When the world got big enough for humanity to realize the sun didn’t rise on everyone at the same time, I wonder how many religions died?

I know it didn’t happen overnight, but there must’ve been worldviews unable to sustain the revelation that “days” were conventions relative to global positions. Subjectively, sunrise and sunset seem so universal; to make the day into a foundational marker for rituals and observances and holy seasons would’ve seemed self-evident. But by the time days no longer had any intrinsic, absolute and universal significance, I can only imagine how many of the old beliefs the sun had already set on. 

When the shadow of what we couldn’t have known is replaced by the light of what can clearly be seen, a living faith has no choice but to rescue what has been at its heart all along and carry it into the light. When revelations uncover unforeseen realities, action must happen quickly. Time is short; after the campfire has been blown out, the central coals have to be distinguished from the firebrands on the fringe if the heart of the fire is going to be rekindled successfully in another location. 

Christianity has survived the discovery of the heliocentric solar system and the expanding universe, so I’m not considering here anything like…impending reckonings with aliens or the self-conscious personhood of AI. 

I’m more concerned with how a faith dies when a prayer isn’t answered. 

nescience (n) · a lack of knowledge

Many prayers of supplication (i.e. prayers asking for things) are based on ignorance. I don’t mean anything derogatory by that; many times, requests are made of God simply because the asker doesn’t know what is, what will be, or what could be different. (“Nescience,” by the way, would be the better, less pejorative word for the state of simply not knowing something.)

Consider the example of a prayer following a doctor’s visit: “Lord, don’t let it be cancer.” The patient knows that the results of the tests ordered by the doctor are going to show whether cancer is present or not. Further, the patient knows that this also means they either already have cancer or do not, in fact, have the disease. When praying, “Lord, don’t let it be cancer,” it is the patient’s inability to know their current condition that sustains that particular request. If the results do, devastatingly, show the disease to be present, then the prayer likely changes to: “Please heal my body; take away my cancer.” 

It’s worth noting how this prayer changes with the passage of time and with the corresponding passage of “unknown” into “known.” If the patient refused to acknowledge the reality revealed to them by doctors out of the former darkness of their unawareness, then they would essentially be asking God to falsify the findings in front of them, or else to time-travel on behalf of their prayers: “God, let what they think is cancer, not be cancer;” or, “God, don’t let this have been cancer.” Few, I think, would consciously pray the latter, expecting the Almighty to re-write history on their behalf. Many of us do pray one form or other of the former, desiring our current circumstances to realign with the future we had believed for in the past.

Seeing Is And Yet Believing

It’s good to let our prayers continually reflect our desires, but is there a point where we have to ask what our faith is really in? If I don’t like what I see when the sun comes up, can I just go on insisting that “it must still be night, because this isn’t what ‘day’ is supposed to look like”?

It seems that this kind of faith during prayer could eventually find me huddled around darkened coals, desperately trying to convince myself that the fire has not really gone out. Would I not have done better to find warmth in another source, to have salvaged an ember from the heart of what I once believed and incorporated that into my circumstances as they now are?

And yet, what is faith if not a reach across a seemingly impossible divide? In the practical human experience, faith in God is predicated upon nescience; the contents of our inculpable unawareness will always become for us the domain of God. The divine realm harbors all that which we do not or cannot yet know. 

In the shadowy reaches of our experiences’ uncertainty, randomness, or extreme complexity, God will be invoked as a matrix of meaning. We’re not wrong to appeal to the Almighty in such cases. I believe a biblical understanding of God is an understanding that places him at the headwaters of all of our unknowns.

The tension here seems to be fundamental to faith itself: believe in what you can’t see; know that what you believe transforms what you do see. Trust that there is a reality beyond what you know; trust that that reality has the power, at any time, to change everything about what you think you know. 

Faith, in the Christian sense, is one shining facet of the diamond of our love for God, and, as all things are with love, it is worth our entire commitment. An entirely committed faith, then, is one which applies the tenets of this tension absolutely. Faith insists on maintaining the paradoxical stance that “the things I don’t know or can’t know always belong to a loving God. The things I do know/think I know can be rewritten by his love at any time.” My perception of a situation is never so infallible that a fresh revelation from him couldn’t cast it in a wholly different light of understanding.

If someone camps their faith in the territory of only what they think they know, building a delicate flame from only the kindling available there, the warmth will be gone when the fuel of the abilities of their conscience understanding either runs out, or else is doused by the downpour of new circumstances. 

If, however, you know that camp is wherever the fire is, your whole approach to surviving the night has changed. Warmth does not depend on how much fuel the fire looks like it has at any moment. Warmth is knowing that the coals at the bed of the fire can always spring to life, even after they look and feel like they’ve gone out.

When we can’t understand why the prayer wasn’t answered like we hoped or expected, this kind of faith knows that it doesn’t know how it’s all part of God’s love—but that it nevertheless still is. 

When what we see only gives us reasons to doubt and regret and despair, this kind of faith knows that, in a moment, Love could show us how in the end it will all be worthy of our tears of joy. 

Faith isn’t strong because it’s about what we know; faith is invincible because it’s about Who we trust. A Christian faith that trusts Who it believes in is a faith that shines when the sun rises.