What is Faith?
What is Faith?
Earlier, we noted the opening statement of the main Christian creeds: “I believe in God.” So what does it mean to talk about “believing in God”? What are we to understand by words such as “belief” and “faith”?
To begin with, we need to note a distinction between two senses of the word “faith.” Christian theologians have traditionally distinguished faith understood as a set of beliefs, and faith understood as an act of believing. Two Latin phrases are often used in the theological literature to express this difference between the content of faith and an act of faith.
The relationship between these objective and subjective aspects of faith is regularly discussed in works of theology. There is a general consensus, transcending denominational divisions, that both elements need to be part of a proper understanding of faith. Faith affects the human mind, heart, and will. This is reflected in a comment on faith made by the Anglican writer W. H. Griffith-Thomas (1861–1924):
[Faith] commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction; and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.
The biblical sense of the word “faith” includes the idea of trusting in God, which stands at the center of the Old Testament account of the calling of Abraham (Genesis 15: 1–6). This tells of how God promised to give Abraham countless descendants, as numerous as the stars of the night sky. Abraham believed God – that is, trusted the promise that was made to him. Abraham did not merely accept that a God existed; he trusted this God. John Macquarrie (1919–2007) makes a similar point when he notes that “faith is not a mere belief but an existential attitude” which includes “acceptance and commitment.”
This process of the intellectual exploration of the consequences of trust in God or in Jesus of Nazareth is often framed using a slogan introduced by Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033–1109) in the eleventh century. Anselm used the Latin phrase fides quaerens intellectum (Latin: “faith seeking understanding”) to refer to the process by which someone who comes to trust God begins to explore the intellectual landscape that this implies. Anselm did not mean to replace faith with understanding but to supplement faith with understanding, seeing this as a natural progression from trusting God to understanding God.
So is faith simply an act of human trust? Or is God somehow involved in this process? This question was of particular importance during the Pelagian controversy (see pp. 330–4), which explored the interplay of the human and divine in faith and salvation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressed this point well:
Believing is possible only by grace and the interior help of the Holy Spirit. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. Trusting in God and cleaving to the truths he has revealed is contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason.
John Calvin (1509–64) expressed this idea in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), emphasizing both the importance of faith as a trusting response to God's promises and the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling this human response.
Now we shall have a right definition of faith if we say that it is a steady and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence towards us, which is founded upon the truth of the gracious promise of God in Christ, and is both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
So how does faith relate to reason? We shall discuss this question in Chapter 6, when we look at reason as a source of theology, and more fully in Chapter 8, which considers the relationship between philosophy and theology. Yet some initial reflections will be helpful at this stage.
One of the most important recent discussions of the relationship between faith and reason is found in the 1998 encyclical letter Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”), by Pope John Paul II (1920–2005). The letter opens with a declaration that faith and reason can work together. Human beings long to know the truth, and are constantly searching for it. “In the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.”
So can reason alone lead humanity to this truth? The letter pays a handsome tribute to philosophy, as the legitimate human quest for truth. Philosophy is “one of the noblest of human tasks,” which is “driven by the desire to discover the ultimate truth of existence.” Yet unaided human reason cannot fully penetrate to the mystery of life. It cannot answer questions such as “why are we here?” For this reason, God graciously chose to make these things known through revelation, which would otherwise remain unknown. “The truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason.”
The letter stresses that faith is not blind trust, opposed to the evidence of the world. Rather, it points out that the world – which Christians see as God's creation – is studded with hints of God's existence and nature. It appeals to Paul's sermon preached at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17) in arguing that it is entirely reasonable to infer the existence of God from the wonders of nature and a human sense of divinity within us. These do not count as “proofs”; they can, however, be interpreted as confirmation or corroboration of the basic themes of faith. Having believed, we long to understand the inner dynamics and structures of our faith – the basic idea which is expressed in Anselm's slogan fides quaerens intellectum.