Some years ago, when my husband and I were members of a little independent Bible church in the countryside, a famous revivalist came to preach. He gave what I later learned was his most well-known sermon: a come-to-Jesus bidding drawn from the parable of the wheat and the tares found in Matthew 13:24–30. In the parable, Jesus tells of a farmer who allows good seed that has been mixed with bad to be sown and to grow together until the harvest. When that time comes, the wheat grown from the good seed is gathered in the barn, but the tares grown from the bad seed are bundled up and burned.

The preacher’s sermon spurred some, fearing that they were really tares and not wheat, to the altar at the sermon’s close. Among them was a young married couple who had recently joined the church after professions of faith and baptism. “Are we truly wheat?” my friends wondered. “Or are we just bad seed mixed in with good?” After all, the preacher had warned, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Even having to ask, my friends thought, must be evidence that they were not truly saved. So they went forward during the altar call that day to make another profession of faith and be saved—again.

Later these young Christians learned, from me and from others, that most believers have fleeting moments (or hours or days or years) of doubt, and that the inevitable self-examination that results is not only normal but can be good and healthy. While I don’t think hellfire and brimstone sermons are the best way to achieve it, such scrutiny can be evidence of a living faith—one that is active, growing, and bearing fruit. In contrast, a faith that never feels challenged is most likely dead.

WHAT IS FAITH?

What is faith? We use the word in so many ways. We can have faith in a person or an institution. The law might consider a transaction to be one made “in good faith.” We describe our level of self-confidence as the amount of faith we have in ourselves. But faith as a virtue has a particular meaning, one expressed in the Bible when it explains that faith comes from the grace of God, not from human works (Eph. 2:8–9). Faith is the “instrument” that brings us to the Christ who saves us.1

Faith, along with hope and love, is a theological virtue. The theological virtues differ from the cardinal virtues because they are not attained by human power but come from God. Conferred by God, these virtues provide “an ennobling of man’s nature” beyond natural human ability,2 “something essentially inhuman.”3 They are called theological virtues because their object is God, they assist us in seeking and finding God, and they come to us by God’s grace alone.4 The theological virtues differ in their origin, but like the other virtues, they can become excellent through practice. Thus faith, “over time through the hard work of habituation,”5 can become a “consistent and enduring quality of one’s character.”6

The excellence of one’s faith can be measured a number of ways: by the strength of one’s conviction, by the response to that conviction, and by the actual trust one places in the object of faith.7 Similarly, a colleague who is a New Testament scholar describes faith as having three primary elements: belief (cognitive), trust (relational), and fidelity (obedience).8 Consider, for example, the faith a child has in a parent: the child may believe that she should trust her parents, and she may obey them, but she may do so without trusting them. On the other hand, a child could believe in and trust her parents—and willfully disobey anyway. Some doubts cannot be expressed apart from faith in God. “Thus, rather than having faith in faith itself, as a point of certainty that relies on our volition only, true faith is a childlike trust in God, who allows his children to question him as they might question their earthly parent, and to do so in the certainty of the relational knowledge and trust of the Father.”9

A DISORIENTING AND DEVASTATING PICTURE OF FAITH

Few works of modern literature grapple as provocatively and deeply with the virtue of faith as Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. Chosen by HarperCollins as one of the “100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century,”10 Silence wrestles with hard, uncomfortable questions about the nature and limits of personal faith, as well as the ways cultural conditions can foster or discourage faith.

To be sure, the picture of faith in Silence is disorienting and devastating. The novel centers on a test of faith that is unimaginable for most Christians today, whose Christianity is marked by a Western triumphalism that dramatically differs from the defeat and defeatism of the Christian experience in seventeenth-century Japan. Yet this strange and troubling portrayal offers the opportunity to examine the true nature of the virtue of faith—the true wheat—apart from the limitations of both personal and cultural experience. Silence asks a question that is difficult for many readers to answer with certainty: Is the faith of its main character, Father Rodrigues, a saving faith that endures to the end?

But the purpose in reading this novel—or any novel—is not to find definitive answers about the characters. It is rather to ask definitive questions about ourselves. To read about an experience of faith as it falters is an opportunity to seek resolution not in the work of fiction but in the work of our own faith.

