In dealing with so vast a subject as faith in so narrow a space, one’s first need is to limit the area of discussion without thereby distorting or falsifying the true nature of the subject. Our analytical age is all too prone to divide to conquer, only to find that the sum of the parts divulges no deep truth about the original reality. We must avoid this danger in speaking of faith, for faith is more than the sum of those of its elements which can most readily be detected and analyzed—knowledge, reason, will, love, emotion, and others. “You may think that it is very easy to explain faith,” wrote C. H. Spurgeon many years ago, “and so it is; but it is easier still to confound people with your explanation (What Is Faith?, Chicago, 1897, p. 13).
Definition. Faith is a channel of living trust and communion between morally conscious free beings. The dimension of moral consciousness must exist if there is to be communion (“and man became a living soul,” Gen. 2:7), and freedom must exist if the unity of the society produced by faith (faulty on earth; perfect in heaven) is to be that of dynamic life, not of soulless machines. Because living faith permits each soul to extend its dimensions of existence into the souls of others, and into the Infinite Dimension of God, there is irretrievable commitment and consequent hazard in faith. True faith, in the words of T. S. Eliot, costs not less than everything. It also gains everything—if the object of faith is faithful.
The life, the power, which flows through the channels of faith is the ultimate energy of the universe: God’s love—the love which God is. Where love is perfect, faith is perfect, as in the ineffable beatitude of the Trinity.
Every dimension of reality, whether material or spiritual, is compatible with faith when that dimension is truly understood. That is, faith is harmonious with reason, with knowledge, with “science,” with “psychology”—with all truth, ancient or modern—though it is dependent on none of them.
When God’s love is permitted, through faith, to permeate existence, life manifests the qualities inherent in divine creation: harmony, beauty, holiness, joy. When man, through a defect of love wilfully wrought, blocked the channel of faith in the Fall, faith ceased in man to reach wholly outward and instead turned in upon itself, where it must sicken and die. The limit of our faith is the limit of our life. It is unimaginable that any man should have faith literally in nothing except himself and continue to “live.”
Self-severed from God by disbelief in God’s veracity, man is doomed, so far as his own power is concerned, to wander forever in darkness and spiritual death. Any solution must be entirely of God and entirely of grace, without merit on man’s part. Even man’s assent to the free offer of redemption and salvation from God is a gift of God (Eph. 6:23; 2:8,9; Phil. 1: 29); the Saviour who (alone—John 14:6; Matt. 11:27) works our redemption is a gift (2 Cor. 9:15); and man’s empowering in the transaction is by the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 4:13; Gal. 5:5). It is all of God.
Of the utter centrality of faith in Christian theology there can be no question. So long as man is, by sin, displeasing to God and at enmity against Him, man is without all hope; and without faith it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). The rays of divine love come to their sharpest focus in the simple words, “For by grace are ye saved through faith …” (Eph. 2:8).
Faith and Knowledge. The role of knowledge in faith, and the difference between the two, may perhaps best be discussed by noting the difference of meaning between two terms commonly used to define faith: belief and trust. In this context we use belief in its narrow, secondary meaning of “intellectual assent, based on a sufficiency of evidence.” Trust we use in its meaning of reliance upon and commitment to.
Upon sufficient evidence, I am prepared to believe that Jesus existed, and that during certain years he walked the roads of Palestine. This takes no commitment on my part, involves me in no hazard. My conduct need not be altered by it, nor my boundaries of trust (life) extended, nor my sinful condition modified. This belief is not accounted to me for righteousness, as was Abraham’s (Gal. 3:6), for I have not believed God but evidence. Indeed, no matter how much I believe in this way, I shall always be inferior to the fallen angels and to Satan, for they believe, and tremble (James 2:19).
Knowledge, therefore, may compel the assent of the intellect, but it cannot compel that act of the will which constitutes trust. Our stony natural hearts must be softened by a more powerful solvent than knowledge, “for with the heart”—not the head—“man believeth unto righteousness” (Rom. 10:10).
But if knowledge is not of itself sufficient to produce reliant trust, it is, in greater or lesser quantity, an absolutely essential precondition to trust. “Flow then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?” (Rom. 10:14). The basic imperative in this area is, “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace” (Job 22: 21). Our Lord himself taught the value of objective evidence in developing reliant trust when he commanded doubting Thomas to reach forth his hand and feel the evidence of the wounds in Christ’s body. Saul of Tarsus, smitten to earth on the Damascus road, asked for one key bit of information: “Who art thou, Lord?” The answer, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest” (Acts 9:5), gave him the Object of his trust.
To scorn knowledge is to make faith a purely subjective experience, which is as fatal as to seek salvation in knowledge alone. Modern Christian existentialism may be useful in reminding us that faith must be an inner reality and in Warning us against faith in human reason; but when it denies the reality of the objective source of knowledge which God has provided in his Word, and when it suggests that faith is a self-authenticating inner awareness, it cuts us off from the power of God by cutting us off from the historical Christ, who is the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24).
