“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
Editor’s note. This quote is widely misattributed to Sartre, sometimes to Being and Nothingness, but the word lonely doesn’t even appear once in Hazel E. Barnes’ standard English translation. Nevertheless, it’s a great quote, akin to sayings I’ve heard that resonated with me. Does the quote capture the gist of Sartre’s existentialism? Of “bad faith”, or “inauthenticity”?
At the rutted, muddy impasse between theological determinism and theological deferentialism — whether God determines every event in history or has created other determining agents besides himself — I choose the latter rut. Though perhaps I could do other, here I stand because of the many threads in the biblical tapestry of metaphors, archetypes, roles, themes, parables, and stories that God tells to reveal His relationship to humanity. The debate about the way in which God exercises His sovereignty or rightful authority over His creation often centers upon the interpretation of a handful of contested texts, from the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus to the Potter’s prerogative in Romans. Through these peepholes, the proof texts can seem ambivalent. But a wider gaze at all the ways God acts and speaks makes it overwhelmingly clear that God has made our relationship with Him voluntary, mutual, responsive, and thereby responsible.
I mean to challenge a very specific and widely held view: theological determinism. Sometimes called “meticulous sovereignty”, theological determinism is at odds with the overwhelming thrust of biblical revelation and human experience. On this view, God is the determinant (i.e. the determiner, the decisive factor) of every event ever. God is the final answer to every question that asks, “Who determined that such and such would be so?” There is not, to my knowledge, a symmetrical term for the opposing view. With respect to salvation specifically, monergism versus synergism is precise. I’ll be using theological deferentialism to denote the view that God is not the determinant of every event, most especially of all those events that are against His will. Rather, God created other agents (determiners) and freely chooses to defer the determination of many events to them. God allows — No! He urges, expects, and commands — them to act and to determine many aspects and the ultimate end of their own lives. Indeed, in that capacity, God expects them to willingly yield to His calling and commands.
What is it to have a will, to be a determiner? For our biblical exegesis, the crucial issue is: who is the determinant of an action. When we ask, why did Persephone choose x over y, I say a full accounting amounts to, Persephone (the determiner) determined a (one option amongst others) for the sake of y (the reason/s). For example, Persephone determined to eat the fruit loops(a) for their crunchy, sugary taste(y) instead of eating the fruit salad(b) for its nutritious vitamins(z). Here a and b are two options and y and z are ends or reasons. No additional or prior desires, influences, or persons were the deciding factor or determinant between a or b. She had reasons for both, neither of which, in itself, was determinative. Persephone — not God, not an ineluctable chain of events or desires — was the decider, the agent, the determiner. Of course, many things beyond her control had to exist and persist to occasion this decision point, but she herself was the determinant of a over b.
We are all directly and constantly aware of what I am describing. Every day we are presented with thousands of choices, each with upsides and downsides. We feel the force of desires and habits pressing upon our will. We also feel that the force is resistible, that we can go either way (1 Cor. 10:13). We are inclined, but not compelled, as Aquinas put it. We feel this will power, and sometimes, at momentous junctures, we even feel that Kierkegaardian “dread” at holding a slice of the future in our hands (Deuteronomy 30:15), or the Frostian regret at roads we could have traveled, but did not. Our direct awareness of our wills is so ever present that the determinist’s claim — that it is an illusion — is radical in the extreme. It is on a par with reductive claims that consciousness — seeing, hearing, and thinking — is illusory. The pre-theoretical and pre-theological view that it is we who determine many of our acts is rightly our presumption. Though the ocean currents pull east or west, that I am the captain of my soul is as evident to me as that the water is wet.
This determinative will is the awesome privilege and responsibility that God grants his human (and apparently angelic) creatures. God defers by allowing others to participate in determining the course of events. By contrast, for the theological determinist, Persephone chose a because God determined that she would do so before time, according to his good pleasure, for His own ends. Persephone may have been instrumental in bringing it about, but God is the answer to who determined it and why. God is the determinant of a, and of b, c, d, and e. Hence, theological determinism. God determines all.
To test the biblical concordance of theological determinism, a full explanatory theory of free will or agency is unnecessary. We need only to read scripture attentive to whether it treats others beside God as the determiners of events. And indeed, it would be hard to find a question more plentifully answered in the biblical drama. The will, and whether it will choose God’s way or its own, is central from Genesis to Revelation. In histories, parables, prophecies, revelations, and songs it recurs on every page. Will persons and peoples obey? Will they cooperate? Will they return or run off, defy or submit, run after other gods or be faithful? Will they continue in their own way or confess? The volitional language is pervasive: commands, obedience, rewards, temptation, sin, self-denial, self-discipline, obedience, repentance, love, judgment, Satan, persistence, and on and on. The history the Bible records is populated throughout with wills who are either in keeping or at odds with God’s commands. No doubt, God’s goodness, glory, and preeminence is paramount in the biblical story and He is the protagonist. The human response to God is also central to the story. Volition extends its branches into virtually every chapter.
Let us get specific, comparing theological determinism with the record of God’s self-revelation and involvement in history in the Bible. I aim to show that the Bible regularly attributes some choices to God, and some to his creatures. As Luke records in Acts 2:23, in the climactic events of the crucifixion: “This man was handed over to you by God‘s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”
Right out of the Garden, in the first chapter of Genesis, we see God deferring and delegating to Adam. “God brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” (Genesis 2:20 | NIV) I think of how eagerly my wife and I seized at the name our two-year-old daughter gave to the orphan cat we adopted; “Mr. Wires” she dubbed him, for his very pronounced whiskers. My wife also had a clever name: “Mr. Meowgi”. But there was a particular delight in delegating that honor of naming to our young daughter. Our delight is an echo of God’s fatherly delight in his creature’s first creative acts. But this story in Genesis loses its resonance and significance if Adam is merely a mouthpiece for the names God has already chosen. Adam determines their names, using his God given creativity and calling. As a good father and out of a capacious will, God defers to Adam’s whim. Ever since, one of the first exercises in every child’s development is learning the names of the animals.
Through the process of naming the animals, Adam comes to see the lack of a suitable partner for himself. God intended a helpmate for Adam that — unlike the mute, subservient relationship with the animals — would be equal, reciprocal, mutual. As Adam’s wife, she would be his ally and partner, a collaborator in the mission God gives them to multiply. God also gives the responsibility to take care of — “to rule over” and “cultivate” — the world they inhabit. Their calling is to be God’s stewards, executors, viceroys. My wife and I taught our daughters to feed Mr. Wires, the cat, and soon they were cleaning the litter box and the chicken coop too. We want them to feel responsible for the well-being of these housemates, and for the home they inhabit. We are always on the hunt for new responsibilities they can take up. As they grow, our goal is that they would have learned how to do so whether we are there or not; that they will develop a character that chooses obedience even in our absence, that prefers the good out of their own choosing.
