We typically think of proverbs as sources of guidance about how to live. However, the kind of guidance you can get from a proverb is tricky, since different proverbs appear to give conflicting advice.
There’s the admonition to “Look before you leap,” but we are also told, “He who hesitates is lost.” There’s a proverb that suggests, “Better safe than sorry,” but another one urges, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” We are instructed, “Don’t cross that bridge until you come to it,” but we also hear, “Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.”
In many cases you could follow the instruction of one of these proverbs only by doing what another proverb warns against.
David Holley
Once we notice that proverbs can give us conflicting advice, we might conclude that they are pretty worthless as sources of guidance. However, such a conclusion is too hasty. While it is simplistic to imagine that having a store of traditional proverbs is enough to tell a person precisely what to do in each situation, proverbs might help in a different way. They might serve as reminders of common mistakes to avoid. Such reminders can be useful, but it takes judgment to decide how relevant or important a reminder is in a particular case. Proverbs cannot take the place of good judgment.
Good judgment often requires you to be alert to more than one kind of danger. For example, you might see what you are doing in terms of not letting others take advantage of you, but if you are attending only to that danger, you may not let your guard down enough to build strong friendships. Or you might pride yourself on disciplined work habits that keep you focused on the task at hand but fail to notice that your habits sometimes block more creative ways of performing an assignment. In these instances, excessive concern with one kind of danger actually increases the risk of an outcome that may be just as undesirable.
My concern is with two opposite dangers that arise for someone who embarks on a life of Christian faith. One is the danger of losing your faith by ceasing to affirm some essential Christian teachings. The other is the danger of holding so tightly to what you have affirmed that there is no room for welcoming new understandings and rethinking your faith in the light of greater knowledge or fuller experience.
Both dangers are real, but it is easy to treat one as all-important while not paying enough attention to the other. You can think the vital thing is to hold tightly to your beliefs and fail to recognize the need to develop a more mature or a more defensible faith. Or you might think a willingness to adjust your beliefs in light of new insights is the paramount concern and change your mind too easily when your faith affirmations are challenged or when they don’t fit well with the spirit of the age.
“Trying to make sure your beliefs don’t change typically results in a faith that can’t be examined too closely.”
Trying to make sure your beliefs don’t change typically results in a faith that can’t be examined too closely. To keep your beliefs from changing, you have to guard against ideas that might undermine your ways of thinking. Doing so likely involves refusing to think about views that don’t fit well with what you have affirmed or distorting those views into a caricature that you don’t have to take seriously.
What you have to sacrifice is the ability to reflect honestly. You might imagine that this kind of approach will keep your faith secure, but a faith with unalterable beliefs is actually very susceptible to collapse. Maintaining your beliefs by closing your eyes to what you don’t want to recognize generally produces an internal tension that can be difficult to sustain. It is sometimes with considerable relief that someone who has been trying to hold together a very inflexible faith gives up the project altogether.
On the other hand, the opposite extreme of being too ready to adjust the content of faith tends to result in a faith that is too thin. Sometimes people don’t want to give up calling themselves Christians, but they water down Christianity to an extent that it becomes virtually indistinguishable from what non-Christians could accept. They continue using Christian language but empty it of the kind of theological substance that makes a Christian understanding distinctive.
Usually, some alternative to the Christian message becomes a substitute for what is left behind. For example, Christianity is identified with a particular political agenda, or it is made into a vehicle for affirming the clichés of popular self-help books. When this sort of shift occurs, it is not always noticed. It is possible to lose any genuinely Christian faith without even realizing it has happened.
“The ideal is to steer a course between these extremes, striving for a faith that is neither too rigid nor too thin.”
The ideal is to steer a course between these extremes, striving for a faith that is neither too rigid nor too thin. But what would it mean to recognize both of these dangers? Can you really be tenacious about holding onto your faith affirmations, but also open to changing your mind when you need to?
The short answer is, “Of course, you can.” However, doing so calls for recognizing when to be tenacious and when to let go of what is blocking you from a more resilient and better-informed faith. Judgment of this kind is often not easy, and there is no foolproof way I know of to avoid mistakes.
You can be tenacious when you should have been more flexible, and you can be receptive to change when you should have stood firm. On the other hand, sometimes you can be fairly confident in the judgment that a particular affirmation needs to be maintained or that a particular faith claim needs to be rethought, and even when it is not entirely obvious which way to go, it is often clear when you should err on the side of being tenacious or err on the side of being open to change.
David M. Holley taught philosophy for 40 years at universities in Kansas, Arizona and Mississippi. His books include Meaning and Mystery: What It Means to Believe in God, and he has published numerous articles in professional journals on topics in philosophy of religion and ethics. He is currently retired and lives in Texas with his wife, Joyce. They are members of Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas. This content is excerpted from his new book, Changing Your Mind Without Losing Your Faith and is used here by permission of the author.
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