The Coin Email

At first when I started this blog entry, I was going to rant and rave about the idiocy of an email forward I got and how things like this were giving Christians a bad name. But God had different plans...

I think there are different types of faith. Not different levels, but different types. And God uses all of them to edify each other. They go along with the Spiritual Gifts, I think. But also, at different times in our lives we experience different types of faith. I want to talk about one of them, and maybe later I'll fill in the others.

This is what we might call "Blind Faith"
-Far from being a bad thing, this type of faith is probably best exhibited by new Christians though it occurs in other places as well. The motto for Blind Faith is "All I know is that..." Fill in the blank. They don't know much about the faith, or the basic doctrines, or the many ins and outs of Christianity, but God has done a miraculous work, and they feel they owe Him their allegiance.

These are often the people who forward those "If you love Jesus you'll send this to all your friends" emails. They act on their emotion for Christ, and sometimes they stumble, sometimes they fall, but they get back up and keep going because Jesus did something for them, and now they're going to do something for him.

Granted, we 'old' Christians often get annoyed by their tactics. Once, when I was attending a church of mostly "senior saints", as we called them, a new Christian started coming and shaking things up. A bunch of the elders were talking about her and one man, a pastor in his eighties, said, "Don't worry. Give her a few years; she'll calm down." As if her excitement for Christ was a bad thing! She had been pushing the church out of its rut, and all the older members could think about was getting things back to they way they'd always been.

Blind Faith is dynamic faith at its purest. But the danger can be ignorance. "I've already made up my mind," a friend of mine used to joke. "Don't confuse me with the facts."

An example of this is a forward that I got yesterday. It concerned the new Presidential Dollar Coin and encouraged Christians to refuse to accept the coin because "In God We Trust" was missing. The email also stated, "We have enough problems in our country without this too." So, setting aside my ideological differences with the text of the email, the first thing I did was look this up to verify it. Apparently none of the people who had forwarded it before had bothered to check the veracity of the statement. Indeed, as I thought, "In God We Trust" was printed on the coin, but on the edge. I immediately emailed a bunch of my friends clarifying this and encouraging them to check whether a fact like that is true before they send it into cyberspace.

One of my friends emailed me back. The text of his statement follows:

I for one still won’t except the coin. It looks to me like they are trying to fade it out by taking it off the front of the coin. One can hardly read the side of the coin and since when has there been writing on the side of any coin. That is how I see it. Choose for yourselves. In God I trust.

I didn't bother to point out to my friend that the Brits have been printing on the edges of their coins for years or to explain any of my disagreements with his statements.

I was impressed with his faith. I wish I could sometimes be like him.

Blind Faith has a very idealistic view of the world. Blind Faith wants all things to be restored to perfection under Christ, and doesn't care that this won't/can't happen in this world. Blind Faith is the faith of Apollos, who preached Jesus even though he didn't know much. Blind Faith says, "Lord, if it's you, call me so I can walk on water too," and doesn't care that walking on water is impossible.

And that's an admirable trait.