Tag Archives: faith

Does Everyone Exercise Faith?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If you claim to know anything that you haven’t personally experienced or seen with your own eyes, then you exercise faith. Faith, a concept badly misunderstood by so many people, is the primary way that we know most things about the world. If you were to say, “I will stop claiming to know anything by faith,” then you would, in effect, know very little.

Thomistic philosopher Joseph Owens, in his book An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, explains how faith actually works:

If the mechanic who services your car tells you the valves need grinding, you assent to that judgment even though you yourself know nothing about the needs of valves. In this case there is nothing in the object to move you to assent, even to the probable assent of opinion. The assent is all the more caused by your will.

When you agree with the mechanic that your valves need grinding, what is going on? Why would you assent to something that you personally have not observed?

You give the assent, because you have concluded that the mechanic understands valves and wants you to know the truth about the ones in your car and that it is to your own advantage to accept his information. Assenting to a judgment on the word of another is called faith or belief. It requires acquaintance with the reliability of your informant, that is, that he has the requisite knowledge and that he is not intending to deceive you. Both these points are conclusions of your own. In accepting his capacity to give the information reliably, you accept his authority.

Is it crazy to trust the authority of another person?

In human authority there is always the possibility that your informant is mistaken or that he is deceiving you. Faith in human authority, therefore, can never be absolute. There is always the possibility that a judgment accepted solely on human authority may be wrong. In events immediately perceived by the informants, the reliability can be very high. It is on such testimony of witnesses that the gravest issues are decided in the lawcourts.

Again we ask, “Can we live without faith?” No. Living without faith would make life unlivable. We rely on other people’s authority all the time. It is the truly naive and foolish person who claims that everything they know they have experienced themselves or reasoned to themselves. Owens reminds us:

In everyday life, however, much of one’s information comes from authority. The news that you get from the daily telecast and daily paper, your knowledge of countries and cities that you have not visited, your knowledge of history, all that you know from reading of books, constitute a sizable portion of your cognition. Yet it is all accepted on faith. Faith, accordingly, is an important means of widening human cognition.

What Are the Roles of Faith and Reason in Christianity? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this series Philosopher Edward Feser demonstrated that reason, not faith, brings us all the way to the conclusion that Jesus is divine.  Once we arrive here, where do we go?

Feser explains:

Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and therefore that Christ really is divine, as He claimed to be, so that anything He taught must be true; in other words, suppose that the general strategy just sketched can be successfully fleshed out.

What would follow?  Faith, or belief, enters and takes center stage.

Then it follows that if you are rational you will believe anything Christ taught; indeed, if you are rational you will believe it even if it is something that you could not possibly have come to know in any other way, and even if it is something highly counterintuitive and difficult to understand.  For reason will have told you that Christ is infallible, and therefore cannot be wrong in anything He teaches.  In short, reason tells you to have faith in what Christ teaches, because He is divine.

We have faith in Christ and what He teaches because of who He is.  Because He proved himself to be divine by resurrecting from the dead, we believe Him.  That is faith.

Does every Christian follow the process that Feser describes, reasoning through philosophy and historical evidence to the conclusion that Jesus is divine?  Obviously not.  Most Christians believe because they have received it on authority from someone else who does understand the arguments.

There may even be more than one link in the chain to get back to someone who understands the arguments, but this hardly matters.  What matters is that there are theologians and philosophers and other scholars who do understand the arguments, so even the person who does not understand the reasons for his faith still indirectly bases his faith on those reasons.

This is no different than anything else we come to believe in life.  For the vast majority of things we each believe we have received on authority from someone else.  Feser gives a parallel in science.  “The man in the street who believes that E=mc^2 probably couldn’t give you an interesting defense of his belief if his life depended on it.  He believes it because his high school physics teacher told him about it.”

Continuing alone these lines Feser further argues:

Most people who believe that E=mc^2, and who believe almost any other widely known and generally accepted scientific proposition, do so on the basis of faith in exactly the sense in question here.  They believe it, in other words, on the authority of those from whom they learned it.  Everyone acknowledges that this is perfectly legitimate; indeed, there is no way we could know much of interest at all if we weren’t able to appeal to various authorities.