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.
Psalm 8:5-6
It is right to marvel with David that God endowed us with the weight of glory and of responsibility for making this or that like so. It is a mistake, even out of humility, to minimize that commission God has given us. From the start, God lays the groundwork for human persons whose raison d’etre is bringing glory to God by participating in and contributing to the flowering and flourishing of creation.
In the Garden, God plants a Tree of Life and a forbidden tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Though I’m sure we do not fully understand their significance, planted right there in an orchard at the beginning, and written of millennia before our modern debates, is a momentous choice. On the one hand is life, and on the other, death (Gen. 2:17). These two trees reveal God’s intention to enable Adam and Eve to choose to obey or disobey, to live according to his rule, or to reject it. God lavishes Adam and Eve with a garden of delights, a Tree of Life and a thousand yeses. But to the fruit of one tree, he says: “thou shalt not”. It is God’s very first negative command to man. It is a mistake to think that Adam and Eve did not understand the difference between good and evil, that they did not know they had a choice between obedience and disobedience before succumbing to the serpent’s temptation. Eve initially rebuffs the serpent, explaining that to eat its fruit is forbidden. So, from the start, God gifts a garden of earthly delights to enjoy forever. But, significantly, he also makes a point of making it possible to knowingly reject God’s command.
The Bible centers the will, the locus of decision making, in the human heart. And testing and winnowing human hearts is a recurrent theme from Eden onwards. After their liberation by God from their Egyptian masters and their grumbling and faithlessness, the Hebrews’ sojourn in the wilderness was just such a test. “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.” (Deuteronomy 8:2) God allows the Hebrews to be hemmed in by Philistines and Canaanites to this end. “They were left to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the Lord’s commands, which he had given their ancestors through Moses.” (Judges 3:4) King David writes, “Test me, Lord, and try me, examine my heart and my mind; (Psalm 26:2). Jeremiah records on God’s behalf, “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.” (Jeremiah 17:10. See also Zechariah 13:9, Job 23:10, Jeremiah 12:3, Proverbs 17:3, 1 Corinthians 3:13, Luke 6:45.)
Notice how clearly these verses distinguish between the acts of God, such as leading them in to the wilderness, and the acts of each Israelite, their decisions whether to keep God’s commands. God puts his people to the test. But if it is God who has determined all the machinations of their hearts, then it is God’s will that is on trial; “God in the dock” as C.S. Lewis put it. That’s not what it says.
I have made you a tester of metals and my people the ore, that you may observe and test their ways. They are all hardened rebels, going about to slander. They are bronze and iron, they all act corruptly.
Jeremiah 7:27-28
As the center of our will, and the source of sin (Matthew 12:34), we must guard our heart (Proverbs 4:23). It is the human heart, the will, that is put to the test by these commands, trials, and tribulations.
In view of all the ways in which hearts are tested and face a day of final reckoning and judgment, it is clear that one of God’s principal purposes for our lives is the winnowing, threshing, and refining of the human heart. But this only makes sense if willing human hearts are not merely an expression of God’s own will. Though God can thwart the plans we devise in our hearts (Proverbs 16:9), God locates the genesis of evil acts within the heart of man.
For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come from within and defile a person.
Mark 7:21-23
Echoing Jesus, his brother and disciple James writes.
So submit to God. But resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and make your hearts pure, you double-minded.
James 4:7-8
Proverbs 16:9,
wellspring
call and response
James 4:8
He said, “What comes out of a person defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. 23 All these evils comefrom within and defile a person.”
add
“But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.”
-Luke 7:30
Calvinism’s take on this verse must be: God purposely decreed for them to reject His own purpose for the
and the Egyptians lorded it over them defer Paul echoes this sentiment in his letter to the Galatians. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Notice “don’t let yourselves“
Football or foosball
Not all Israel
5 They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind: Jeremiah 19:5
“Your own ways, your own deeds have brought all this upon you; this is your punishment, and all this comes of your rebellion.” (Jer 4:18 NEB) Obadiah underscored the same lesson: “For soon the day of the LORD will come on all the nations: you shall be treated as you have treated others, and your deeds will recoil on your own head.” (Obad 1:15 NEB)
What you sow, you will reap. What is crucial to see when God sets out the rewards and consequences of a particular course of action is that the decider will be making their choice on the basis of the ends which they seek. It is not the past or the present that determines their choice but their pursuit of future outcomes.
Also implicit in the principle of sowing and reaping is that the consequences we earn are tied to the choices we sowed. Who sowed? And who, thereby determined our outcome? We did. The Bible stresses this point over and over. Most consequentially, the sin we sow reaps death. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” (Romans 6:23) We earn death, whereas life is a gift.
A king, Saul. Obey the voice of the people in relation to all that they say to you. For it is not you they have rejected, but Me they have rejected from reigning over them.”
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge your flesh, but through love serve one another. In this passage
“Rules are made to be broken.” That popular rebel spirit is antithetical to the Spirit of God. Still, the saying has it right that rules and laws can be broken. As in the Garden, where Eve and then Adam disobeyed the prohibition against the one Tree, we have excelled at breaking God’s commandments. What is a
Laws that can be broken imply at least that the lawgiver knows the law can be broken and that those under the law have the capacity to both obey and disobey the law. Though there are consequences, God’s law is resistible.
A covenant is a contract or commitment between two or more parties. Yes, the very nature of covenant, of one of the most overarching aspects of our relationship to God, has two or more parties. The biblical story involves several pivotal covenants, from the Adamic Covenant, the Noahic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, to the New Covenant inaugurated by Jesus. Though all of these covenants involve two parties, the consensual nature of the covenant is especially pronounced in the Mosaic Covenant. Twice over, the details of the agreement, obedience to a set of moral laws in exchange for blessing and the Promised Land, are laid out, and twice the elders and the Israelites agree to the terms. “So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the Lord had commanded him to speak. The people all responded together, “We will do everything the Lord has said.” So Moses brought their answer back to the Lord.(Exodus 19:8, 24:3)
As such, a covenant can be fragile if one of the parties to the covenant is unreliable, inconstant, unfaithful. In one of the most exotic metaphors in scripture, Abraham is put to sleep
In the book of Genesis, we find a mysterious episode where Jacob wrestles through the night with a man who is an incarnation of God. At daybreak, the “man” tells him: “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” (Genesis 32:22-32) Henceforth, “Israel”, the namesake of the people of God, means to struggle with God. To wrestle. Is there any more poignant picture of a contest of wills? And, of course, the Israelites live up to their name in subsequent history, wrestling with God for generations, sometimes obeying, more often rebelling. Notice that God allows Jacob to wrestle instead of overpowering Him, as He could have. as illustrated by throwing out his socket with a touch. Here again we see God’s desire to gift strength and self-determination to Jacob. Like a father who allows his child to compete in a wrestling match on the living room carpet.
