What is Faith?
Examples of Faith in Our Popular Culture:
1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: starring Harrison Ford & Sean Connery as Indy’s father) – At the end of the story, Indy must retrieve the Holy Grail to save his father’s life. He makes it through a long corridor of obstacles; only to find he is standing on the edge of a deep chasm he must cross. He steps out “in faith” and finds he is actually walking on a camouflaged footbridge. Therefore, we see that FAITH = BELIEVING IN THE FACE OF CONTRADICTORY EVIDENCE.
2. Revolutions: the third movie in The Matrix trilogy. In the final scene the Oracle is asked if she always knew that Neo was “The One”? She replies, “Oh no. But I believed. I believed.” Therefore, we see that FAITH = BELIEVING WITHOUT REALLY KNOWING.
3. Polar Express: The boy, who is skeptical about whether Santa Clause is real, finally is lead to say, "I believe, I believe." Just then, Santa appears to him. Therefore, we see that FAITH = BELIEVING MAKES IT REAL. (1)
The Leap of Faith
As seen above, is it any wonder why our culture does not have a clear understanding about the nature of biblical faith? Furthermore, one of the most common assertions about faith in God or Jesus as the Messiah is nothing more than a "leap of faith." But is this really what the Bible teaches? Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), became one of the foremost contributors to existential philosophy because of a reaction to one of the largest influences on his life, that being George Hegel, who believed the only way to discover reality was through rationalism. (2) Another contributing factor to Kierkegaard’s existentialism was the experience he had in his formal church that was located in Denmark. It was there that practicing faith with passion was discounted. Out of his reaction to the cold formalism, Kierkegaard discovered what was important was to have an existential encounter with God. (3) Many assume that the phrase itself “leap of faith” finds its origins in the writings of Kierkegaard. However, he himself never used the term, as he referred to a leap as a leap to faith. For Kierkegaard, since man finds his authentic existence in a relationship with the Creator, the decision to believe must involve a criterionless choice.(4) Even though Kierkegaard says there are no rational grounds to take the leap to faith, the individual must do so or he will forever remain in an inauthentic existence. (5)
Kierkegaard was correct in calling people to a passionate experience with God. After all, faith is not simply about adhering to a set of objective, historical, propositions. However, the subjective nature of existentialism leads to one of the most important questions in religious dialogue: What god is the individual encountering? Do not all religious experiences require an external test for truth? After all, while there are some similarities in faiths such as truth, a God, right and wrong, spiritual purpose in life, and communion with God, they all also have some glaring differences such as the nature of God, the afterlife, the nature of man, sin, salvation, and creation. In their book Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli give a summary of faith. It is very helpful.
Kreeft and Tacelli say we must distinguish between the act of faith from the object of faith- believing from what is believed. The object of faith means all things believed. For the Christian, this means everything God has revealed in the Bible. This faith (the object, not the act) is expressed in propositions. Propositions are many, but the ultimate object of faith is one. The ultimate object of faith is not words, but God’s Words (singular), indeed-Himself.
Without a relationship with the living God, propositions are pointless, for their point is to point beyond themselves to God. But without propositions, we cannot know or tell others what God we believe in and what we believe about God.
The act of faith is more than merely an act of belief. We believe many things-for example that the Chicago White Sox will win this years World Series and that New Zealand is beautiful but we are not willing to die for those beliefs, nor can we live them every moment. But religious faith can be something to live every moment. It is much more than belief and much stronger, though belief is one of its parts or aspects. There are four aspects of faith:
1. Emotional faith: is feeling assurance or trust or confidence in a person. This includes hope (which is much stronger than a wish and peace (which is much stronger then mere calm.).
2. Intellectual faith: is belief. It is this aspect of faith that is formulated in propositions and summarized in creeds.
3. Volitional faith: is an act of the will, a commitment to obey God’s will. This faith is faithfulness, or fidelity. It manifests itself in behavior, that is, in good works.
4. Faith: begins in that obscure mysterious center of our being that Scripture calls the ‘heart.” Heart in Scripture does not mean feeling, or sentiment, or emotion, but the absolute center of the soul, as the physical heart is at the center of the body. “Keep your heart with all viligence” advised Solomon, “for from it flow the springs of life.” (Proverbs 4:23).
Lessons from 1 Corinthians 15:
One of the key problems in the assertion that there is no proof or evidence for God is that people forget the fallacy of equivocation. Equivocation is classified as both a formal and informal fallacy. It is the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning or sense. And one word where the equivocation becomes an issue is in defining faith. So what is biblical faith? And how does the resurrection relate to this issue?
A good place to start is 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8 :
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
Four observations can be made from this passage:
First of all, biblical faith has an object.
Secondly, the object of biblical faith must be true. As D.A. Carson says,
Paul is communicating to the Corinthians’ that their faith is “futile”( vs. 17). In other words, the Corinthians faith is valid only if its object is true. Faith is never validated in the New Testament when its object is not true. Indeed, New Testament faith is strengthened when its object is validated supported by witness, shown to be revealed by God, impregnably real, true. Such an understanding of“faith “is utterly at odds with the use of faith in the Western culture. (6)
In relation to truth, both the Old and New Testament terms for truth are emet and alethia. In relation to truth, these words are associated with fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. (7) According to a Biblical conception of truth, a proposition is true only if it accords with factual reality. There are numerous passages that explicitly contrast true propositions with falsehoods. The Old Testament warns against false prophets whose words do not correspond to reality. For example Deuteronomy 18:22: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken", and the ninth commandment warns against bearing false testimony. (8)
Given that Paul was Jewish and he was raised in the Jewish Scriptures, he must have known that the seriousness of the Sinai Covenant. Within the covenant, bearing false witness was considered to be a major crime (Exod 20:16). Hence, he must have had a commitment to presenting the resurrection story in an accurate manner.
