Page 7 - Core Beliefs For Intentional Community

therefore in his name the great commandment is given: “You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deut. 6: 5).

This is what ultimate concern means and from these words “ultimate concern” is
derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total
surrender to the subject of ultimate concern. The Old Testament is full of commands
which make the nature of this surrender concrete, and it is full of promises and
threats in relation to it. Here also are the promises of symbolic indefiniteness,

although they center around fulfillment of the national and individual life, and the
threat is the exclusion from such fulfillment through national extinction and individual
catastrophe. Faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately
and unconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand,

threat and promise.

Another example – almost a counter-example, yet nevertheless equally revealing – is the
ultimate concern with “success” and with social standing and economic power. It is the
god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every

ultimate concern must do: demand unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price
is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its
threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise – indefinite as all such promises –
the fulfillment of one’s being. …

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the
life of the believer, but it does not matter for formal definitions of faith… (From pp. 1–4)

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…In the act of faith that which is the source of this act is present beyond the cleavage
of subject and object. It is present as both and beyond both.

This character of faith gives an additional criterion for distinguishing true and false

ultimacy. The finite which claims infinity without having it (as, e.g., a nation or success)
is not able to transcend the subject-object scheme. It remains an object which the
believer looks at as a subject. He can approach it with ordinary knowledge and subject
it to ordinary handling. There are, of course, many degrees in the endless realm of
false ultimacies. The nation is nearer to true ultimacy than is success. Nationalistic

ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject is almost swallowed by the object. But
after a period the subject emerges again disappointed radically and totally, and by
looking at the nation in a skeptical and calculating way does injustice even to its
justified claims. The more idolatrous a faith the less it is able to overcome the
cleavage between subject and object. For that is the difference between true and

idolatrous faith. In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly
ultimate; while in idolatrous faith preliminary, finite realities are elevated to the rank
of ultimacy. The inescapable consequence of idolatrous faith is “existential

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