Historical background helpful to understanding the story, a fictionalized account of actual persons and historical events, is provided in the translator’s preface to the English language version of Silence. The preface explains that Christianity was brought to Japan by Jesuits in the sixteenth century during a time when Japan had undergone destabilization and decentralization by war. However, the initial flourishing of Christianity ended early in the next century with changes in Japan’s trade relationships with other countries. Japanese leaders came to distrust the foreign missionaries and, consequently, to persecute Japanese Christians with horrific methods of torture and execution aimed, not only at killing the victims, but at wiping the faith from the land entirely. One favored technique was forcing Christians to trample on a fumie, an image of Christ or Mary carved into a flat piece of stone or wood. Japan did not succeed in eradicating Christianity, however, despite killing five to six thousand Christians during this period. Silence is rooted in these historical events and centers on the fictional character of Sebastian Rodrigues, who is based on an actual person, Giuseppe Chiara. Chiara was one of a group of missionaries who came to Japan in the wake of reports that his mentor, the Portuguese Jesuit priest Christovao Ferreira (both a historical person and a character in the novel), had apostatized following renewed persecutions against Christians. While most of the details are imaginatively filled in by the novelist, the major events depicted—the persecution, torture, and killing of Christians, as well as the fall of these two priests—are factual.

Father Rodrigues arrives in Japan an earnest but proud man. He is proud of his education and office and proud of his faith and that of the former mentor he has come here to find. In contrast, the Japanese Christians, humble, persecuted, poor, and hidden in remote villages, are joyous to have priests among them at last, to teach them and to administer the sacraments to them. Rodrigues’s disdain for them is clear when, while baptizing one of the children, he reflects, “This child also would grow up like its parents and grandparents to eke out a miserable existence face to face with the black sea in this cramped and desolate land; it, too, would live like a beast, and like a beast it would die. But Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt—this is the realization that came home to me acutely at that time.”11

Rodrigues, and perhaps the cursory reader, might think these thoughts are noble and compassionate. But, in truth, they are at base condescension, the outworking of inner spiritual and cultural pride. Father Rodrigues’s spiritual arrogance is seen again later in an important moment of irony and foreshadowing when some of the villagers ask him what they should do if authorities try to force them to trample the fumie. He unhesitatingly, almost dismissively, advises them, “Trample! Trample!”12—as if these humble peasants are not capable of the inner torment he will eventually undergo himself in facing the same dilemma.

The climax of the novel finds Father Rodrigues himself facing the decision of whether to comply with the order to trample. The stakes are impossibly high: before being brought to the fumie, he hears the moans of the Christian villagers undergoing unspeakable torture. The authorities tell him that if only he will trample, their torture will end. It is one thing to face the temptation to deny Christ to save yourself from suffering. It is another thing altogether to face this temptation in order to end the suffering of others.

JUST A FORMALITY

Surrounded by Japanese authorities, Rodrigues looks at the fumie in the dirt at his feet. It is “a simple copper medal fixed on to a gray plank of dirty wood” that bears “the ugly face of Christ, crowned with thorns and the thin, outstretched arms.”13 It is not the beautiful face of Christ he has imagined in his mind over and over to sustain him while here in this godforsaken land. The gentle goading of the Japanese officials echoes Satan’s temptations of Christ in the wilderness (Luke 4:1–13). “‘It is only a formality. What do formalities matter?’ The interpreter urges him on excitedly. ‘Only go through with the exterior form of trampling.’”14 The torturer’s words belie, of course, his knowledge of the power of a symbolic act. Nothing that is truly “just a formality” would be so urgently insisted upon.

We easily fool ourselves about the meaninglessness of such “formalities” or mere “symbols.” People who resist getting married by insisting that formal marriage is “just a piece of paper” ironically demonstrate just how important that paper is in their very desire to avoid it. Similarly, our nation is currently divided over symbolic postures toward the American flag as well as the place monuments to evil deeds should have within the public square. Such controversies attest to the fact that cloth and stone are more than mere materials, that symbols have power. I once considered adopting an orphan from a Muslim country I had visited several times. The government of this country required without exception that adoptive parents affirm the declaration, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” The government, and even some Christian friends, insisted that it was “just a formality.” Yet, if it were, why would it be so necessary? Despite seeing and holding little children without families or homes, I was convicted that to affirm something I don’t believe, even for such a good reason, would be to have too little faith—in the power both of God and of symbols.

Rodrigues, urged on by the officials who torment him with the promise of releasing the others from their ongoing torture if only he will comply, finally “raises his foot.”

In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”15

He tramples.

Whether Rodrigues’s act of trampling is truly a denunciation of Christ—the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit that would indicate an unredeemed state—is the most controversial and vexing question of the novel. The complexity of the story allows for a range of conclusions, and readers and critics have weighed in accordingly. Regardless of other ambiguities, however, the lines that follow this part of the text are unambiguous: “The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”16 The cock crowing is a clear signal that Rodrigues has, like Peter, betrayed Christ.

