What is Christian faith?
It is often mischaracterized in different ways. Some of these mischaracterizations include seeing faith as only an affective state, or mental assent (belief), or as only hope, or even as a means to gain knowledge. Or worse, there was once a schoolboy who defined it as “when you believe something you know isn’t true.” All of these definitions are incorrect.
Faith, in the biblical sense, is trusting in what you have reason to believe is true. This trusting is evidenced by your actions. This definition encompasses three components:
- A cognitive component, believing certain things about God.
- A relational component, trusting in God based on what is believed.
- A behavioral component, faithfulness at all costs in response to God.
All three of these components together make up the sum of what is called “the Christian faith.”
What the Christian Faith is Not
Before looking at what the Christian faith is, first let’s understand what it is not. Some philosophers identify faith simply as an affective psychological state, in other words, a state of feeling confident and trusting.[1] It cannot be reduced to only this, more is necessary, like a cognitive component. Others have limited faith to a mental assent, an acceptance of certain truths in their cognitive faculties. This is a very dangerous way to define faith. The apostle James tells us that even demons have mental assent (Jas 2:19), or accept the truth about who Jesus is, but don’t serve Him. John Wesley warned people in his time that the devil had given the Church a substitute for faith that looked and sounded so much like faith that many could not tell the difference, what he called “mental assent.”
Another fallacy of faith is that it is hope. Biblical hope is a firm assurance about things that are unseen and still in the future. It’s a confident expectation about things still to come (Rom 8:24-25). Hope is a part of faith, but it is not faith. Faith is often misclassified as an epistemological category, a means by which you gain knowledge. “Faith is not a way of knowing something.”[2]It has been said that we can use our reason and senses or we can use faith to gain knowledge, this is not biblical.[3]Faith is not something believed in spite of the facts, but because of the facts. The Christian faith finds its basis in the historical fact of the resurrection of Christ. In my next post, I will explore the three components of Christian faith in more depth.
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[1]J. S. Clegg, “Faith,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1979): 229. Accessed February 10, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009762.
[2]William Lane Craig, “What is Faith?” (video), presentation for APOL-B02, accessed February 7, 2017, Liberty University Online.
[3]Rich Holland, “Biblical Notions of Faith” (video), presentation for APOL 550-B02, accessed February 7, 2017, Liberty University Online.
*This blog post was adapted from a paper I wrote on the subject while in graduate school.
