What is Faith?

As Christians, we are force fed a steady diet of Christian propaganda. If we are taught answers to hard questions, it is in an effort to allow us to defend our faith. In fact, growing up Christian, it seemed obvious that childhood, public schools, and college were all rigged with secular traps to ensnare unwary Christian boys and girls. Our faith is something to be protected and guarded, bordering on fragile. All the while, we are not even sure what this faith is.

As evangelical Christians, it is pounded into our heads that all we have to do to be Christian, and thus be saved from damnation, is to say a few words “accepting” Jesus as our Lord and Savior. I was led in this Sinner’s prayer myself when I was three years old. We are expected to actually change our lives and keep Jesus as our Lord by trying to live our lives according to Christian morals, but the actual salvation comes about at the acceptance of and agreement with a few statements about Christianity.

We should agree that exactly one God exists. We should agree that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the three parts to this one God (although sides, persons, or aspects have also been used to replace “parts”: each part is not an actual third of who God is). We should agree the Jesus is the Son, and he became a real life human who lived in the 1^st century. We should agree that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. We are all familiar with the lists of things that various people say Christians must believe. Some people’s lists are more exclusive than others, which points to what this agreement signifies: a way of distinguishing between us and them.

Somehow or another, sometime in the past, this agreement of these statements became faith. If we agree that Jesus was God and lived on Earth a long time ago and saved us from our sins by dying and resurrecting Himself, we have faith in Jesus. In effect, our faith because synonymous with our religion. Further, both the denotation and connotation of “faith” is “believing without seeing”. Put the two together, and we get that faith is a set of beliefs for which we have no basis other than the Bible and tradition, relying more heavily on the latter than the former.

When the high school science teacher teaches evolution, the Christian student takes it as a personal attack against his faith. When he learns that over 95% of all scientists support evolution, he either starts to reject academia as a viable avenue to truth or doubt his own faith.

Due to the first option, the Christian community today is opposing universities, scientific journals, and philosophers: in general, the most well studied members of our society. It makes Christians look foolish to pretend they know more about biology than a biologist or about cosmology than a cosmological physicist. I think Christians know this, and that is why there is a deep seated insecurity in many Christians, thinking the world is “out to get them” or “secularly biased”. Be reassured, scientists do not sit up at night thinking of the best theory to screw over Christians. 

Due to the second avenue, we get a lot of kids who “lose their faith” in college, where they are taught that the claims of their pastors and parents were all wrong. It plays right into the rebellious nature of youth, and the youth feel vindicated. They think they are on the right side of history, rejecting a previous generation’s stupidity and clinging to their new found atheism in an ironically religious way.

This brings us back to the beginning. We are told to defend our faith. We have to protect ourselves from all those liberal professors and doubters and guard ourselves with the Bible. Genesis says six days. Don’t question that, or where would you stop?

Do we really need to abandon reason in order to keep our faith? After all, for a lot of us Christians, we do not believe in God merely because we were always taught it. We actually feel God’s presence. We’ve seen His work in our lives. We’ve been comforted in the hard times and stare in awe at the amazing universe we live in and feel a sense of meaning in a world that seems to scream to us that we are meaningless. We know God is real more than we know anything else, and not because of some cosmological argument given by Christian theologians. If reason goes against this, how do we believe anything at all?

This is where Biblical faith should be distinguished from fundamentalist faith. When the Bible uses the word “faith”, it is talking about a trust in God and living our life based on that trust. There is no mention of agreement with doctrine. Any verse in the Bible uses faith in the sense that we should not worry. Instead we should obey God.

A mere lip service to Christian doctrine is denounced by James and Peter, and faith is even defined by Paul. In the Bible, it is even possible to have faith without being the right religion. The Roman centurion is one example. The good Samaritan is another. Yes, Paul says to believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord, but throughout the Bible we are given examples that say we can measure the belief in our heart by our actions, and others can tell if we confess (present tense, not one-time, past tense) with our mouths by whether we are ashamed of the gospel. As Peter says, we should not hesitate to give a reason for our lives, which should reflect Christ. This is both the basis of ministry and the basis of Christianity.

As James says, so what if we believe that God is real and Jesus is His Son? Even the demons believe that, and shudder. True faith is active, visible, and has nothing to do with legalistic doctrine. Any tour through the book of James or 2 Peter will say the same thing.

I think most Christians will agree with this when they read it. Specifically, they will agree that actions speak louder than words and that true faith will show itself in actions. But most will still see the basis of their faith as the agreement with several statements about God. For example, they would say a Mormon is not Christian because there are several “key” statements that, when pressed, they would not agree with, and there are several statements they agree with that they should not. They could profess a strong love for Jesus, live lives reflecting that love, and trust God in their decisions (read faith). Yet because they do not agree on some bizarre, though important, items, they are not Christian.

Although I will not claim to have an opinion on who will go to heaven and who won’t (at least not here), I think that the attitude of “Faith = Doctrinal Agreement” is dangerous for Christians to have. The reason is that when we stop asking questions about God, when we stop searching for God, the Holy Spirit has little place in our lives. The Holy Spirit works through our admitted weakness and humility, and to say that we have everything figured out is dangerous.

I’ve heard many times that such “relativity” in my faith will lead to a relativistic morality. I say that such stubbornness in doctrine will lead to stubbornness of morality. Stubbornness in our morality is good if we have it all figured out, I guess, but who does? Before we are Christians, we have a relativistic morality, swaying with the social tides and our own prejudices. God does not send doctrine to fix that. He sends the Holy Spirit.

Why should we tell our kids to defend their faith? Our kids should be encouraged to grow in their faith. They should be encouraged to ask the Big Questions and get Big Answers from God, not some canned C.S. Lewis quote. Even more importantly, the faith that should be emphasized is biblical trust and obedience, not mind-numbing, zombie-like agreement with doctrine.