If Jacob and the angel are each facets of God’s will, how does one make sense of this clash? It reads like a foreshowing of Fight Club, where the narrator has had a psychotic break and is left wrestling with his own shadow, that is, with himself.
Jonah famously did not want to obey the calling of God on his life. He hated the Ninevites and when called by God, he ran the other direction. To accomplish his will, God could have knit Jonah together differently in the womb. God could have determined that his irresistible desires would be to conform from ages past. Instead, God softens Jonah’s heart by being an agent in the story, shaping events . This is the kind of . Like a family intervention to implore a wayward daughter to choose differently, this is the kind of influence we see as
Whenever persons in the Bible encounter the living God
After the Fall, the next generation has to deal once more with the temptation to sin. “Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.” (Genesis 4:7 NET) Cain, tragically, fails to subdue it, and murders Abel. Notice in this instance that God emphasizes, twice over, that though tempted, Cain can and must choose not to sin. This episode foreshadows the penetrating description of temptation and sin In James.
The apostle Paul provides one of the most penetrating and intriguing descriptions of temptation and sin. “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. Then when desire conceives, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death.”
James 1:13-15 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jas.1.13-15.NET Here James emphatically disassociates God with any role in bringing someone to sin. Rather, it is desires within us that serve as the hooks onto which temptation latches.
Like Robert Frosts famous two paths that diverge in a wood, God sets out two paths before his people. And there he implored them, choose life!
These paths recur throughout scripture and on judgment day, goats and sheep, wheat and chaff, . Jesus in particular uses this metaphor
Within the sixty-six books of the Bible spanning millennia, we find hundreds of names, stories metaphors, similes, and actions attributed to God. Overwhelmingly they paint a portrait of an interactive, synergistic relationship between God and his creatures. And they portray people as both contending and cooperating with God. At almost every turn, God invites us to take up the mantle, to participate in the work he is doing, to respond to him in obedience, to invest and grow our gifts in his absence, . Instead of determining our actions, God defers to us. You choose. I have not chosen for you.
The will of man in opposition or submission, broken or reconciled.
Deuternomoy 5:29
15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
John 5:39-40 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/jhn.5.39-40.NIV
Throughout the Bible, but especially in the prophets and reinstated with John the Baptist and then Jesus, the call goes out, “repent!”, “turn away”, “return”. To repent is to choose otherwise. It is a direct and bold appeal to the will. God initiates, often through a prophet, reminding His people of acts of gracious love, and exhorts us to respond. Consider Zechariah, one of many such examples.
3 Tell the people: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Return to me”, declares the Lord Almighty, “and I will return to you”, says the Lord Almighty. 4 Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Turn from your evil ways and your evil practices.” But they would not listen or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. 5 Where are your ancestors now? And the prophets, do they live forever? 6 But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your ancestors? “Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.’”
Notice the back and forth. God says, turn. The ancestors do not turn. Zechariah’s audience does turn. One generation repents, the other does not. And there is reciprocity. If you return to me, I will return to you.
Having chosen a wayward path, God beseeches people to choose to reverse course. Principally, he uses prophets and consequences to nudge people back to the narrow gate
‘This is what the Lord says:
Jeremiah 8:4-6
“‘When people fall down, do they not get up?
When someone turns away, do they not return?
5 Why then have these people turned away?
Why does Jerusalem always turn away?
They cling to deceit;
they refuse to return.
6 I have listened attentively,
but they do not say what is right.
None of them repent of their wickedness,
saying, “What have I done?”
Each pursues their own course
like a horse charging into battle.
“Do not let your heart turn to her ways or stray into her paths.” (Prover 7:25 | NIV)
In several parables, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a wedding and to its guests as those who said yes to the invitation.
Similar to the invitation, Jesus uses the metaphor of a sower
We are encouraged by God to make appeals to Him, and assured that he will answer them. Abraham (Gen. 18:16-32), Moses (Ex. 32:9-14), and Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:1-11) each reason with God. Jesus tells us to “pray and not lose heart”, since even an unjust judge will accede the request. By contrast, how much more will our good Father in Heaven. “And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” (Luke 18: 7) As if to make the point clearer, later in the same chapter, Luke tells us Jesus heals a persistent blind man whom he asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Yes, it is incredible that the Lord of the all would take our desires and requests into account, but Scripture gives us every indication that He does.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuke to theological determinism in scripture is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, where he prayed that God’s will would be done on earth as it is heaven. Here Jesus himself states that much of what occurs under the sun is at odds with God’s will, whether secret or explicit. There is no hint of a “but actually, in God’s secret will”.
After creating, God declared his world good.
One of the most troubling aspects of biblical revelation is that in some sense, Satan is the prince of this world. Satan has some level of jurisdiction over the affairs of this world. The Devil is active, prowling and — He is a determiner of events. This poses a difficult dilemma for the theological determinist. Is Satan acting out God’s will or is he another determiner, fighting against God and his Kingdom.
In His great mountain side sermon, Jesus bids his listeners to ask, to seek, to knock, to do (unto others), to enter (the narrow gate), to watch out (for false prophets), and to put His words into practice. Jesus warns that, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
Here multiple threads are interwoven. the appeal to our wills is a steady drumbeat.
Matthew 7:21 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/mat.7.21.niv
““Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Matthew 7:7 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/mat.7.7.niv
This exhortation to seek God, to choose the narrow road, is entirely in keeping with Jesus’ teaching elsewhere. Jesus calls us to pick up our cross and follow him, but to count the cost. These calls bear all the hallmarks of and informed and a willful decision
In the Garden of Gethsemane, we see perhaps the most momentous act of will since the Garden of Eden. Standing in contrast to Adam’s and Eve’s ill-advised disobedience, Jesus falls before his Father, anticipating his imminent suffering and death with fear and dread. With his “spirit willing, but flesh weak”, Jesus pleads, face to the ground, with God the Father for another way. But with a resolve that is the antithesis of his forbears, Jesus utters, “yet not as I will, but as you will”.
When we repent of going outside of the boundaries that God has set is an act of submission. Probably the central act of will in scripture\
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Matthew 26:39 New International Version (NIV)
Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God. May Your gracious Spirit lead me on level ground. (Psalm 143:10)
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mathew 26:41).
“This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”
Acts 2:23 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/act.2.23.NIV
It is sometimes said that the Bible is Gods love letter to his people. It is also a tragic story of unrequited love. One of the most remarkable but recurrent descriptions of God is as one who laments and longs for the ones he loves. Indeed, unrequited love is an overarching theme of the biblical story. God loves, pursues, rescues, and chastens a people whose love is, in return, fleeting and fickle. Indeed, instead of love, often there is hate. It is odd to think of God as having unmet desires, but so we read, again and again. Confronting the pharisees Jesus says:
37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gatheryour children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it!