So these are the roles of reason and faith in Christianity, a far cry from the story that atheists tell.  Some of you may be complaining at this point that you know Christians who disavow this approach, who truly do have blind faith, who say that reason has no place in their belief system.  Feser’s final words on this topic are a propos:

I do not doubt that there are and have been Christians and people of other religions whose theory and/or practice does not fit this understanding.  But I do not speak for them, and neither did Aquinas and the other great thinkers of the Western religious tradition.  And if the ‘New Atheists’ are serious about making a rational case for atheism, then, as I have said, they should be taking on the best representatives of the opposing point of view – not blabbering on for hundreds of pages about the dangers of ‘faith’ as an irrational will to believe something in the face of all evidence, when this is an attitude that the mainstream Christian theological tradition has itself always condemned.

What Is Christian Faith?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most abused words in the English language is the word faith.  For skeptics, faith is believing in something despite reason.  For some religious folks, faith is simply the expression of positive emotions toward God.  Others claim faith is purely intellectual.

Can we more rigorously define what faith is?  I think we can, and I will call on Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to help out, from their book Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

Kreeft and Tacelli first differentiate between the object of faith and the act of faith.

The object of faith includes all the things that are believed about God, as communicated by the Bible.  These things that are believed are expressed in propositions (e.g., Jesus is the Son of God).  These propositions, however, are only pointers.  They direct our attention to the real object of faith, God.  If the real object of faith is God, then why do we need all the propositions that capture our beliefs about God?  Kreeft and Tacelli explain, “Without propositions, we cannot know or tell others what God we believe in and what we believe about God.”

The act of faith consists of more than just belief.  There are four components of faith: 1) emotional, 2) intellectual, 3) volitional, and 4) heart.  Let’s look at each of these one at a time.

Emotional faith is “feeling assurance or trust or confidence in a person.  This includes hope (which is much stronger than just a wish) and peace (which is much stronger than mere calm).”  Emotional faith is the weakest component of faith because emotions change so frequently.

Intellectual faith is belief.  According to Kreeft and Tacelli, intellectual faith is more stable than emotional faith.  Strongly held beliefs will tend not to change often.  They cite the definition of intellectual faith from the Baltimore Catechism: “the act of the intellect, prompted by the will, by which we believe everything God has revealed on the grounds of the authority of the One who revealed it.”

Volitional faith is an act of the will.  “This faith is faithfulness, or fidelity.  It manifests itself in behavior, that is, in good works. . . . For the root of volitional faith – the will – is the faculty or power of the soul that is closest to . . . the ‘heart’.”

Heart faith is the very center of a person’s being, the center of their soul.  This is the “I” where the emotions, intellect, and will reside.  “The heart is where God the Holy Spirit works in us. . . . With the heart we choose our ‘fundamental option’ of yes or no to God, and thereby determine our eternal identity and destiny.”

All four of these components of faith work together, with the heart being the intersection of them all.  Faith is, therefore, not just about emotions or intellect.  Faith involves the entire person – every part.

The interaction of the intellect and the will are particularly interesting.  Kreeft and Tacelli describe how they work together:

The intellect is the soul’s navigator, but the will is its captain. . . . The will can command the intellect to think, but the intellect cannot command the will to will, only inform it, as a navigator informs the captain.  Yet the will cannot simply make you believe.  It can’t force the intellect to believe what appears to it to be false, or to disbelieve what seems to it to be true.

We could also add that if the emotions are predisposed against believing, then faith can be thwarted.  This is why purely intellectual appeals to a non-believer may not be effective.  If their emotions and/or will are set against faith, then intellectual arguments cannot bring them to God.  Likewise, purely emotional appeals may appear to work for a short time until that person has time to think about their beliefs and decide they are not reasonable (they have an intellectual problem).  There are even people who will to believe, but their intellect and/or emotions stand in the way.

Christian faith deals with the whole individual, so the takeaway is that the church can never become one dimensional and forget that will, intellect, emotions, and finally the very heart of a person must all express faith.

Some Great Pascal Quotes – #8 Post of 2009

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I am reading Pascal’s Pensees right now and couldn’t help but stop and record some of the wonderful quotes I’ve run across.

Blaise Pascal

With regard to the interaction between faith and reason, Pascal said:

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

With regard to the search for God:

There are only three kinds of persons; those who serve God, having found Him; others who are occupied in seeking Him, not having found Him; while the remainder live without seeking Him and without having found Him.  The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy; those between are unhappy and reasonable.

