What is faith? The importance of faith pervades the New Testament. But what is faith? Faith has been variously defined and I shall not attempt to define it myself. It blends into so many other characteristics of a believer that it is hard to delineate its precise boundaries. Instead I shall describe four qualities that are always present in a strong and living faith.
The first of these qualities is belief. Faith is more that believing certain things to be true, but it includes this. It means the recognition that the universe has an Author: that it does not contain within itself the explanation of its existing; that it points to a Mind and Will that has caused it to be what it is. The Christian belief is God includes the belief that he is actively at work throughout the universe shaping it to His mind. But the center of Christian belief is that God has declared Himself and His purpose for us in the man, Jesus Christ. Christ is God’s message to man. Christ is, in a well-known phrase, what man means by God, what God means by man.
All this we accept in the first place on authority, which is a highly reasonable procedure to begin with. After all, we accept the extraordinary things which the astronomers tell us about the stars on the authority of men who have made a study of their subject and know more about it than we do. The authority persuading us to Christian belief is the authority of the Church speaking through its representatives; and this again rests on the authority of Christ Himself, of the apostles, His companions, and of the multitude of people who have based their lives on Him and His teaching.
But if we begin by accepting our faith on authority we cannot be content to let it end there. For a living faith is a faith seeking fuller understanding; and this growth to a fuller understanding is painful. It means surrendering over-simple notions, giving up ideas which we had taken to be part of the faith but have been forced to recognize as doubtful or even untrue. It involves questioning what we have received, partly to make sure that we have understood it, partly in case we have to discard elements in our understanding of it. This questioning of things received on authority is, I believe, closely bound up with genuine belief. For it is love of truth that prompts our questions and a genuine belief and concern for truth must walk hand in hand. Every concerned student is bound in some degree to experience the painful purifying and rectifying of his belief as a result of his studies. Indeed I believe that for modern men this process is inevitable if they are to attain a vigorous belief. It is not to be regretted but accepted and welcomed as part of the intellectual cross which Christ’s twentieth century disciples have to carry.
But if we have to struggle to get a deeper and truer understanding of our faith so as to believe more genuinely, faith itself helps understanding. “I believe in order to understand,” said Augustine.
Just as a scientist first frames a hypothesis to account for facts, so faith once accepted enables you to understand much that was unintelligible before. Faith is like the spectacles which enable a man of poor sight to see more clearly. It is a vantage point from which you can see further. The power that Christian faith has to illuminate the world of things, of men and of events, confirms the believer in his assurance of the truth of what he believed. Reason plays an important part in that questioning process through which faith grows to a fuller understanding, but it can never take the place of faith. Reason never contradicts faith but neither can it prove the truth of what we believe; nor can reason give the certainty that the believer craves.
I have dwelt at length on belief, the first of the elements of a living faith, because this element is of such importance; but it is only one element. The second I will call experience. It is an intuition of spiritual realities, an awareness that defies clear description or definition. Everyone is familiar with difference between knowing something about a person and knowing the person. There is an immediacy, a first hand quality, about our knowledge of a friend that is different in kind from the knowledge we may have had about him before we met him for the first time. There is the well-known story of the eighteen year old French boy, Nicholas Herman (later and better known as Brother Lawrence) staring at a tree stripped of its leaves in the winter and reflecting that presently with the spring the bare branches would put forth bud and leaf, blossom and fruit, and further that God’s providence brought this yearly miracle about. On the instant his heart and mind were full of a sense of the divine presence, and speaking of the experience fifty years later after years of life in a monastery, he could not say whether the love of God born in that moment of revelation had grown greater or less in the interval. An experience as intense and lasting as this is rare. More often an awareness of God, a certainty about Him, grows gradually. For many the grandeur and beauty of nature, the starry heavens, snow-capped mountains, a gorgeous sunset awaken the awareness of God. For many the solitude of retreat away from the pressure of work and the tensions of living with their fellows awakens the realization of God as nothing else does. But for most of the people most of the time I believe corporate worship is the normal way in which God is realized. Further I believe that a great many people have an experience with God, an experience that they value, without realizing that it is God that they are experiencing. They lack the theological concepts which would explain their experience to them, concepts which would immensely enrich it by linking it up with the experience of Christians down the ages. The disciplined life of prayer - of worship, corporate and private, of enlightening reading and mental prayer, of acts of penitence and confession - has as one of its functions the fostering of this awareness of God, who whether we know it or not is all the time at work in us and around us.