Jesus, Matthew 27: 37
Those who trust in Jesus join his family as adopted children of God. Astonishing. “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1a) Jesus in particular appeals to the picture of a good Father to reveal God’s nature to us. “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11) God’s goodness and generosity as a Father is oft remembered (James 1:17).
Romans 8:14-17 – For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”)
This picture of God as father is at odds with a God who determines every story beat of His children’s lives.
The idea that a controlling sovereignty redounds to the glory of God is perplexing. We would never confer extra honor to a domineering father who treated his children thusly.
My four year old daughter has a rare form of liver disease called Caroli. While we awaited surgery, she had nearly daily bouts with extreme pain and emotions. In these traumatized states, she refused pain meds, even though it was the thing that could relieve her pain and restore her to herself. Reasoning with her became impossible, and sometimes my wife or I have to force the medicine into her mouth. It is awful enduring her writhing pain with her. And yet, it was worse still to force these meds on her over her clenched fist protests as she screamed: “Don’t force, don’t force!” In these heart-wrenching episodes, two things came into focus: the powerful human drive to not have our wills violated, and my own horror, as a father, to have to do so.
Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. (Isaiah 1:2)
“We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
2 Corinthians 5:20 NIV
http://bible.com/111/2co.5.20.niv
Ambassador is one of the most beautiful characterizations of the missionary call in
In the Garden, it is the serpent — God’s and humanity’s arch nemesis — who tempts Eve and then Adam. And ever since,
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
1 Corinthians 10:13 | NIV
Sin is to cross the line or to miss the mark. It is to trespass, to fall short.
“If it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.”
Here we see a faculty over and above desire. “Do not to let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey it in its lust.”
God has nothing to do with the unrighteous acts of man. He opposes them. He casts it out. The biblical authors are exceedingly concerned to underscore that God is not evil and has nothing to do with evil.
If it is God who determined our wicked acts, it requires him to be intimately involved in the contemplating and planning of the most wicked and perverse of human deeds. This is unthinkable.
When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
James 1:13-17 | NIV
One of the most stunning of God’s revelations is that He is a God who created us in a relationship to himself and seeks to restore the rift in that relationship. From the Garden where the relationship was poisoned to its ages long restoration through Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. At the crux of the story is Jesus, who comes to restore the restore the rift and, astonishingly, calls His disciples and followers not just servants, but friends. In this central biblical theme lies the profound incomprehensibility of theological determinism. All of the thousands of relational words and stories God uses to reveal himself — love, friendship, adultery, reconciliation, the prodigal, the bride, etcetera — are analogies from human relationships. And human relationships are always bilateral, reciprocal, interactive. The meaning of these terms is not preserved when there is but one will on both sides of the relation. a ⟷ b, a ⟷ a
From the start, God hands work and the honor of participation in the story to His creatures. Adam is given the
In perhaps the most compelling gesture of deference, Jesus chooses to leave his work in the hands of his people, the church.
Because the ability to will and choose freely is sui generis, the use of analogies and metaphors in this conversation is inevitable. Every analogy is imperfect, and none will capture our subject . Nevertheless, if Jesus spoke of us seeds and lambs, surely there is some possibility for to be gained.
more like the making of the movie than the writing of the screenplay. It’s more like football than foosball.
And yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, theological determinism is ascendant in many quarters. Many Reformed theologians apply their monocausal (“monergistic”) accounting not only to salvation, but to every human happening. God, of course, is inconceivably transcendent and independent, and humans are lowly and utterly dependent for every breath. That is a given.
Often, the intentions driving theological determinism are of the noblest sort. First, there is a desire to give all due to God. You sometimes hear this view expressed as, “it’s not about man, it’s all God”. And second, there is a desire to construe God’s power in the strongest terms, and therefore as complete control. We ought to marvel with David at the realization that God chose to clothe us in glory, honor, and responsibility.
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:
Psalm 8:5-6
Dan Wolgemuth’s anecdote of Home Depot.A battle over the meaning of terms is right at the
To bring the distinction into focus, the most helpful parallel is the way in which interlocutors have used the terms monergism and synergism with respect to regeneration and salvation. As R.C. Sproul explains:
Monergism is the opposite of synergism. … Synergism is a cooperative venture, a working together of two or more parties. … Monergistic regeneration is exclusively a divine act. … A corpse cannot revive itself. It cannot even assist in the effort. It offers no help in reviving itself, though once revived it is empowered to act and respond.
R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology? Understanding the Basics
Reformed theologians like Sproul describe salvation as a “monergistic” event, wherein God is the “exclusive” agent who effects the outcome, with no “assistance”, no “help”. That is a conversation for another day.2 Of concern here is that the theological determinist extends this monocausal accounting to all human events, the will of God being the sufficient, 100% cause of every event, every effect. There is one player in this game, and many pieces; many characters, but one writer ; one will, and many conduits. By contrast, the deferentialist sees God choosing to have a “synergistic” relationship with his creatures, wherein God gifts humans with the privilege and responsibility of being a component cause of many events. On this multicausal view, God incorporates many causal agents, giving a small writing role to each of us. We are coauthors, collaborators, contenders. God is the creator, but we his stewards. God is the initiator, but we the respondents. God is the hero, but we are his allies, or his enemies. God is the conductor, but we play our notes, following the rhythm, or not. God is the director, and as actors we follow the script, or not, with room, even, for improvisation. He calls, we respond. One way – or another.
Perhaps synergism is the best counterpart to determinism, though it is perhaps more specific, as the antipode to monergism. Libertarian free will is not an apt term because it is a term for a view about human the human will, not about God.
Because we are directly acquainted with our wills, it is not special pleading when so called “libertarians” insist that free will is, de facto, libertarian. We could be mistaken, but our knowledge of the will is based on the tangible and repeated experience of desires and pressures being irresistible and of the determination of imminent events being in our hands.
problem passages: Acts 4:28
At the rutted, muddy impasse between theological determinism and theological deferentialism — whether God determines every event in history or has created other determining agents besides himself — I choose the latter rut. Though perhaps I could do other, here I stand because of the many threads in the biblical tapestry of metaphors, archetypes, roles, themes, parables, and stories that God tells to reveal His relationship to humanity. The debate about the way in which God exercises His sovereignty or rightful authority over His creation often centers upon the interpretation of a handful of contested texts, from the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus to the Potter’s prerogative in Romans. Through these peepholes, the proof texts can seem ambivalent. But a wider gaze at all the ways God acts and speaks makes it overwhelmingly clear that God has made our relationship with Him voluntary, mutual, responsive, and thereby responsible.
