death as individuals, but on top of that most indications are that all human life, along with our planet, the solar system, and even the universe, will eventually come to a dead end. Does this spell the end of human evolution or of existence itself? Thus in terms of the human desire for self-transcendence the question is: Is there anything, or anyone beside ourselves, on which we can place our hopes? Or to put it another way: How can there be self-transcendence without there being a transcendent meaning beyond that which we make up in our own minds?
This is the issue that ultimately confronts all questions about meaning and our hopes for fulfillment. Is there an “ultimate” or lasting meaning to our existence — or to all existence? The only answer to that question, according to Frankl, is to be found in “faith” which is “trust in ultimate meaning” — which I take to be another way of saying that God exists.
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Questions for Reflection and Discussion
1. Think of an example where “faith” of some sort made all the difference in achieving some goal. Can you recount something similar that has happened in your own life or in the life of someone you know?
2. What do you think of Frankl’s criticism of the search for happiness? Can you think of examples where “the pursuit of happiness” didn’t work, especially from your own life?
3. What would be your idea of “meaning” in your own life? How would this fulfillment differ from mere “pleasure”? Would fulfillment be the same as “self-actualization” — yes or no? If not, how?
4. In what way are faith and “ultimate meaning” bound up with each other? Need such a faith be “religious”?
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Chapter 2: The Meaning of Faith
“Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. . . If it lays claim to ultimacy it demands total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment.” ( Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith)
Those brought up with a more traditional Christian outlook on faith may have been surprised a bit by Frankl’s description of faith as “trust in ultimate meaning,” just as many may feel somewhat uneasy with theologian Paul Tillich’s interpretation of faith as “ultimate concern.” This uneasiness is understandable. No doubt any faith worth consideration will begin with such concern, but hadn’t there ought to be much more to it than that? Doesn’t Frankl’s “trust” even imply more? I agree. But before we can really delve into the matter further, we have to arrive at some common understanding or working definition of the word “faith.”
For example, in a recent Gallup poll, taken at the request of the Religious Education Association of the United States and Canada (see The Gallup Organization, Inc., The Development of the Adult Life Cycle, Module 1), some 1,042 people were asked, among other things, to choose between four different “definitions” of faith. A full fifty-one percent of those who answered felt that “a relationship with God” best described what they meant by faith. Twenty percent thought of faith as “finding a meaning in life.” Another nineteen percent understood faith to mean “a set of beliefs,” but only four percent associated faith as necessarily involving “membership in a church or synagogue.” (Of the remainder, five percent had no answer to the question and a slim one percent declared that faith was not meaningful as far as they were concerned.)
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Given these various ideas about what faith means to people today, it seems only logical to try to trace the reason ‘or such a wide variety of opinions. To do this, I’m going to turn briefly to the work of a modern Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles, S.J.
Models of Faith
In his essay, “The Changing Forms of Faith” (see A. Dulles, The Survival of Dogma, pp. 17-31) Dulles gives us what amounts to seven variations in the understanding of he word faith down through history.
(1) ‘Emunah in the Hebrew scriptural sense denotes that we generally think of as faithfulness or “loyalty” or “steadfastness” today. This faith, however, has to be understood primarily in the context of God’s faithfulness to his covenant or promises to his chosen people-thus their fidelity to God in return.
(2) Pistis in the New Testament, in view of its background in the Hebrew scriptures, includes this same idea of God’s faithfulness to his promises and our faithfulness in return. But now this faithfulness has a new focus, and particularly in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) the term pistis or “faith” means a loving trust in God’s power working through Jesus. There is, however, a further development in a doctrinal direction in the various other New Testament writings, particularly the later Pauline ‘pastoral” epistles.
(3) Early Christian faith emphasized the enlightenment of humanity that was made possible through the revelation in Christ. In a sense, this early Christian understanding of faith was a continuation and expansion of the idea of faith already found in the gospel of John where Jesus is depicted as the “truth” and the “light of the world.” This emphasis on “enlightenment” was highlighted by the then common reference to baptism as “illumination” and could be best
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understood in St. Anselm’s famous phrase “I believe so that I may understand.”
(4) Medieval faith continued the early Christian tradition, but with an increased emphasis on the body of doctrine or so-called “deposit of faith” that did not so much enlighten or expand the possibilities of human knowledge, but entirely surpasses it. Yet paradoxically, the scholastic theologians also subjected this doctrine to the scrutiny of human logic to a degree unheard of before and scarcely rivaled since. It was almost as if they were trying to turn Augustine’s saying upside down or inside out and make every belief fully explainable by human reason.
(5) Reformation (Protestant) faith represents a strong reaction to the excesses of the later medieval scholars. The reformers, especially Luther, stressed faith as being primarily a complete trust in the saving grace earned by Christ on the cross. For this, Luther relied primarily on St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (as well as the epistle to the Galatians) where Paul reacts strongly against the Pharisees’ notion of faith as mostly a matter of a painstaking keeping of the ancient law. To various degrees, all the reformation churches adopted Luther’s motto of “Scripture alone, Faith alone, Grace alone.”
(6) The Catholic counter-reformation stressed faith as the adherence to the “deposit of faith” (as understood by medieval theology) but with the old emphasis on understanding replaced by a new emphasis on acceptance of the church’s teaching authority (not just that of the Bible alone), along with the performance of good works (against reliance on “grace alone”). This same approach was stressed again, but with renewed emphasis on the “reasonableness” of faith, at the First Vatican Council in 1870 to combat the rise of the modern sciences and the growing “modernist” ideas that faith is an irrational human “sentiment” or expression of a “religious impulse.” But the earlier counter-reform emphasis
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on authority expressed at the Council of Trent still comes out on top even in the Vatican I statement used as the model of our old catechism definition:
Faith is that supernatural
