Martin Marty on Speaking of Faith

Yesterday, I listened to Krista Tippett's podcast interview with Martin Marty entitled America's Changing Religious Landscape. The podcast, published November 2, 2006, and a written guide to the interview (entitled "Particulars") is available at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/marty/index.shtml. It's well worth the time to listen at least once, and probably much more than once. The interview covers a lot of ground about contemporary American religious practices.

Although I've heard Marty's name many times (he's a Lutheran, a teacher, a modern-day religious thinker), I've never read anything he's written, nor have I heard him speak before this time. Now I know why I've heard his name so many times during the course of my Lutheran life. He's thoughtful and thought-provoking. A general theme throughout his career centers around religious pluralism in our society. Pluralism is a hot topic and one that dances around in my head, but that's not the subject of my thoughts today.

What brings me back to that podcast today is not only Marty's candid statements of his own faith and the state of contemporary religious life, but a quote from a talk he gave during a series of lectures at the Clinton White House, from a book by Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

This struck a chord with me. In our hopelessness, we find hope, faith, love, and forgiveness. This describes to me the ultimate humility - the fact that we can do nothing, that we cannot do it our way, that instant gratification is not a reality we can depend on.

Is this one of the ways God steps into our lives and says "I AM"? Is this one of the ways he gets our attention, by making the realization known to us that, by ourselves, we are hopeless?

Take this in the same thought as the story of the rich young man in Matthew 19:16-26 and its key verse, Matthew 19:26, and remember it:

NIV: With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

NLT: Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.

See also http://sroesner.blogspot.com/2005/09/puddleglums-testimony.html for a C. S. Lewis response to hope being born out of hopelessness.

Be it so for me to remember.