I mean to challenge a very specific and widely held view: theological determinism. Sometimes called “meticulous sovereignty”, theological determinism is at odds with the overwhelming thrust of biblical revelation and human experience. On this view, God is the determinant (i.e. the determiner, the decisive factor) of every event ever. God is the final answer to every question that asks, “Who determined that such and such would be so?” There is not, to my knowledge, a symmetrical term for the opposing view. With respect to salvation specifically, monergism versus synergism is precise. I’ll be using theological deferentialism to denote the view that God is not the determinant of every event, most especially of all those events that are against His will. Rather, God created other agents (determiners) and freely chooses to defer the determination of many events to them. God allows — No! He urges, expects, and commands — them to act and to determine many aspects and the ultimate end of their own lives. Indeed, in that capacity, God expects them to willingly yield to His calling and commands.
What is it to have a will, to be a determiner? For our biblical exegesis, the crucial issue is: who is the determinant of an action. When we ask, why did Persephone choose x over y, I say a full accounting amounts to, Persephone (the determiner) determined a (one option amongst others) for the sake of y (the reason/s). For example, Persephone determined to eat the fruit loops(a) for their crunchy, sugary taste(y) instead of eating the fruit salad(b) for its nutritious vitamins(z). Here a and b are two options and y and z are ends or reasons. No additional or prior desires, influences, or persons were the deciding factor or determinant between a or b. She had reasons for both, neither of which, in itself, was determinative. Persephone — not God, not an ineluctable chain of events or desires — was the decider, the agent, the determiner. Of course, many things beyond her control had to exist and persist to occasion this decision point, but she herself was the determinant of a over b.
We are all directly and constantly aware of what I am describing. Every day we are presented with thousands of choices, each with upsides and downsides. We feel the force of desires and habits pressing upon our will. We also feel that the force is resistible, that we can go either way (1 Cor. 10:13). We are inclined, but not compelled, as Aquinas put it. We feel this will power, and sometimes, at momentous junctures, we even feel that Kierkegaardian “dread” at holding a slice of the future in our hands (Deuteronomy 30:15), or the Frostian regret at roads we could have traveled, but did not. Our direct awareness of our wills is so ever present that the determinist’s claim — that it is an illusion — is radical in the extreme. It is on a par with reductive claims that consciousness — seeing, hearing, and thinking — is illusory. The pre-theoretical and pre-theological view that it is we who determine many of our acts is rightly our presumption. Though the ocean currents pull east or west, that I am the captain of my soul is as evident to me as that the water is wet.
This determinative will is the awesome privilege and responsibility that God grants his human (and apparently angelic) creatures. God defers by allowing others to participate in determining the course of events. By contrast, for the theological determinist, Persephone chose a because God determined that she would do so before time, according to his good pleasure, for His own ends. Persephone may have been instrumental in bringing it about, but God is the answer to who determined it and why. God is the determinant of a, and of b, c, d, and e. Hence, theological determinism. God determines all.
To test the biblical concordance of theological determinism, a full explanatory theory of free will or agency is unnecessary. We need only to read scripture attentive to whether it treats others beside God as the determiners of events. And indeed, it would be hard to find a question more plentifully answered in the biblical drama. The will, and whether it will choose God’s way or its own, is central from Genesis to Revelation. In histories, parables, prophecies, revelations, and songs it recurs on every page. Will persons and peoples obey? Will they cooperate? Will they return or run off, defy or submit, run after other gods or be faithful? Will they continue in their own way or confess? The volitional language is pervasive: commands, obedience, rewards, temptation, sin, self-denial, self-discipline, obedience, repentance, love, judgment, Satan, persistence, and on and on. The history the Bible records is populated throughout with wills who are either in keeping or at odds with God’s commands. No doubt, God’s goodness, glory, and preeminence is paramount in the biblical story and He is the protagonist. The human response to God is also central to the story. Volition extends its branches into virtually every chapter.
Let us get specific, comparing theological determinism with the record of God’s self-revelation and involvement in history in the Bible. I aim to show that the Bible regularly attributes some choices to God, and some to his creatures. As Luke records in Acts 2:23, in the climactic events of the crucifixion: “This man was handed over to you by God‘s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”
Right out of the Garden, in the first chapter of Genesis, we see God deferring and delegating to Adam. “God brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” (Genesis 2:20 | NIV) I think of how eagerly my wife and I seized at the name our two-year-old daughter gave to the orphan cat we adopted; “Mr. Wires” she dubbed him, for his very pronounced whiskers. My wife also had a clever name: “Mr. Meowgi”. But there was a particular delight in delegating that honor of naming to our young daughter. Our delight is an echo of God’s fatherly delight in his creature’s first creative acts. But this story in Genesis loses its resonance and significance if Adam is merely a mouthpiece for the names God has already chosen. Adam determines their names, using his God given creativity and calling. As a good father and out of a capacious will, God defers to Adam’s whim. Ever since, one of the first exercises in every child’s development is learning the names of the animals.
Through the process of naming the animals, Adam comes to see the lack of a suitable partner for himself. God intended a helpmate for Adam that — unlike the mute, subservient relationship with the animals — would be equal, reciprocal, mutual. As Adam’s wife, she would be his ally and partner, a collaborator in the mission God gives them to multiply. God also gives the responsibility to take care of — “to rule over” and “cultivate” — the world they inhabit. Their calling is to be God’s stewards, executors, viceroys. My wife and I taught our daughters to feed Mr. Wires, the cat, and soon they were cleaning the litter box and the chicken coop too. We want them to feel responsible for the well-being of these housemates, and for the home they inhabit. We are always on the hunt for new responsibilities they can take up. As they grow, our goal is that they would have learned how to do so whether we are there or not; that they will develop a character that chooses obedience even in our absence, that prefers the good out of their own choosing.
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.
Psalm 8:5-6
It is right to marvel with David that God endowed us with the weight of glory and of responsibility for making this or that like so. It is a mistake, even out of humility, to minimize that commission God has given us. From the start, God lays the groundwork for human persons whose raison d’etre is bringing glory to God by participating in and contributing to the flowering and flourishing of creation.
In the Garden, God plants a Tree of Life and a forbidden tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Though I’m sure we do not fully understand their significance, planted right there in an orchard at the beginning, and written of millennia before our modern debates, is a momentous choice. On the one hand is life, and on the other, death (Gen. 2:17). These two trees reveal God’s intention to enable Adam and Eve to choose to obey or disobey, to live according to his rule, or to reject it. God lavishes Adam and Eve with a garden of delights, a Tree of Life and a thousand yeses. But to the fruit of one tree, he says: “thou shalt not”. It is God’s very first negative command to man. It is a mistake to think that Adam and Eve did not understand the difference between good and evil, that they did not know they had a choice between obedience and disobedience before succumbing to the serpent’s temptation. Eve initially rebuffs the serpent, explaining that to eat its fruit is forbidden. So, from the start, God gifts a garden of earthly delights to enjoy forever. But, significantly, he also makes a point of making it possible to knowingly reject God’s command.