Experience is the second element present in a living faith; the third is obedience. Faith is more than just an orientation of heart and mind, and inner attitude; it involves living according to your belief, attempting at least to base your life on your belief. The typical man of faith in the Bible is Abraham. Abraham not only believed in God, he obeyed. At God’s word he left his ancestral home in Mesopotamia and set out across the desert to destination unknown. It is only when faith is out to the test of action that it can grow strong. A faith which makes little of no difference to the living of your life has a dreamlike, insubstantial quality. It only becomes a thing you do. Our Lord sometimes summoned people to break with their past and throw in their lot with Him, not only mentally but by some decisive act was necessary if faith we to grow strong. The spirit of venture is integral to faith. The late Father Stephen Bedale once put the point in this way. “Supposing someone asked me,” he said, “’Do you believe the Christian faith?’ I should say ‘Of course I do.’ IF he went on to ask, ‘Do you always feel quite sure that the Christian faith is true?’ I should have to reply, “Sometimes I don’t feel as sure as I should like to feel.’ But if he went on to ask, ‘Would you be prepared to stake your life on the truth of the faith?’ I should say ‘I’ve done that already.’” Faith means basing your life, your plans, your decisions, your actions on what you believe. It means getting out onto the ice when you aren’t quite certain if it will bear your weight. It means taking risks. For some the decision to seek ordination is a real act of venture, of commitment, of going out like Abraham not knowing where. But it is not enough to rest on an act of obedience, of commitment once made. For the spirit of venture is a permanent part of faith and must be always present. There is a great deal in us that craves for safety and for the elimination of risk. Of course prudence is a genuine virtue and there are times, for example, at the bottom of the mine or when landing or taking off in an airplane, when safety first is only common sense. But safety first as a principle of life runs flatly contrary to the spirit of faith. “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it.” The spirit of venture, of risk-taking in obedience to what we believe to be God’s will, is an essential element in a living faith.
Faith then clearly demands courage. Indeed our Lord sometimes speaks of faith and fear as opposites. “Fear not, only believe.” “Why are ye so fearful, O ye of little faith?” there are two sorts of courage - the courage that dares and the courage that endures. The fourth element of a living faith is trust - putting you trust in God. It means not getting anxious about the hundred and one things that tend to disturb us. Our Lord tells us to imitate the birds who are a picture of joyous freedom from care. God cares for the birds by giving them instincts which teach them where to look for food and how to avoid their enemies. All the same, the birds do sometimes come to a bad end; they freeze or starve to death in a harsh winter, they are killed by their enemies. Our Lord does not promise us that if only we trust God all will go well with us, at least in the short run. He promises the cross is some shape or form. He tells us to put our whole trust in God in spite of the worst that may happen, partly because, as He constantly assures us, God suffers with us and will never stop caring. Trust in God involves an attitude of openness to people and to events, for God is in all people and even acting through them and overruling them. It means keeping calm in the face of hostility and persecution, and refusing to worry about the hardships and inconveniences that accompany you as you try to follow Christ.
This is not easy. Anxiety is an emotion that can sometimes possess us, that we can by no means always master. Indeed if you are to trust God and keep calm under pressure you need to find some way of casting your care on God. Perhaps a method can be discerned in our Lord’s prayer in Gethsemane. For in Gethsemane we see our Lord casting His care on God. He feels an overwhelming revulsion of horror and fear at the prospect of the agonizing death that confronts Him. He frankly gives rein to this revulsion in the first part of His prayer: “Father, if it is possible, suffer this cup to pass from me.” He then surrenders His feelings and fears in the prayer “Nevertheless, not what I will but what thou wilt.” I believe we have here a method applicable to our own lives by which we can bring our fears and problems to God. First express them in words fully and frankly, then surrender them to God with the word “Thy will be done,” in the sure confidence that God will bring good out of evil and meaning out of the seemingly senseless. I believe that when you are really obsessed with worry about something - a quarrel, a mood of resentment or depression, a serious failure, even and examination - it is a good plan to write out your trouble in the form of a prayer committing it to God. Having written out you prayer you can pray it over half a dozen or any number of times. Writing helps you to clarify the problem you are grappling with, and a clearly defined trouble is always more bearable than something vague and shapeless. The regular practice of bringing your troubles to God and surrendering them to Him is a way of training yourself in the habit of trust. This spirit of tranquil trust has been happily described in some lines of Victor Hugo which have been translated thus:
Let us learn like a bird for a moment to take
Sweet rest on a branch that is ready to break;
She feels the branch tremble, yet gaily she sings:
What is it to her? She has wings, she has wings.
The wings of trust in God can enable you to keep calm though the world rocks.
These four elements which I have called belief, experience, obedience and trust are all present in a strong faith. The faith of some is insecure because they value and rely on one of the elements of faith to the exclusion of the others. One man for example overvalues intellectual belief and is worried because reason cannot give him the certainty he would like. Another thinks too much of experience and is wanting all the time to recapture past feelings, when he would be wise to concern himself with other elements of faith. A third sees the whole of faith as obedience, as duty, and needs to enlarge his intellectual grasp of the faith. All four elements are needed. A missionary in Peru was translating the New Testament into an Indian dialect. He came across the phrase “our help is in God” and wondered how to render it in a way concrete enough for an Indian to understand. In the end he translated in “We hang on to God.” We hang on to God by the rope of faith, a rope woven of four strands each of which must be there if the rope is to hold under the strain.
Reprinted from The Cowley Evangelist, January, 1965; publication of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, an Anglican Monastic Order. Original title “The Four Strands of Faith.”
What is Faith?