Rodrigues spends the years of his life following his apostasy assimilated into Japanese culture, employed by the Japanese government to identify Christian contraband smuggled into the country, and eventually taking a Japanese wife and name at the orders of the government. The teasing of the neighborhood children who call out to him, “Apostate Paul! Apostate Paul!” echoes the guilt that dogs him the rest of his days. On the surface, Rodrigues seems to have taken the same path as his mentor, Father Ferreira, who also has taken a Japanese name and wife and is writing a book that he claims will unmask the deceit of Christianity.

However, despite Rodrigues’s forced assimilation into Japanese culture and the hiddenness of his faith, evidence remains that he still believes. For while Rodrigues’s faith may be hidden, that does not mean, necessarily, that it is not living. In fact, some readers think that the moment of Rodrigues’s seeming apostasy is actually the moment of his true conversion. Such an interpretation is supported by Rodrigues’s transformation after this crisis point from a position of arrogance, self-reliance, and imperialism to a posture of brokenness, submission, and humility. The virtue of faith, if God has given it, might be diminished by lack of exercise and nourishment like any other virtue, but that decrease does not mean that one never had it or that it has been lost. This question is the merit of the self-examination that the parable of the wheat and the tares elicits.

Some time later, as “the last priest in this land,”17 Rodrigues is sought out in secret by fellow apostate Kichijiro in order to hear his confession. Kichijiro, who has been dogging Rodrigues throughout the narrative, apostatized years before Rodrigues’s arrival in Japan, after the government murdered his family. Since then he has been caught in an endless cycle of betrayal and confession, futilely trying to escape the weight of his perpetual fear and shame. Kichijiro is Rodrigues’s doppelganger, a double who shadows him and whose needling presence offers a check on Rodrigues’s spiritual pride, although that check is ignored. Kichijiro reflects Rodrigues’s own guilt—as well as his continued clinging to faith despite his faltering. Both men embody the Japanese Christians that the author of Silence considered to be (along with himself) “children of failed faith” who, “unable to completely walk away from their faith,” thus “lived with utter shame, regret and the dark pain of their past constantly.”18 Kichijiro now wants to give his confession once more. His request of Rodrigues prompts Rodrigues to grapple with God in an internal dialogue.

“Lord, I resented your silence,” he confesses.

He receives from God the response, “I was not silent. I suffered beside you.”19

After administering the sacrament to Kichijiro, Rodrigues acknowledges to himself that “his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege,” since he is no longer considered to be within the church. But, Rodrigues thinks, “even if he was betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love.”20 These lines capture the perhaps irresolvable interpretive question about the nature of Rodrigues’s faith. Does his expression of love for God evidence his faith? Can a person who keeps his faith hidden because of persecution have what is truly a saving faith?

A HIDDEN FAITH?

The responses of Christian readers to the questions Silence raises follow predictable lines. Progressive Christians praise the novel’s ambiguity, the idea that Jesus would approve of denying him, and the way “love wins” in the lines quoted above. For example, Father James Martin, a liberal Catholic priest, says Rodrigues’s apostasy is allowable “because Christ asks him to” trample on the fumie. Martin praises the story’s emphasis on the role of individual conscience over rules and its emphasis on “‘discernment’ for people facing complicated situations, where a black-and-white approach seems inadequate.”21 In contrast, some theologically conservative readers see the novel as celebrating, or at least justifying, apostasy and suggesting that one can have an internal faith that is not evidenced by outward behavior. Even more serious a concern for such readers is that the novel lends weight to contemporary ideologies that, as one critic puts it, “seek to absolutize the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ by making effective public adherence to the Christian tradition seem ‘selfish’ and finally futile.”22

Ironically, both types of readers are reading the novel in the same way: as a literal exposition of Christian doctrine with which they accordingly either agree or disagree. But Silence is a work of literary art and should be read as such. Endo himself insisted it was not a work of theology.23 It is fiction, a novel, and even a particular kind of novel. Reading virtuously, reading faithfully, depends greatly on accepting a text on its own terms and attending to how it is told as much as, if not more than, what it tells.

The narrative structure offers the most significant cue for how to read Silence. It begins with a prologue by a third-person narrator. Then the first half of the book shifts to first-person narration in the form of letters written by Rodrigues. But once Rodrigues is captured—betrayed by the Judas-like Kichijiro—the narrative point of view shifts back to the third person. The last chapter of the novel introduces a new narrative style in the form of diary extracts from a clerk with a Dutch merchant, followed by an appendix consisting of diary entries from an officer assigned to Rodrigues’s residence, concluding with the officer’s report of Rodrigues’s death and his Buddhist burial.