The Bible centers the will, the locus of decision making, in the human heart. And testing and winnowing human hearts is a recurrent theme from Eden onwards. After their liberation by God from their Egyptian masters and their grumbling and faithlessness, the Hebrews’ sojourn in the wilderness was just such a test. “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.” (Deuteronomy 8:2) God allows the Hebrews to be hemmed in by Philistines and Canaanites to this end. “They were left to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the Lord’s commands, which he had given their ancestors through Moses.” (Judges 3:4) King David writes, “Test me, Lord, and try me, examine my heart and my mind; (Psalm 26:2). Jeremiah records on God’s behalf, “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.” (Jeremiah 17:10. See also Zechariah 13:9, Job 23:10, Jeremiah 12:3, Proverbs 17:3, 1 Corinthians 3:13, Luke 6:45.)
Notice how clearly these verses distinguish between the acts of God, such as leading them in to the wilderness, and the acts of each Israelite, their decisions whether to keep God’s commands. God puts his people to the test. But if it is God who has determined all the machinations of their hearts, then it is God’s will that is on trial; “God in the dock” as C.S. Lewis put it. That’s not what it says.
I have made you a tester of metals and my people the ore, that you may observe and test their ways. They are all hardened rebels, going about to slander. They are bronze and iron, they all act corruptly.
Jeremiah 7:27-28
As the center of our will, and the source of sin (Matthew 12:34), we must guard our heart (Proverbs 4:23). It is the human heart, the will, that is put to the test by these commands, trials, and tribulations.
In view of all the ways in which hearts are tested and face a day of final reckoning and judgment, it is clear that one of God’s principal purposes for our lives is the winnowing, threshing, and refining of the human heart. But this only makes sense if willing human hearts are not merely an expression of God’s own will. Though God can thwart the plans we devise in our hearts (Proverbs 16:9), God locates the genesis of evil acts within the heart of man.
For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come from within and defile a person.
Mark 7:21-23
Echoing Jesus, his brother and disciple James writes.
So submit to God. But resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and make your hearts pure, you double-minded.
James 4:7-8
Proverbs 16:9,
wellspring
call and response
James 4:8
He said, “What comes out of a person defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. 23 All these evils comefrom within and defile a person.”
add
“But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.”
-Luke 7:30
Calvinism’s take on this verse must be: God purposely decreed for them to reject His own purpose for the
and the Egyptians lorded it over them defer Paul echoes this sentiment in his letter to the Galatians. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Notice “don’t let yourselves“
Football or foosball
Not all Israel
5 They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind: Jeremiah 19:5
“Your own ways, your own deeds have brought all this upon you; this is your punishment, and all this comes of your rebellion.” (Jer 4:18 NEB) Obadiah underscored the same lesson: “For soon the day of the LORD will come on all the nations: you shall be treated as you have treated others, and your deeds will recoil on your own head.” (Obad 1:15 NEB)
What you sow, you will reap. What is crucial to see when God sets out the rewards and consequences of a particular course of action is that the decider will be making their choice on the basis of the ends which they seek. It is not the past or the present that determines their choice but their pursuit of future outcomes.
Also implicit in the principle of sowing and reaping is that the consequences we earn are tied to the choices we sowed. Who sowed? And who, thereby determined our outcome? We did. The Bible stresses this point over and over. Most consequentially, the sin we sow reaps death. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” (Romans 6:23) We earn death, whereas life is a gift.
A king, Saul. Obey the voice of the people in relation to all that they say to you. For it is not you they have rejected, but Me they have rejected from reigning over them.”
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge your flesh, but through love serve one another. In this passage
“Rules are made to be broken.” That popular rebel spirit is antithetical to the Spirit of God. Still, the saying has it right that rules and laws can be broken. As in the Garden, where Eve and then Adam disobeyed the prohibition against the one Tree, we have excelled at breaking God’s commandments. What is a
Laws that can be broken imply at least that the lawgiver knows the law can be broken and that those under the law have the capacity to both obey and disobey the law. Though there are consequences, God’s law is resistible.
A covenant is a contract or commitment between two or more parties. Yes, the very nature of covenant, of one of the most overarching aspects of our relationship to God, has two or more parties. The biblical story involves several pivotal covenants, from the Adamic Covenant, the Noahic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, to the New Covenant inaugurated by Jesus. Though all of these covenants involve two parties, the consensual nature of the covenant is especially pronounced in the Mosaic Covenant. Twice over, the details of the agreement, obedience to a set of moral laws in exchange for blessing and the Promised Land, are laid out, and twice the elders and the Israelites agree to the terms. “So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the Lord had commanded him to speak. The people all responded together, “We will do everything the Lord has said.” So Moses brought their answer back to the Lord.(Exodus 19:8, 24:3)
As such, a covenant can be fragile if one of the parties to the covenant is unreliable, inconstant, unfaithful. In one of the most exotic metaphors in scripture, Abraham is put to sleep
In the book of Genesis, we find a mysterious episode where Jacob wrestles through the night with a man who is an incarnation of God. At daybreak, the “man” tells him: “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” (Genesis 32:22-32) Henceforth, “Israel”, the namesake of the people of God, means to struggle with God. To wrestle. Is there any more poignant picture of a contest of wills? And, of course, the Israelites live up to their name in subsequent history, wrestling with God for generations, sometimes obeying, more often rebelling. Notice that God allows Jacob to wrestle instead of overpowering Him, as He could have. as illustrated by throwing out his socket with a touch. Here again we see God’s desire to gift strength and self-determination to Jacob. Like a father who allows his child to compete in a wrestling match on the living room carpet.
If Jacob and the angel are each facets of God’s will, how does one make sense of this clash? It reads like a foreshowing of Fight Club, where the narrator has had a psychotic break and is left wrestling with his own shadow, that is, with himself.
Jonah famously did not want to obey the calling of God on his life. He hated the Ninevites and when called by God, he ran the other direction. To accomplish his will, God could have knit Jonah together differently in the womb. God could have determined that his irresistible desires would be to conform from ages past. Instead, God softens Jonah’s heart by being an agent in the story, shaping events . This is the kind of . Like a family intervention to implore a wayward daughter to choose differently, this is the kind of influence we see as
Whenever persons in the Bible encounter the living God
After the Fall, the next generation has to deal once more with the temptation to sin. “Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.” (Genesis 4:7 NET) Cain, tragically, fails to subdue it, and murders Abel. Notice in this instance that God emphasizes, twice over, that though tempted, Cain can and must choose not to sin. This episode foreshadows the penetrating description of temptation and sin In James.
The apostle Paul provides one of the most penetrating and intriguing descriptions of temptation and sin. “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. Then when desire conceives, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death.”
James 1:13-15 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jas.1.13-15.NET Here James emphatically disassociates God with any role in bringing someone to sin. Rather, it is desires within us that serve as the hooks onto which temptation latches.
Like Robert Frosts famous two paths that diverge in a wood, God sets out two paths before his people. And there he implored them, choose life!
