Valson Thampu

Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish author and spiritual thinker, cites in his famous work, The Tragic Sense of Life, the instance of a doctor in Paris.

When that doctor found that a quack was drawing away his clientele, he left the city and settled down far away and began to work as a quack. In due course, he was arrested. When put on trial, he said: “I am indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as a doctor I should not have had as large a clientele as I have as a quack-healer. Now that my clients know that I am an authentic doctor, they will desert me in favour of some quack who will assure them that he cures them by inspiration.”
I cannot help thinking that this beleaguered Paris doctor derived his wisdom from Jesus Christ, so to speak! Jesus was wise enough to know that false prophets would arise and displace true prophets. Think of the hundreds of cases coming to light of believers being taken for a ride by Christian god-men –the religious counterparts of quacks in medicine. Families ruined. Thousands cheated of their wealth. Many trapped in cobwebs of cults. Faith-healers rake in crores. There is no disease they cannot heal; except that when they are taken ill, they go overseas for treatment. What finances their medical extravaganza is the money extracted from gullible believers, who cannot distinguish, as the book of Jonah puts it, ‘their left hand from their right’.
The latest and hottest fad is that astronomical sums will land in your bank accounts, if you invoke the prayer-power of a young fry of patented religious fraudulence. If Christians had a mustard seed of common sense, wouldn’t they ask: ‘If this fellow has the power to pray so much money into our accounts why doesn’t he do the same for himself and stop putting his hand into our pockets?’ But no one asks. Why?
The problem with faith is that it is horribly vulnerable to misrepresentation and abuse. In popular imagination faith is magical. Magic works out of a voluntary and irrational submission of the self to a person, who is believed to have supernatural powers. Those who go to a magician, have ‘faith’ in him. Here ‘faith’ means, for all practical purposes, submission to a fellow human being. Unless you do implicitly as the expert in magical spells prescribes, the trick won’t work. Notice that here human beings are required to submit themselves unthinkingly to a fellow human being. This is the working principle of magic.
Notice also that the moral or spiritual substance of the one who approaches the expert in the magical lore is irrelevant. The transaction takes place between the pocket of the client and the pretension of the magician.
Biblically, faith is faith in a Personal God. According to St John, only those who receive Jesus and believe in him –notice the double emphasis- become children of God (Jn.1:11-12). When this core element in faith is substituted with anything else, it makes the people vulnerable to religious deceptions of diverse kinds. Religious wolves pursue their predatory trade because Christian believers trust them implicitly. Regrettably, ‘faith’ begins to aid and abet religious fraudulence.
It is dishonest to blame this entirely on Christian god-men and god-women. The blame must be placed squarely on the faulty Christian nature imparted to believers. We are a strange category! We are believers, but without knowing what it means to have faith or who to have faith in. Knowing who to believe necessarily includes knowing who to distrust. Trusting shepherds and wolves equally proves stupidity, not faith. The function of faith is not to make us blind and gullible, but to open the eyes of our discernment, which can pierce through facades of deception.
Christian god-men and god-women invoke the name of Jesus, but they know that the ‘miracle-formula’ is independent of faith in him. Here’s how that formula works. The miracle-seeker –say a man or woman suffering from a serious illness- is concerned only with getting relief from her affliction.
Now consider Abraham as the father of faith. Was his faith manifested as signs and wonders? The miraculous provision of the lamb of sacrifice, to be offered in place of Isaac, you may argue, is a miracle. Yes. But it was not sought by Abraham. Also, there was no miraculous substitute for the most agonising Journey of journeys Abraham had to undertake: the journey to the top of Mount Moriah. If God provided the lamb of sacrifice atop Moriah, it was because Abraham obeyed God all the way from Ur in Mesopotamia to the top of Moriah. Neither we, nor the god-men and god-women we trust, have anything to do with faith as a discipline of this kind. Our faith is little more than faith in short-cuts. God is, for most people, the shorted cut of all. The problem, however, is that all short-cuts lead to corruption.
“But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the Cross.” wrote Miguel De Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life.