These narrative points of view taken together and in order effect a movement that begins at a distance from Rodrigues and his experience of faith, then moves closer, then moves away again, and then, finally, moves even further away. This movement significantly shapes the reader’s experience of the story, not only in terms of shifting proximity to Rodrigues, but also in offering various angles of his life and faith. This interplay of subjective and objective, as well as limited and omniscient points of view, complicates the reader’s experience and suggests implications and applications of the story’s content beyond the pages of the book—in a way similar to how a parable works.

The truth a parable expresses is not found in a straightforward or literal reading. In fact, the Greek original of the word parable means to “throw beside.” A parable is not an allegory (a form to be discussed in chap. 9), because a parable does not have a one-to-one correspondence of symbolic meaning as an allegory does. Whatever spiritual truth is gleaned from a parable, as in Silence or in Jesus’s story of the wheat and the tares, is less absolute. Like a parable, Silence raises questions even as it offers possible answers.

Endo was himself Japanese and wrote the novel in Japanese, yet even his original Japanese audience—modern, secular, skeptical—found the subject matter strange. After all, Christians make up just 1 percent of the Japanese population today. In his insightful examination of Silence, Japanese artist and Christian Makoto Fujimura likens Endo’s approach to the Christian faith within his own cultural context to that of Flannery O’Connor within hers: both authors were writing to a hostile culture in which Christ was either haunting or hidden.24

Accordingly, Silence uses emblematic, “deeply layered, conflicted language” that is more likely to convey to “a cynical and faithless world” something of the power of a faith it no longer believes in,25 Fujimura explains. Similarly, the “weak, sometimes failed characters” of Silence “expose our true selves” to careful readers able to see how we can be like them.26 Indeed the novel sets a trap for readers by inviting us first “to judge Kichijiro in the same way that Father Rodrigues does”27 and then to indict Father Rodrigues too.

Endo had harsh words for readers quick to judge the failure of Rodrigues: “How can anyone who has never experienced the horrific tortures of the Christian persecution era have any right to say anything about the depth or shallowness of the believers then? . . . First, that person has no imagination. It shows not the shallow faith of those who end up apostatizing, but it reveals the lack of compassion in the ones making such a judgment.”28 Too often, in our tendency to make heroes out of faith leaders, “we fall into a false dichotomy of seeing faith only in terms of victory or failure, which leads us to dismiss and discard the weak,”29 Fujimura points out. This seems particularly true within modern American evangelicalism.

AN OLD STORY FOR MODERN TIMES

Silence is based on history several centuries old, but the story is reframed in terms that address modern questions, including the very modern concern of “individual uncertainty over broader historical or social issues.”30 As one critic observes (in objection not praise), Rodrigues’s plight, although set in seventeenth-century Japan, reflects the condition of belief in the Western culture of the twentieth century. “A lot has happened in three hundred years,” this reviewer points out. “As secularization has advanced and man has had to learn to live without God, his solution for the most part has been to draw closer to other people, in unprecedented, ultimately untenable ways.” One of these ways, which the novel shows by placing Rodrigues in the position of having the power to end or continue the torture of other Christians, is that “man attributes too much agency to himself.”31 And certainly, we can see the same attribution of too much agency in ourselves within modern church culture when we base the knowledge of our salvation on fleeting feelings and consequently find ourselves going forward to the altar to receive salvation again and again.

But this incompatibility between the seventeenth-century setting of Silence and its twentieth-century questions is less a weakness than an indication of the novel’s affinity with the tragic mode. Ancient tragedies were, like Silence, retellings of history. In their treatment of the Oedipus myth, for example, both Homer and Sophocles took a story from history and retold it “in such a way that it raises and reflects issues of contemporary concern, issues that are within the day-to-day experience of his audience.”32 Additionally, tragedies deal in the mythical and religious, not the realistic. Although a pre-Christian literary form, ancient tragedies were deeply rooted in religious worship and expressive of religious beliefs. “Commonly regarded as the highest form of literature, [ancient tragedy] deals with the problem of pain and evil, the incongruity of the way things are and the vision of them as they should be.”33 Silence shares all this in common with ancient tragedy.

