Luther felt that there was no longer any true religion to be found amidst the decadence of the Catholic Church; he proclaimed that in his view, religion had no need of the structures of the Catholic Church that came between man and God. However, his faith was not founded on thin air: he founded it on the Bible, which he took to be the glorious revelation of God. No doubt he perceived the reality of the Bible’s existence, its accessibility to man’s mind and aspiration, as enough of a self-evident revelation that it didn’t need defense and therefore was a solid enough basis for his faith.
But his critique of the Church opened the doorway for further critiques. In protesting that the Church was an unnecessary structure getting in the way of man’s relationship with God, he prefigured the argument that the Bible itself could be seen as an unnecessary structure, either because man’s relationship to God needed no textual prop, or because there was no God for man to relate to. When modern biblical scholarship showed that the Bible was made up of a collection of texts authored by humans within the literary conventions of their time and put together deliberately for a spiritual-political purpose of establishing a canon, some lost faith in the idea of the Bible as self-evident revelation. And if their faith was based on the Bible, they then either lost faith altogether, becoming atheists or agnostics, or otherwise found a faith that did not rely on either the Church or the Bible, which meant that it bore little resemblance to Christianity as it had been understood.
Having long since integrated the perception that the Bible is not self-evidently the direct revelation of God, the modern mind sees no need for faith at all. The watchword of the modern mind is science, and the meaning of science is direct observation rather than taking things on faith, that is to say, without direct experience of them. This attitude affects spirituality as well. Where spirituality is still practiced in the modern era—as opposed to completely discounted by a materialist worldview—it is taken for granted that the experiential method is necessary. According to this line of thinking, the difference between the modern spiritual search and the premodern spiritual search is that the modern spiritual search has no need of dogma (which faith is conflated with) and proceeds by experience alone.
One problem with this attitude is apparent to anyone who has tried to walk the path of experiential spirituality. The issue is that the experiences on which the modernist seeker tries to base his spiritual conclusions—the great experiences of oneness with God, peace, enlightenment—often take decades of experience to establish. The method of founding one’s spiritual convictions on direct experience is hardly as simple as, say, going to another country to gain “experience” of it. One can argue that this long incubation period is not unlike the incubation period needed to gestate a scientist during their apprenticeship; empirical scientific knowledge is accessible to everyone, but still requires 5 or 10 or 15 years before its secrets make themselves known. But the scientist doesn’t need “faith” to keep going because of the hegemony of scientific knowledge; there is no serious doubt about the scientific illumination, and the person who falters along the way does so because of psychological exhaustion and not a lack of belief in scientific knowledge.
The spiritual seeker, on the other hand, still needs something to keep them going during the long process of the spiritual search, where affirmation and encouragement are in short supply and experiences can be meager; hence the continued utility of faith, even in this modern age. Faith doesn’t have to be without evidence: it just needs to be rooted in the highest intuition or conception that one has access to. Luther genuinely perceived the Bible as a revelation, and this gave him the faith that he needed for his own spiritual path. But if we no longer have faith in the Bible, if it no longer seems like a self-evident revelation to us, that doesn’t mean we have to give up on faith altogether; it just means that we may need a source of faith besides the Bible. This can come from within us or from outside; it may be founded in another book, an idea, the community of seekers, or an intuitive knowledge or feeling that we hang onto in times of doubt.
The faith that we find is the faith that we are on the right path; that God or the Spirit is real; that one is continuing to be guided. Faith provides the encouragement, consolation, and comfort that one needs to continue down an arduous and difficult path.
Doubt is a fundamental movement of the modern mind, and its critiques can go farther than critiques of institutions and books; critique and doubt can go to the very root of rationality and self-experience altogether. In the face of critique and doubt about our perceptions, the nature of our world, and our spiritual path, we may even find that faith is more fundamental than knowledge itself.
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