the question (except, of course, when it comes to the dogmatic [and contradictory] claims that there are no dogmatic claims . . . but that’s a subject for another day). Faith is opaquely hidden our sight.

But what if there were another way to approach these matters? Maybe, faith is neither completely clear nor absolutely out-of-reach. Perhaps, truth is sufficiently identifiable but also shrouded in mystery. Faith, in other words, might not be transparent or opaque. Instead, it might be translucent. Thus, we can know a lot of things, but there is much that evades our grasp. Likewise, even what we know is a knowing-in-part. Faith, therefore, is neither translucent nor opaque; it is neither completely clear nor absolutely beyond our grasp. Instead, it entails a combination of reasonable confidence and unavoidable enigma. Faith, in this sense, is translucent. Let’s here it for a translucent faith!