With regard to belief or non-belief in God:

I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion is true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

With regard to the person who hears the gospel and immediately believes without ever reading the Bible:

Those who believe without having read the Testaments, do so because they have an inward disposition entirely holy, and all that they hear of our religion [Christianity] conforms to it.  They feel that a God has made them; they desire only to love God; they desire to hate themselves only.  They feel that they have no strength in themselves; that they are incapable of coming to God; and that if God does not come to them, they can have no communion with Him.

And they hear our religion [Christianity] say that men must love God only, and hate self only; but that, all being corrupt and unworthy of God, God made Himself man to unite Himself to us.  No more is required to persuade men who have this disposition in their heart, and who have this knowledge of their duty and of their inefficiency.

Did Jesus Want Us to Think?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

According to Martin Lloyd-Jones, the answer is “yes.”  Below is a quote from Lloyd-Jones where he is commenting on Matt. 6:30, from the Sermon on the Mount.  He argues that Jesus’ words indicate that he expected his listeners to be actively using their minds to make logical deductions from the evidence around them.  The source of this quote is Tim Challies’ blog.

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph, is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. …

We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. …

Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. … That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.

What is James Teaching About Faith and Works?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you’ve ever read James 2:14-26, then you’ve probably been confused.  Why?  Because James seems to be contradicting Paul’s clear teaching that eternal salvation is by faith alone, and not works.

Recently, through my seminary studies, I was introduced to a new way of interpreting this passage that has really opened my eyes.

The first thing to look at is James 2:26: “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.”  Notice that in this analogy, the body is equated with faith and the spirit is equated with deeds (works).  Since the spirit of a person is what animates his body, then James is saying that works are what animates faith!  This is just the opposite of the way many of us think about faith and works, but that is definitely what James is saying in verse 26, which is the conclusion of the passage.

But what does James mean by dead faith?  In verse 20, James says that “faith without deeds is useless.”  So now we know that dead faith is not faith that has disappeared or ceased to exist, but it has become useless.  It is not functioning in the way it was intended to function.

OK, but how was faith intended to function?  Here is where most everyone gets tripped up.  We read verse 14, which says, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?”  Ah hah!  We are talking about salvation from hell, about eternal life with God, right?  After all, any time the New Testament talks about being saved, it always means eternal life.  Wrong!!

The New Testament authors use the word save to mean several different things, and the only way we can determine which meaning is correct is by context.  According to Zane Hodges,

The Greek verb used in James 2:14 (sozo) has a wide range of possible meanings which run the gamut from physical healing and rescue from danger, to spiritual deliverances of various kinds, to preservation from final judgment and hell.  It is the interpreter’s duty to examine each text where this verb occurs to ascertain its exact sense.

When we look at James 1:21; 2:15-16; and 5:19-20, it certainly appears that the context dictates that James is speaking of being saved from physical death, and not being saved from hell.  Again, Hodges comments, “It has nothing to do with eternal destiny at all, but deals instead with the life-preserving benefits that obedience brings to the Christian and which cannot be experienced by mere hearing or by faith alone.”

Useless faith is faith which does not promote the life-saving qualities of God’s Word.  Sin brings pain, suffering, and finally physical death to those who practice it.  It is only by putting God’s Word to use through works that we gain the benefits of its life-saving capacity.  In this way, our works animate our faith.  They make our faith come alive in our earthly lives.  The Book of Proverbs is full of this theme (see  Prov. 10:27; 11:19; 12:28; 13:14; 19:16), and James is building on this Old Testament foundation.

“OK,” you say, “I can see your point, but what about James saying Abraham and Rahab were justified by works?”  The word justified does not always refer to legal righteousness in front of God.  It sometimes means that, but not always.  In this case, James is talking about the vindication of our faith during our spiritual walk on earth.  Abraham’s works perfected his faith.  Rahab was also vindicated by her works.  James is not speaking of the faith that saves from hell, but the faith that believers have after they are saved from hell.  Works animate, perfect, and mature that faith.

These verses are not talking about eternal life or salvation from hell.  They are not talking about the initial faith that saves a person from God’s eternal punishment.  They are referring to the faith of a person who is already destined for heaven.  For this person, their faith becomes useless in their earthly life if it is not animated by works.  If you don’t act out your beliefs, you get no benefit from them while you live this physical life.  This is very practical and wise advice that the readers of James needed to hear.

Our mistake is that whenever we read the words faith, works, save, and justification, we always assume the subject must be eternal life.  This assumption is not always correct.  The New Testament writers employed these words to convey several different concepts, and if we don’t carefully study the context, we will miss their point.