These paths recur throughout scripture and on judgment day, goats and sheep, wheat and chaff, . Jesus in particular uses this metaphor
Within the sixty-six books of the Bible spanning millennia, we find hundreds of names, stories metaphors, similes, and actions attributed to God. Overwhelmingly they paint a portrait of an interactive, synergistic relationship between God and his creatures. And they portray people as both contending and cooperating with God. At almost every turn, God invites us to take up the mantle, to participate in the work he is doing, to respond to him in obedience, to invest and grow our gifts in his absence, . Instead of determining our actions, God defers to us. You choose. I have not chosen for you.
The will of man in opposition or submission, broken or reconciled.
Deuternomoy 5:29
15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
John 5:39-40 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/jhn.5.39-40.NIV
Throughout the Bible, but especially in the prophets and reinstated with John the Baptist and then Jesus, the call goes out, “repent!”, “turn away”, “return”. To repent is to choose otherwise. It is a direct and bold appeal to the will. God initiates, often through a prophet, reminding His people of acts of gracious love, and exhorts us to respond. Consider Zechariah, one of many such examples.
3 Tell the people: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Return to me”, declares the Lord Almighty, “and I will return to you”, says the Lord Almighty. 4 Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Turn from your evil ways and your evil practices.” But they would not listen or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. 5 Where are your ancestors now? And the prophets, do they live forever? 6 But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your ancestors? “Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.’”
Notice the back and forth. God says, turn. The ancestors do not turn. Zechariah’s audience does turn. One generation repents, the other does not. And there is reciprocity. If you return to me, I will return to you.
Having chosen a wayward path, God beseeches people to choose to reverse course. Principally, he uses prophets and consequences to nudge people back to the narrow gate
‘This is what the Lord says:
Jeremiah 8:4-6
“‘When people fall down, do they not get up?
When someone turns away, do they not return?
5 Why then have these people turned away?
Why does Jerusalem always turn away?
They cling to deceit;
they refuse to return.
6 I have listened attentively,
but they do not say what is right.
None of them repent of their wickedness,
saying, “What have I done?”
Each pursues their own course
like a horse charging into battle.
“Do not let your heart turn to her ways or stray into her paths.” (Prover 7:25 | NIV)
In several parables, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a wedding and to its guests as those who said yes to the invitation.
Similar to the invitation, Jesus uses the metaphor of a sower
We are encouraged by God to make appeals to Him, and assured that he will answer them. Abraham (Gen. 18:16-32), Moses (Ex. 32:9-14), and Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:1-11) each reason with God. Jesus tells us to “pray and not lose heart”, since even an unjust judge will accede the request. By contrast, how much more will our good Father in Heaven. “And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” (Luke 18: 7) As if to make the point clearer, later in the same chapter, Luke tells us Jesus heals a persistent blind man whom he asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Yes, it is incredible that the Lord of the all would take our desires and requests into account, but Scripture gives us every indication that He does.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuke to theological determinism in scripture is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, where he prayed that God’s will would be done on earth as it is heaven. Here Jesus himself states that much of what occurs under the sun is at odds with God’s will, whether secret or explicit. There is no hint of a “but actually, in God’s secret will”.
After creating, God declared his world good.
One of the most troubling aspects of biblical revelation is that in some sense, Satan is the prince of this world. Satan has some level of jurisdiction over the affairs of this world. The Devil is active, prowling and — He is a determiner of events. This poses a difficult dilemma for the theological determinist. Is Satan acting out God’s will or is he another determiner, fighting against God and his Kingdom.
In His great mountain side sermon, Jesus bids his listeners to ask, to seek, to knock, to do (unto others), to enter (the narrow gate), to watch out (for false prophets), and to put His words into practice. Jesus warns that, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
Here multiple threads are interwoven. the appeal to our wills is a steady drumbeat.
Matthew 7:21 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/mat.7.21.niv
““Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Matthew 7:7 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/mat.7.7.niv
This exhortation to seek God, to choose the narrow road, is entirely in keeping with Jesus’ teaching elsewhere. Jesus calls us to pick up our cross and follow him, but to count the cost. These calls bear all the hallmarks of and informed and a willful decision
In the Garden of Gethsemane, we see perhaps the most momentous act of will since the Garden of Eden. Standing in contrast to Adam’s and Eve’s ill-advised disobedience, Jesus falls before his Father, anticipating his imminent suffering and death with fear and dread. With his “spirit willing, but flesh weak”, Jesus pleads, face to the ground, with God the Father for another way. But with a resolve that is the antithesis of his forbears, Jesus utters, “yet not as I will, but as you will”.
When we repent of going outside of the boundaries that God has set is an act of submission. Probably the central act of will in scripture\
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Matthew 26:39 New International Version (NIV)
Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God. May Your gracious Spirit lead me on level ground. (Psalm 143:10)
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mathew 26:41).
“This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”
Acts 2:23 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/act.2.23.NIV
It is sometimes said that the Bible is Gods love letter to his people. It is also a tragic story of unrequited love. One of the most remarkable but recurrent descriptions of God is as one who laments and longs for the ones he loves. Indeed, unrequited love is an overarching theme of the biblical story. God loves, pursues, rescues, and chastens a people whose love is, in return, fleeting and fickle. Indeed, instead of love, often there is hate. It is odd to think of God as having unmet desires, but so we read, again and again. Confronting the pharisees Jesus says:
37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gatheryour children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it!
Jesus, Matthew 27: 37
Those who trust in Jesus join his family as adopted children of God. Astonishing. “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1a) Jesus in particular appeals to the picture of a good Father to reveal God’s nature to us. “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11) God’s goodness and generosity as a Father is oft remembered (James 1:17).
Romans 8:14-17 – For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”)
This picture of God as father is at odds with a God who determines every story beat of His children’s lives.
The idea that a controlling sovereignty redounds to the glory of God is perplexing. We would never confer extra honor to a domineering father who treated his children thusly.
My four year old daughter has a rare form of liver disease called Caroli. While we awaited surgery, she had nearly daily bouts with extreme pain and emotions. In these traumatized states, she refused pain meds, even though it was the thing that could relieve her pain and restore her to herself. Reasoning with her became impossible, and sometimes my wife or I have to force the medicine into her mouth. It is awful enduring her writhing pain with her. And yet, it was worse still to force these meds on her over her clenched fist protests as she screamed: “Don’t force, don’t force!” In these heart-wrenching episodes, two things came into focus: the powerful human drive to not have our wills violated, and my own horror, as a father, to have to do so.
Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. (Isaiah 1:2)
“We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
2 Corinthians 5:20 NIV
http://bible.com/111/2co.5.20.niv
Ambassador is one of the most beautiful characterizations of the missionary call in
In the Garden, it is the serpent — God’s and humanity’s arch nemesis — who tempts Eve and then Adam. And ever since,
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
1 Corinthians 10:13 | NIV
Sin is to cross the line or to miss the mark. It is to trespass, to fall short.
