When Father Jonathan invited me to preach today, on this Feast of All Saints, your feast of title, I was of course honoured and delighted. However, I must confess that the invitation also caused me to question your rector's judgement just a wee bit. For, in addition to being a priest, I am also a PhD student. And it is always somewhat risky to ask a PhD student to speak in public-or at all, for that matter. Risky, because no matter what the occasion, the student's research topic is just bound to be mentioned. It's inevitable. Whether or not it is relevant, interesting, or even appropriate, it is just inevitably bound to be mentioned.
Fortunately for me-and I also trust fortunately for both Father Jonathan and for you-my research topic is the late Austin Farrer, 1904 to 1968; seventh Warden of Keble College, Oxford; an Anglo-Catholic philosopher, theologian, biblical scholar, and preacher; recently described by Archbishop Rowan Williams as 'possibly the greatest Anglican mind of the twentieth century.' And my reason for discussing Austin Farrer in this sermon for the Feast of All Saints is neither artificial nor exploitative, but perfectly natural and deeply appropriate, as I shall now demonstrate.
One of the many topics to which Austin Farrer fruitfully turned his brilliant mind was the complex and contested question of the rationality of religious belief. Professor Richard Dawkins is just the noisiest and most recent of a long line of detractors who have said to religious people in general and Christians in particular: You have no reason to believe what you believe. Your faith in God is irrational. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief without evidence is stupid and wrong. And not only is it stupid and wrong, it's evil. It's evil because belief without evidence leads to fanaticism, and fanaticism leads to atrocities such as suicide bombers and 9/11.
So, according to Richard Dawkins, what you and I are doing here today, listening to Scriptures and a sermon, saying prayers and receiving the sacrament, is stupid and wrong and evil-precisely because it's irrational, and irrational precisely because it involves belief without evidence. Despite the fact that we ourselves as good members of the Scottish Episcopal Church are gentle, tolerant, enlightened, and perhaps even liberal individuals, our collective irrationality creates a dangerous space in our society in which fanaticism and hence terrorism may flourish. Thus, Richard Dawkins. [i]
But the problem with Dawkins's critique of faith is that he starts by defining faith as belief without evidence. And that's just not true. Faith is not belief without evidence. Faith may go beyond the evidence. And faith may even sometimes go against the evidence. But faith never goes without evidence. Even faith-or, you might say, especially faith-requires evidence. Yes, faith requires evidence. So the real question-which Dawkins never even considers-is, What sort of evidence does faith require? What evidence have you and I encountered over the course of our lives that leads us to commit ourselves to God and Christ and the Church in faith, despite the cavils of the Professor Richard Dawkinses of this world? What is the evidence that establishes and supports our faith?
Austin Farrer spent a great deal of time thinking about this question, and his final answer was rather surprising. He first considered some of the more conventional answers, such as arguments for God's existence. But Farrer concluded pretty quickly that while such arguments may well be intellectually fascinating and satisfying for the professional philosopher to ponder, they are not why most people believe in God. Arguments can perhaps clear away objections to belief, but they can't provide the basis, the reason, the support for belief itself. For that, we must look elsewhere. Farrer also considered historical investigation into the development of the Bible and the origin of the Christian religion. But here, too, while Farrer thought such historical work was extremely important and had an essential role to play in supporting the life of faith, even this was not itself why most people believed. So then, why? Why believe? What is the evidence for faith?
Farrer's simple answer is that saints are the evidence for faith. And by 'saints' he didn't just mean the great saints of the Church such as St Peter and St Paul, or St Francis of Assisi or St Teresa of Avila. No, by 'saints' he meant precisely the saints for whom this particular church is named and whose feast we celebrate today-All Saints, all those followers of Christ from the beginning of the Church until now, known and unknown, famous and anonymous, great and not-so-great.
So when Farrer talks about saints he isn't primarily thinking of those ecclesiastical celebrities who get their own day in the liturgical calendar, have churches named after them individually, and are venerated by millions. But he was also not thinking of people completely unknown to us-saints in the distant past or the distant present. No, he meant specific individuals whom you and I have met and known personally, those rare and special people whose very lives convince us of the reality of God. And so, in one of his sermons, Farrer said:
indeed I knew a man whose name, though uncanonized, I shall always silently mention when I recall at the altar of God those saints whose fellowship gives reality to our prayers; a man who sacrificed in the prime of his age a life which he had never lived for himself; a man whose eyes sparkled with all the passions, pity, indignation, sorrow, love, delight, but never for himself; unless it is more proper to say, Yes, for himself; since he had made God's loves and God's concerns his own, and had no others you would greatly notice.
Farrer continued:
Such a life, then, is evidence; and what other evidence could you hope to find?....So the saint is our evidence, and other men, of course, for the glimpses of sanctity we find in them.