Should Catholic Apologists Be Invited to Speak at an Evangelical Apologetics Conference?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In a recent post, I mentioned some of the speakers at an upcoming apologetics conference sponsored by Southern Evangelical Seminary.  One blog commenter noticed that Catholic speakers were being featured at the event and argued that they should not be.  He believes that Catholics are not Christians, and therefore cannot properly defend the Christian faith (which is the goal of apologetics).  Specifically, the commenter mentioned the fact that Catholics do not agree with evangelical views of justification by faith alone.

I disagreed with the commenter and argued that Catholics are Christian and should be able to present at the conference, but I want to know what readers of this blog think.  Should Catholics be allowed to speak at an evangelical apologetics conference?  Tell us what you think by voting in the poll below.  Also, share your comments on this issue by commenting on this blog post.

"For Not The Hearers Of The Law Are Just Before God…"

Romans 2:13 says:

“For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.” (KJV)

A few years back I was listening to an LDS General Authority talk about how we need to do more… a better job with our home teaching, visiting teaching, magnifying our callings, etc.   To support his point he quoted Paul… ” Brothers and Sisters we need to lengthen our stride and do more.  If we don’t are we really doing our duty as members of the church?  We must do more!  As Paul says ‘For not the hearers of the law are just before God but the doers of the law shall be justified.'”   In a recent comment on The Book of Mormon… Another Testament Tom linked to an article written by LDS General Authority Elder Christofferson here [link no longer works].  In his article Elder Christofferson used this quote from Paul in a similar manner in an effort to emphasize the necessity for good works to enter Heaven.

To be classed among the truly penitent, random acts of obedience will not be adequate. We must properly enter into the covenants and persist in keeping them to the point that our expectation of salvation is affirmed by the Holy Spirit of Promise (see D&C 132:7, 19). It is not simply the promise of obedience in our contracts with Deity that brings grace, but the performance of our promises: “For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified” (Rom. 2:13).

What I find most disturbing is the context in which these General Authorities used this passage.  The fact of the matter is they are quoting Paul completely out of context.  Looking at the first three chapters of Romans closely one can see that Paul was not using this passage to emphasize the need for good works.  Instead Paul was using this passage to point out how no one can do enough good works to enter Heaven because no one will ever be able to keep the whole law.

In chapters 1 – 3 Paul builds his case for the depravity of mankind – both Gentile and Jew.  In 1:29-32 he sums up the state of the Gentiles.

29Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,  30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

In chapter 2 Paul talks about the state of the Jew.  In verse 12 he tells us:

12For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law

The Jews, who have been given the law, will be judged by the law.  What must they do to keep the law?  That is the question Paul answers in verse 13.

For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.

They have to be doers of the law!  How much of the law?  Will they be OK if they keep 90% of it?  How about 99% of it?  James gives us a clear answer.

10For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

Unless one keeps the whole law they are guilty of breaking it all.  Can anyone keep the whole law?  Can anyone stop sinning?  Paul tells us just a few verses later in Romans Chapter 3 that the answer is clearly no.

10As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: 11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. 12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.  13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:  14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:  15 Their feet are swift to shed blood: 16 Destruction and misery are in their ways: 17 And the way of peace have they not known: 18 There is no fear of God before their eyes. 19 Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.

The next verse is one of my favorites because it tells us what the purpose of the law is.

20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.

The purpose of the law is to convict us of how bad we really are.  No one can keep all the commandments.  No one is perfect.  The law acts a perfect mirror to tell us just how bad we are and in 3:9 Paul tells us the state that we are all in.

“we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin”.

So what are we to do?  Can we ever get out of this situation?  Fortunately in 3:23-28 Paul gives us the most glorious answer:

21But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;  22Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:  23For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;  24Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus25Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;  26To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.  27Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.  28Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. (Emphasis mine)

Romans 2:13 is not given to convict us that we need to do more or work harder.  Those who use it in this manner are lifting it out of context and are using it to support a false works based theology.   Rather the verse is there to tell us that we cannot work hard enough to be saved.  For no matter how hard we work we will always fall short.  We instead need to turn to Jesus Christ and trust in Him for our salvation.  It is a free gift  to all who believe!  By so doing we will be justified freely by His grace without the deeds of the law.  All praise be to Christ!

Darrell