knew<\/em>\u00a0to be true.<\/p>\nOf course, they\u2019re not alone on the island of denial.<\/p>\n
Despite overwhelming evidence and hard science, countless people\u00a0still deny that Oswald killed Kennedy or that NASA landed on the moon or that climate change is real.<\/p>\n
From the ridiculous (the earth is flat) to the horrendous (the holocaust never happened), the world is filled with folks who, for whatever reason, simply refuse to accept the truth.<\/p>\n
And that includes the church.<\/p>\n
Sadly, the church is\u00a0filled with deniers of all stripes.<\/p>\n
From the rejection of evolution to the embrace of biblical inerrancy, we seem to be\u00a0convinced that denying history, science, and the obvious is some sort of spiritual gift.<\/p>\n
It is not<\/em>.<\/p>\nOf course, some will claim that faith itself is simply denial (particularly faith in God), but I think there are critical differences between the two that all of us, but especially those of us in the church, would do well to remember.<\/p>\n
For example.<\/p>\n
Faith embraces the reality of the world even as it casts its gaze beyond to something deeper, while denial rejects the provable as it attempts to cast\u00a0willful ignorance as some sort of noble virtue in the face of persecution.<\/em><\/p>\nBut there is no virtue in denial.<\/p>\n
Nothing noble about choosing naivet\u00e9 over expertise.<\/p>\n
Nothing holy about denying the obvious in the name of faith.<\/p>\n
You see, the irony here is that faith isn\u2019t blind.<\/p>\n
But denial is.<\/p>\n
Faith accepts the expertise of others,\u00a0while trying to make sense of what they reveal\u00a0in light of what lies beyond the here and now. Denial is enslaved to its own arrogance and willfully blinds itself to the truth, intentionally rejecting anything and everything that doesn\u2019t conform to its already predetermined conclusions.<\/p>\n
Which leads us to another important difference between faith and denial.<\/p>\n
Faith makes room for doubt, but denial does not.<\/em><\/p>\nIn fact, denial goes out of its way to shame those who lack surety or, worse, those who\u00a0disagree.<\/p>\n
Armed with the confidence that it already knows the truth, denial has no tolerance for doubt and no ability to admit even the possibility of being wrong. No amount of scientific evidence, historical discovery, or scholarly insight will ever make a difference to those who have chosen denial in pursuit of blind ideology.<\/p>\n
Which leads us to our final fundamental difference between faith and denial.<\/p>\n
Faith begins and ends at a place of humility, while denial begins and ends at a place of arrogance, assuming it already has every answer to every\u00a0possible question that can ever be asked.<\/em><\/p>\nA strong faith can admit, not only that it doesn\u2019t know everything, but that it can actually be wrong from time to time. It certainly possesses\u00a0confidence in the things it believes, but\u00a0it\u00a0lacks the sort of arrogant stubbornness of denial that refuses to change even when the Spirit moves\u00a0and opens our eyes to new truths about the world we live in and the people in it.<\/p>\n
Humility gives faith the\u00a0flexibility it needs to imagine a new and better world for all.<\/p>\n
Without that humility, the rigidity of denial only ever wrecks the world\u00a0and the lives of those living in it.<\/p>\n
Which is why when we live in denial about things like the reality\u00a0of evolution, the truth\u00a0that gay folks don\u2019t choose to be gay, or the fact that the Bible isn\u2019t perfect, we do no favors for the church.<\/p>\n
In fact, we stand in the way of the gospel.<\/p>\n
When we live in denial of reality, we\u2019re not standing boldly like a city on a hill proclaiming the truth to all.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re standing like a fool on an island\u00a0flipping the bird to the rest of the world.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(H\/T Diogo Martins, Flickr Creative Commons) \u00a0 I remember watching\u00a0the\u00a0first plane hit those Towers not so long ago. \u201cIt had to be an accident,\u201d I thought to myself. But then another plane hit another Tower and I knew it had to be something worse, something far more nefarious. As I watched the towers burn and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3437,"featured_media":13021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"faith\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/941\/2014\/10\/faith.jpg\")
(H\/T Diogo Martins, Flickr Creative Commons<\/em><\/a>)