Faith and the Word of God
saved? All men, even the most lost and fallen, are offered the great consolation that in God all things are possible.
The experience of all believers confirms this testimony of Scripture.
No matter how they may differ and how their beliefs may diverge, in their prayers and praises all believers confess before the face of God that they owe their faith and hope to His grace alone. They cannot explain how they obtained it in any other way. All origins are hidden in the veil of mystery; all birth is from darkness into light. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear it, but you don't know where it's going. Thus it is with everyone born of the Spirit of God. The man blind from birth could only testify, One thing I know: once I was blind, but now I see. So the man who has come to Christ in faith sees and judges and evaluates everything differently. What once was foolishness to him, he now honors as divine wisdom. What he rejected as an offense, he now considers his highest joy. Although everything may oppose it, although everything may seem to contradict it, although the whole world and his conscience should accuse him that he has grievously sinned against all God's commandments and still is inclined to all evil, the believer can only testify that out of pure grace God gives him the righteousness of Christ and reckons it to him, as if he had never sinned, as if he had himself accomplished the absolute obedience that Christ has attained for him. Thus, faith is an act of moral energy, an act of the highest spiritual power; it is God's work par excellence because it is His most precious and most glorious gift. Faith clings to God as though seeing the Invisible, knowing His love, depending on His grace and hoping in His faithfulness.
Faith and the Word of God
From this center the believer feels himself to be in communion with the saints; he is ever more intimately bound to the whole truth, to the full, rich witness of the apostles and the prophets, to the entire Holy
Scriptures as the Word of God. This bond of the soul to the Scriptures undoubtedly possesses a myatical character, as does all love and all inclinations of the heart, but it is not therefore irrational and ungrounded. It is true that faith by no means accepts as divine truth only what it has itself experienced or can infer from its own inner experience, because the emotions generally, and even more so in believers, trail far behind faith. God's revelation in the Scriptures has been given not to a single member of the church but to the church of all ages, all times and in all circumstances to be a source of the truth and a means of grace.
But faith does not blindly accept everything that a philosopher or artist, church or priest presents as truth. Nowadays many seek to tread a middle way, drawing on the subjective certainty and comfort of religion while surrendering its objective truth and knowability.
This makes religion a private matter, a psychological need: whatever someone considers useful and necessary to believe at a given time and place is deemed to be true.
But if religion in the objective sense doesn't exist or is unknowable, its subjective certainty is an illusion. If Christ did not rise from the dead, all preaching is futile and so is all faith. To be acceptable to faith, a word must present, confirm and seal itself as a word from God. From its very inception and as the Reformation returning to Scripture again clarified it, faith has a religious character. It is not first a historical knowledge which later is supplemented and completed by trust or love. From the very beginning it is a religious state, a practical knowing, a knowledge that applies to myself, an appropriation of the promises God made to me.
But such appropriation is possible only if a word presents and confirms itself to me as a word from God. If Scripture were nothing more than a narrative of past events it could be accepted only on