“If it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.”
Here we see a faculty over and above desire. “Do not to let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey it in its lust.”
God has nothing to do with the unrighteous acts of man. He opposes them. He casts it out. The biblical authors are exceedingly concerned to underscore that God is not evil and has nothing to do with evil.
If it is God who determined our wicked acts, it requires him to be intimately involved in the contemplating and planning of the most wicked and perverse of human deeds. This is unthinkable.
When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
James 1:13-17 | NIV
One of the most stunning of God’s revelations is that He is a God who created us in a relationship to himself and seeks to restore the rift in that relationship. From the Garden where the relationship was poisoned to its ages long restoration through Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. At the crux of the story is Jesus, who comes to restore the restore the rift and, astonishingly, calls His disciples and followers not just servants, but friends. In this central biblical theme lies the profound incomprehensibility of theological determinism. All of the thousands of relational words and stories God uses to reveal himself — love, friendship, adultery, reconciliation, the prodigal, the bride, etcetera — are analogies from human relationships. And human relationships are always bilateral, reciprocal, interactive. The meaning of these terms is not preserved when there is but one will on both sides of the relation. a ⟷ b, a ⟷ a
From the start, God hands work and the honor of participation in the story to His creatures. Adam is given the
In perhaps the most compelling gesture of deference, Jesus chooses to leave his work in the hands of his people, the church.
Because the ability to will and choose freely is sui generis, the use of analogies and metaphors in this conversation is inevitable. Every analogy is imperfect, and none will capture our subject . Nevertheless, if Jesus spoke of us seeds and lambs, surely there is some possibility for to be gained.
more like the making of the movie than the writing of the screenplay. It’s more like football than foosball.
And yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, theological determinism is ascendant in many quarters. Many Reformed theologians apply their monocausal (“monergistic”) accounting not only to salvation, but to every human happening. God, of course, is inconceivably transcendent and independent, and humans are lowly and utterly dependent for every breath. That is a given.
Often, the intentions driving theological determinism are of the noblest sort. First, there is a desire to give all due to God. You sometimes hear this view expressed as, “it’s not about man, it’s all God”. And second, there is a desire to construe God’s power in the strongest terms, and therefore as complete control. We ought to marvel with David at the realization that God chose to clothe us in glory, honor, and responsibility.
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:
Psalm 8:5-6
Dan Wolgemuth’s anecdote of Home Depot.A battle over the meaning of terms is right at the
To bring the distinction into focus, the most helpful parallel is the way in which interlocutors have used the terms monergism and synergism with respect to regeneration and salvation. As R.C. Sproul explains:
Monergism is the opposite of synergism. … Synergism is a cooperative venture, a working together of two or more parties. … Monergistic regeneration is exclusively a divine act. … A corpse cannot revive itself. It cannot even assist in the effort. It offers no help in reviving itself, though once revived it is empowered to act and respond.
R.C. Sproul, What is Reformed Theology? Understanding the Basics
Reformed theologians like Sproul describe salvation as a “monergistic” event, wherein God is the “exclusive” agent who effects the outcome, with no “assistance”, no “help”. That is a conversation for another day.2 Of concern here is that the theological determinist extends this monocausal accounting to all human events, the will of God being the sufficient, 100% cause of every event, every effect. There is one player in this game, and many pieces; many characters, but one writer ; one will, and many conduits. By contrast, the deferentialist sees God choosing to have a “synergistic” relationship with his creatures, wherein God gifts humans with the privilege and responsibility of being a component cause of many events. On this multicausal view, God incorporates many causal agents, giving a small writing role to each of us. We are coauthors, collaborators, contenders. God is the creator, but we his stewards. God is the initiator, but we the respondents. God is the hero, but we are his allies, or his enemies. God is the conductor, but we play our notes, following the rhythm, or not. God is the director, and as actors we follow the script, or not, with room, even, for improvisation. He calls, we respond. One way – or another.
Perhaps synergism is the best counterpart to determinism, though it is perhaps more specific, as the antipode to monergism. Libertarian free will is not an apt term because it is a term for a view about human the human will, not about God.
Because we are directly acquainted with our wills, it is not special pleading when so called “libertarians” insist that free will is, de facto, libertarian. We could be mistaken, but our knowledge of the will is based on the tangible and repeated experience of desires and pressures being irresistible and of the determination of imminent events being in our hands.
problem passages: Acts 4:28
“How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
Matthew 16:11-12 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/mat.16.11-12.NIV
“How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
Matthew 16:11-12 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/mat.16.11-12.NIV
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it. When we have little faith what action requires instead is greater riskiness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NIV
In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strivrl has said
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Sam Harris
“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NET
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
John 20:27-31 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Which of these are examples of faith?
| 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal | 1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East. | 1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen. | 1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry. | 1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory. |
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Romans 8:24-25 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24,25 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
Romans 8:23-24 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Inference is Inescapable
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).
Notes
1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it. When we have little faith what action requires instead is greater riskiness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NIV
In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Sam Harris
“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NET
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
John 20:27-31 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Which of these are examples of faith?
| 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal | 1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East. | 1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen. | 1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry. | 1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory. |
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Romans 8:24-25 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24,25 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
Romans 8:23-24 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Inference is Inescapable
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).
Notes
1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A helpful example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it. What it requires instead is greater risk taking or desperation. Once I was stuck at a submerged low-water bridge during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NIV
In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Sam Harris
“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NET
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
John 20:27-31 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Which of these are examples of faith?
| 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal | 1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East. | 1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen. | 1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry. | 1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory. |
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Romans 8:24-25 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24,25 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
Romans 8:23-24 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Inference is Inescapable
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).
Notes
1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A helpful example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it. What it requires instead is greater risk taking or desperation. Once I was stuck at a submerged low-water bridge during a flash flood — at night, with my brother, his wife, and his infant daughter in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NIV
In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Sam Harris
“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NET
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
John 20:27-31 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Which of these are examples of faith?
| 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal | 1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East. | 1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen. | 1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry. | 1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory. |
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Romans 8:24-25 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24,25 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
Romans 8:23-24 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Inference is Inescapable
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).
Notes
1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A helpful example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. It’s easy when there’s food reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us, even if we choose to cross it. We may test each board as we put our foot down and hang more tightly to the hand rails. Good evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence doesn’t diminishes it. What it requires instead is greater risk taking or desperation. Once I was stuck at a submerged low-water bridge during a flash flood — at night, with my brother, his wife, and his infant daughter in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NIV
In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Sam Harris
“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NET
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
John 20:27-31 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Which of these are examples of faith?
| 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal | 1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East. | 1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen. | 1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry. | 1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory. |
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Romans 8:24-25 NIV
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24,25 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
Romans 8:23-24 NIV
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Inference is Inescapable
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).
Notes
1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.