Reconsidering Mr. Tan's Faith

A few months ago, I wrote about the concept of faith that Amy Tan acquired from her parents, saying that both concepts of her mother and father assume that God’s will is to grant our wishes. Her mother was Chinese, who heavily believed in the Chinese concept of luck. Her father was a minister who wrote this as his definition of faith in his own journal:

Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.

I said that what Mr. Tan meant by “something we want” is exactly that, something we want, our own self-centered desires. But after reading this article about George Müller, I started to think that maybe I’ve misunderstood what Mr. Tan really meant, as I was reading him only through Amy’s interpretation. Perhaps I’ve harshly scrutinized what he said based on strict semantics-- an elitist error that merely intellectualizes, instead of seeking to understand or be understood-- when I should’ve looked first at the context. And here was the context:

His son was dying of a brain tumor, and Mr. Tan wanted him to get well. It was the content of his every prayer. Probably because of the Mark 11:24 promise, “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” he did believe that what he prayed for God was going to grant.

Did he believe that whatever was absolute? I wouldn’t know, there is not enough data to say so. I don’t even actually know the exact context of that definition that Amy quoted. For all we know, that might just be a paraphrase of Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

What Amy says, though, is that two months after he wrote it, his son died, and then shortly after, he stopped writing, but not out of lack of faith, rather as the unfortunate symptom of a brain tumor. So for all we know, he might have believed as Müller did:

The last portion of scripture which I read to my precious wife was this: “The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly” [Psalm 84:11]. . . . I said to myself, with regard to the latter part, “no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly” — I am in myself a poor, worthless sinner, but I have been saved by the blood of Christ; and I do not live in sin, I walk uprightly before God. Therefore, if it is really good for me, my darling wife will be raised up again; sick as she is. God will restore her again. But if she is not restored again, then it would not be a good thing for me. And so my heart was at rest. I was satisfied with God. And all this springs, as I have often said before, from taking God at his word, believing what he says. (Narrative, Vol. 2, 745)

And so, I’m sorry, Mr. Tan, if I was quick to make you an example of mistaken faith. I might have been mistaken. Only God knows now. May you rest in peace.