Silence reinvents the historical account in order to address contemporary questions and concerns. The historical figure the character of Rodrigues is based on did apostatize, but it was after he underwent the pit torture himself, not in order to save others from torture.34 One critic objects to this anachronism, saying that Endo’s decision to have Rodrigues apostatize in order to save others rather than himself from torture “turns on an act of emotional blackmail. . . . If it is always and everywhere difficult for human beings to hold in their minds seemingly contradictory tenets of Christianity, Silence makes the task feel impossible. Mercy is pitted against truth, love of neighbor against allegiance to God.”35 But such an impossibility, an irresolvable dilemma, is the heart of tragedy and of Silence.

Consider the tragedy of Oedipus. Told in a prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother, Oedipus runs away to avoid his fate—and in running away ends up unwittingly fulfilling it. Sigmund Freud, who drew upon the Oedipal story in developing his psychoanalytical theory, explained, “Its tragic effect depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to divine will, and the perception of one’s own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn from the tragedy.”36 This impossibility arouses in the viewer or reader fear and pity: fear of the gods and pity for human suffering. Literature, Aristotle says in Poetics, cultivates virtue in arousing such emotions and then purging them through a catharsis brought about by the plot’s just resolution.37

Like Oedipus Rex, Silence offers in Rodrigues a lofty figure who falls through a combination of his own flaw and forces beyond his control. We experience with the characters, through various perspectives, the terrors of torture and martyrdom and fear in being faced with the temptation to deny Christ.

However, where the modern novel Silence departs from classical tragedy is in its lack of complete catharsis. Its ambiguity prevents catharsis in the classical sense. If Oedipus’s self-blinding and self-exile as a result of his unwitting acts of patricide and incest end the drama with a bang, Rodrigues’s death in old age as a hidden Christian working for the Japanese government ends with a whimper. Silence is not a classical tragedy; its tragedy is very much in the modern mode.

Silence shares more in common with Christian tragedy. In classical tragedy, closure is contained within the text. Christian tragedy, on the other hand, looks outward, upward, and beyond for redemption. Following a dormant period for drama, the Middle Ages saw a rebirth of tragedy. Since then “Christian life and thought have been the matrix out of which tragedy was reborn. It takes account of the Redemption, the absence of which characterized, in part, pagan tragedy. The tragic event in human life is no longer the final word.” Christian tragedy differs from classical tragedy in its emphasis on “the next world’s destiny being determined in the present one,” thus making it “infinitely more intense and serious than any other mode of tragedy.”38

Understanding Silence as myth more than realism, as parable more than doctrine, requires a different response from the reader than merely determining the theological category of Rodrigues’s solution to his irresolvable dilemma. The literary qualities of Silence that go beyond mere realism test “one’s imaginative ability to move beyond the obvious,”39 which is helpful in exercising faith because “an unimaginative perspective limits one’s faith in the mystery of God.”40 Indeed, “Silence works as a powerful antidote to the modernist reductionism that entirely rejects doubt—as if we, in our limited minds and knowledge, can know everything God and the universe offer to us.”41

A TEST OF FAITH

In Silence, the unique particularities surrounding one man’s faith and the testing of that faith provide a strangeness that allows readers to view through a different lens what the virtue of faith looks like as it is being practiced well (or not).

What does it mean to practice faith well? While our works cannot save us, our habits can strengthen our faith. Martin Luther cautioned, “Do not think lightly of faith. It is a work that is of all works the most excellent and most difficult.”42 An understanding of faith as not only a gift that is received but also a virtue that is exercised will emphasize any single moment less and the accumulation of moments more. Fortunately, the Bible gives a clear recipe for building on the foundation of faith, which can only strengthen faith itself: “Giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1:5–8 NKJV).

Rodrigues’s former mentor, Ferreira, in trying to convince Rodrigues to abandon the faith as he himself has, tells him that all their efforts to bring Christianity to the Japanese culture were in vain because Japanese culture rendered its people incapable of understanding the faith. Understandably, Rodrigues is discouraged and demoralized. Could this be true?

Of course it is. It is true of all of us. Sometimes our faith is great. Sometimes it is small. There are times for most believers when they wonder if it is there at all. But faith tests true (or not) over time. We can grow in faith only when we recognize that our faith is imperfect.43 Our faith is perfected only in Christ, not in ourselves or our understanding: “We may speak of the virtue of faith but only if we finish it by saying ‘is Christ.’ He must be the virtue of faith because he is the object of faith. There is nothing intrinsic to faith that makes it powerful. . . . It isn’t even the act of believing itself. Christ and nothing else is the virtue of faith.”44 This is why faith is “the virtue whereby, paradoxically, we excel in our dependence upon God.”45