The knowledge which leads to belief in scientific laws and principles is available to him who seeks, but the knowledge of the Person of God, which must be the basis of our trust, is given as an act of divine grace. We must learn of God by believing what he says of himself. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1, 2), and from this Source alone does perfect knowledge flow, the knowledge without which, no matter what our intellectual attainments, we walk in darkness.
There is no quantitative relationship between our knowledge and that act of trust through which we are saved. It was not ignorance which caused Adam to fall (1 Tim. 2:14), but the sin of disbelief committed as an act of will. Thus man born of Adam is in his fallen condition turned away from God and unable by his own powers to find God, for “he that believeth not God hath made him a liar” (1 John 5:10). When we have received sufficient knowledge to know to whom we speak (as did Saul of Tarsus), we then are no longer in a position to demand more knowledge but simply to confront commands which are in effect gracious invitations: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Prov. 3:5).
Faith and Reason. What stacks of books and what quantities of heat have been produced by the debate over the role (if any) of human reason in Christian faith! Positions have ranged from Tertullian’s “Certum est quia impossible est” (De Carne Christi, 5) to the Cambridge Platonists’ “nothing truly religious is irrational and nothing truly rational is irreligious.” Each extreme has produced its own sickness: superstition, dependence on ecclesiastical authority, or pure subjectivism on the one hand; rational skepticism, materialism, or nihilism on the other.
The contemporary Protestant climate is suspicious of rational (or “natural”) theology as a basis for faith. In its place the tendency today is to stress faith as a product of “direct confrontation” of God subjectively and to consider the “quality” of that experience as self-authenticating.
First, if it be granted that any degree of knowledge whatever is a precondition to faith, then some role, however small, must be assigned to reason, for only reason knows how to identify and evaluate information.
Second, human reason, created in Adam and Eve as a trustworthy servant of the will, is in fallen man depraved and incapable of finding God (Rom. 8:7).
But though depraved, reason is not destroyed. Paul was not wasting his time when he spent hours and days arguing and debating in the synagogues. The remnant of right reason, though “aimed” away from God, may, like conscience in fallen man, give some light.
Faith and Love. To quote Spurgeon again: “Although we may not perhaps see it, there lies at the bottom of all love a belief in the object loved, as to its loveliness, its merit, or its capacity to make us happy. If I do not believe in a person, I cannot love him. If I cannot trust God, I cannot love Him.” As a corollary, we are moved to trust those whom we love. Indeed, we may say that faith is embraced in love, and thus the basic exhortation of both Testaments is “Thou shalt love.” True, love is not to be commanded, but it may be overwhelmingly attracted. That which attracts it is love, and “herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.… We love him because be first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 19).
How Faith Operates. Probably the key word is the preposition “through.” “By grace are ye saved through faith.…” On God’s side are the unsearchable riches of his grace; on man’s side, emptiness, drought, death. If man is to receive the water of life, there must be a channel, and that channel is faith. That channel need not be large nor perfect, for it is the reviving drop which is pure and efficacious. There is no merit in the channel, any more than there is reviving life in the dead pipe through which the water flows.
We must immediately distinguish between saving faith (“by grace are ye saved through faith …”) and living faith (“the just shall live by faith …” Heb. 10:38).
Saving faith is never spoken of in relative terms, for the consequence of faith is not relative: it is a passing from death unto life. One is either lost or saved, and the scale between the two conditions is not graduated.
Saving faith is not efficacious by reason either of its strength or the degree of its knowledge, but only by reason of its Object. The woman who touched Christ’s robe did so in almost complete ignorance, but she was healed. And so with Peter, when he began to sink beneath the boisterous waves: “Lord, save me.” And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” (Matt. 14:30, 31).
Saving faith, therefore, is nothing more nor less than reliant trust in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). It need be nothing more than this, for “by him, all that believe are justified from all things …” (Acts 13:39). “I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28). It can be nothing less than this, for “this is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4: 11, 12). “No man cometh unto the Father but by me” (John 14:6). “Through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43).
The difference between saving faith and living faith is the difference between a channel first opened, bringing life, and a channel continuingly and increasingly used, bringing power, victory, and honor. Just as Adam’s faith before the Fall manifested itself in deeds of obedience and fulfillment, so the regenerate, now in Christ, saved by His perfect obedience, and made partakers of the divine nature, live in ever-broadening dimensions. The inexhaustible riches of God’s power are available through faith (Matt. 17:20); and on the degree of our appropriation of that power, through the channel of faith, depends our earthly blessedness and our heavenly rewards (1 Cor. 5:10).
All may be summed up in two passages:
Saving faith: “This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:11, 12).
Living faith: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Bibliography: G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Sanctification; J. Bright, The Kingdom of God; E. J. Carnell, Christian Commitment; J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge; J. G. Machen, What is Faith?; C. B. Martin, Religious Belief; A. Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament; C. H. Spurgeon and others, What Is Faith?; S. Thompson, A Modern Philosophy of Religion; B. B. Warfield, Biblical and Theological Studies, ed. by Samuel G. Craig.
Dean
Columbian College
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