Now, by distinguishing what he calls 'the saint' from 'other men,' Farrer makes it clear that although he doesn't restrict the category of sainthood to the great saints of the Church, he also doesn't think that such sainthood is too terribly common either. As he puts it, 'the evidence of faith is incorrigibly aristocratic.' While sainthood is not so rare that we are unlikely to ever meet a saint or two in our lives, it's also not so prevalent that we bump into such people all the time. They are few and far between. But they exist, and in existing they provide the necessary evidence that what we believe is true. [ii]
It's also important to see that when Farrer says that 'the saint is our evidence,' he means it in both a descriptive and a prescriptive sense. Descriptive, in that it's just the case that, psychologically and biographically, this is in fact why most of us believe what we believe. And just think about that for a moment. Ask yourself why you believe, why you have the faith you do, and see if there is not a human name or face to whom you trace your trust in God, someone whose life has convinced you of the reality of God. An American philosopher named Peter van Inwagen, who gave the Gifford Lectures here in St Andrews several years ago, once wrote:
There are five or six Christians I know who, for all the rich individuality of their lives and personalities, are like lamps, each shining with the same, dearly familiar, uncreated light that shines in the pages of the New Testament....When one is in the presence of this light-when one so much as listens to one of these people speak-it is very difficult indeed to believe that one is not in the presence of a living reality that transcends their individual lives. [iii]
And this is the living reality we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints-that God makes himself known to us through the lives of fellow Christians. I believe we all know such people, and today especially we should give thanks for them, bless them, and pray for them.
But when Farrer says 'the saint is our evidence,' I think he also means this prescriptively, in that it's actually right and proper to consider such holy lives as evidence for our faith. It's not intellectually slip-shod or careless or second-rate or unacceptable. The saint is our evidence, says Farrer, and without such evidence of holy lives, our faith is groundless. It doesn't matter how good the arguments or historical evidence for Christianity may be: if we have never seen or encountered a single life transformed by the grace and love of God, then the whole thing's a waste of time.
Now, for many sincere and intelligent people, this is a very unsatisfactory answer. Imagine, for instance, telling Richard Dawkins that saints are the evidence for the truth of our faith. He would just laugh. And many devout Christians would also think we need something more universal, objective, verifiable, and-well-rational as evidence for our faith. Human lives, however impressive and grace-filled, are still contingent and fallible. Arguments seem more solid and permanent. So why should the primary evidence for faith be lives, and not arguments?
In a lovely little book titled Tokens of Trust, Archbishop Rowan Williams considers this very question. He makes the point we heard earlier from Farrer: most people don't believe in God because of philosophical arguments. Rather, says Archbishop Rowan, 'Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we'd like to live in.'
Archbishop Rowan then mentions a young Dutch Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum who died exactly sixty-five years ago, in Auschwitz, in November 1943 at the young age of 29. And from pondering her diaries and letters, Archbishop Rowan derives a truly remarkable thought: namely, that human lives are required to provide the evidence for God. And that's true in two senses. Human lives are required to provide the evidence for God, in the sense that only human lives can provide this evidence. And human lives are required to provide the evidence for God, in the sense that is it an obligation to which we are all called. In other words, it's not an accident that this is the case; it's somehow necessary. Lives are better than arguments. We may well wish it were otherwise. Thus, as Archbishop Rowan says:
It puts quite a responsibility on believing people, of course. It would be much nicer for all of us if we could just rely on arguments, not on the uncertainties of human lives. But nevertheless the remarkable fact remains. Some do take responsibility for making God credible in the world. [iv]
Yes, it would be much nicer if there was an argument or two that we could just lob from a safe distance at the Richard Dawkinses of the world; an argument or two that would do the work of making God credible, of providing evidence for God, for us; an argument or two that would get us off the hook of trying to be the sort of people whose very lives provided that evidence. It would be much nicer if we didn't have to incarnate in our own lives the reality of what we believe-when it's hard enough just to believe it. But that's not the way it works. As Archbishop Rowan says, 'Some do take responsibility for making God credible in the world.'
'Some do'-that is, the saints. And thank God for the saints. But what about all saints? By which I mean both 'what about all of us here this morning' and 'what about this congregation called All Saints'? What about us? Are we also responsible, both individually and collectively, for making God credible in the world?
Well, let's start small. The congregation of All Saints, St Andrews, both individually and collectively, is certainly responsible for making God credible in St Andrews. That is our call, our vocation, our raison d'tre, why we exist. We don't exist just for ourselves, for the spiritual benefit of our own members. No, we exist to make the reality of God known to this particular community. And we do this, not through being smarter than Richard Dawkins-although, truth be known, I dare say we are-but through lives of obedient service and joyful worship and faithful witness and generous giving. The rulebook of sainthood is the list of Beatitudes we heard announced in the Gospel reading [Matthew 5.1-12]. If we live out the Beatitudes, then we will truly be blessed, and the community of St Andrews should find it increasingly difficult to not believe in God, precisely because of the evidence we provide.
In short, yes, we are called to join that great company of blessed saints whom we celebrate today, for whom we are named, whose very lives provide evidence that the God we worship is the living God:
Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. [1 John 3.2-3]
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!' And all the angels stood round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying, 'Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.' [Revelation 9-12]
Notes
[i] I refer, of course, to Dawkins's lamentable best-seller, The God Delusion, revised and updated paperback edition (London: Transworld Publishers / Black Swan, 2007). For his statements that faith is irrational belief without evidence, that it inevitably leads to violence and terrorism, and hence that 'moderate' religion is equally baneful as 'extremist' religion, see pages 232 and 345-347.
[ii] All Farrer quotations from his sermon 'Narrow and Broad,' originally published in 1960 in his book Said or Sung, now reprinted in Ann Loades and Robert MacSwain (eds.), The Truth-Seeking Heart: Austin Farrer and His Writings (Canterbury Press, 2006), page 187.
[iii] Peter van Inwagen, 'Quam Dilecta,' in Thomas V. Morris (ed.), God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason (Oxford University Press, 1994), pages 57-58.
[iv] Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Canterbury Press, 2007), quotations from pages 21 and 22.
Sermon by: Robert MacSwain