Thirdly, biblical faith is rooted in historical reality: There is no doubt that Christianity is a historical faith. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the verification of the Christian faith as true or false. There is no doubt that Christianity is a historical faith. Biblical faith entails an objective element (the existence of God, Jesus' resurrection), and a subjective element (the individual must appropriate the objective truths through a subjective act). Objectively speaking, no matter how much faith a Christian has, it can’t change whether Jesus rose from the dead. In other words, believing Jesus rose from the dead won’t make it true. The event of the resurrection is in the past. Either Jesus rose from the dead or He did not rise form the dead. A correct view of biblical faith simply appropriates what is already written in the Bible. Perhaps modern- day Christians can learn something about their own faith by reading this comment by New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III:
Any position in which claims about Jesus or the resurrection are removed from the realm of historical reality and placed in a subjective realm of personal belief or some realm that is immune to human scrutiny does Jesus and the resurrection no service and no justice. It is a ploy of desperation to suggest that the Christian faith would be little affected if Jesus was not actually raised from the dead in space and time. A person who gives up on the historical foundations of our faith has in fact given up on the possibility of any real continuity between his or her own faith and that of a Peter, Paul, James, John, Mary Magdalene, or Priscilla. The first Christian community had a strong interest in historical reality, especially the historical reality of Jesus and his resurrection, because they believed their faith, for better or for worse, was grounded in it. (9)
Finally, there is a relationship between faith and knowledge: Does biblical faith assert that we can’t believe in things we cannot know? According to Paul, unless his audience accepts the “fact” that Jesus rose from the dead in the context of time, space, and history, they are still dead in their sins. They are to be pitied. In the words of Greg Koukl, “The opposite of faith is not fact, but unbelief. The opposite of knowledge is ignorance. Neither is a virtue in Christianity." (10)
Biblcial Faith: A Commitment of the Whole Person
Biblical faith is belief, trust, or commitment in God through Jesus the Messiah. Joseph Thayer says,
"To believe" means to think to be true; to be persuaded of; to credit, [to] place confidence in. [And in] a moral and religious reference, pisteuein [from pisteuo] is used in the N.T. of a conviction and trust to which a man is impelled by a certain inner and higher prerogative and law of his soul. (Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 511).
Biblical faith involves an objective element (the existence of God, Jesus' resurrection), and a subjective element (the individual must appropriate the objective truths through a subjective act). There have been three aspects of faith expressed throughout church history: notitia (knowledge), fiducia (trust), and assensus (assent). Notitia refers to the data or doctrinal element of faith. Assensus refers to the assent of the intellect of the truth of the Christian faith. According to the book of James, the demons can have intellectual assent to the fact that God exists but not have saving faith. That is why a person must exercise fiducia- this is the aspect of faith that involves the application or trust in the faith process. (11)
In other words, fiducia allows a person to go beyond merely intellectual assent. Fiducia involves the will, emotion, and intellect. In the Tanakh (the acronym that is formed from the first three parts of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (the first five books of the Bible), Nevi’ im (the Prophets), and K’ tuvim (the Writings), the Hebrew word for heart is "leb," or "lebad." While the word "heart" is used as a metaphor to describe the physical organ, from a biblical standpoint, it is also the center or defining element of the entire person. It can be seen as the seat of the person's intellectual, emotional, affective, and volitional life. In the New Testament, the word “heart” (Gr.kardia) came to stand for man’s entire mental and moral activity, both the rational and the emotional elements. Therefore, biblical faith also involves a commitment of the whole person.
Therefore, there is a relationship between belief that and belief in. As already stated, in James 2:19, it says that the demons believe that God exists. Apologetics may serve as a valuable medium through which God can operate, but faith is never the product of historical facts or evidence alone. It would make no sense for one to place his faith in God without believing that God exists. Objectively speaking, the Holy Spirit works in conjunction with the evidence for the truthfulness of the Christian faith to enable us to understand that God exists. However, from a subjective perspective, the Holy Spirit also enables an individual to place his trust in God. (John 16: 12-15).
Sources:
1. These three examples of faith are courtesy of Summit Ministries. Available at http://www.summit.org/resources/tc/2008/05/is-faith-blind.php
2. Erickson, M. Christian Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 1998, 40-47.
3. Ibid.
4. Craig, W.L. Reasonable Faith. Wheaten, ILL: Crossway Books. 1984, 56.
5. Ibid.
6. Carson, Donald A. Becoming Conversant With The Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing. 2005, 216.
7. Moreland, J.P. and W.L. Craig. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003, 131-132.
8. Ibid.
9. Ben Witherington III. New Testament History. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 2001, 167.
10. Koukl, G. Tactics: A Game Plan For Discussing Your Christian Convictions. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing. 2009, 153.
11. Moreland, J.P Love Your God With All Your Mind. Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress. 1997, 60.