When most people hear the word faith they instantly think of religion. This is especially true in our secular age when it came to be assumed that faith is something religious people need, while those who are not religious do not. If we think about it for even a moment we’ll see how that contention is inaccurate, but atheists over the last two or three hundred years did a great job defining faith in a way that delegitimized religion, and specifically Christianity. It got so bad during the brief era of the so-called “New Atheists,” (there was nothing new about them), that for a brief time they got away with defining faith as, “belief without evidence,” as in, there isn’t enough evidence but I’ll believe it anyway. Mark Twain, the quintessential cynic made the quip, “Faith is belivin’ what you know ain’t so.” That most certainly is not faith!
Before I get into why faith is transformational, it’s important to define it so we’re all on the same page:
Faith is belief based on adequate evidence.
That’s it. Another word for faith is trust. It is being willing to act with limited knowledge, and given we’re finite creatures who can only ever have limited knowledge, faith is a requirement for daily existence. In other words, everyone lives by faith. It is not a religious concept, but a human concept, something required if we’re to exist, and we utilize it every day of our lives. All of this comes down to a complicated topic called epistemology, or the study of how we know things. But it’s not necessary to go down that philosophical rabbit hole to grasp the simple reality that our knowing is limited and never absolute, and faith is required to act in spite of it. Do I trust the bridge to hold my car if I drive over it even though I can’t be absolutely certain it will. The examples are endless.
As you walk down the aisle in mere moments joining with the woman who will become your wife or the man who will become your husband, you are exercising faith. You and your spouse decide to have children; talk about faith! It’s terrifying, but you do it anyway because you believe, you trust, there will be far more joy and blessing than heartache. Do you know that? Of course not, but you do it anyway. That’s faith. Or you take a job or invest in a business venture. Do you know it will work? No, but you do it anyway. That’s faith. When you love someone, do you know they will reciprocate? Of course not, but you do it anyway trusting that the person will love you in return.
We’ve recently celebrated America’s 250th anniversary as an independent nation. America is a product of faith, massive, deep, and abiding faith because few people thought it would work, and most were convinced it wouldn’t. Think of all those people starting with the Pilgrims in the 1630s who got in small rickety boats and travelled over 3,000 miles on the Atlantic Ocean to chase the dream of a new life. That is incredible faith! That faith eventually built the greatest nation on earth. Or go back earlier to Christopher Columbus, a man burning with faith to discover new worlds and share the gospel of Christ. No discovery ever happened without faith. Every explorer or discovery in history was driven by faith. All of science, in fact, is built on it.
Nothing happens without faith, and its corollary is true: faith is required for anything to happen. Just waking up in the morning is an act of faith. As is eating the food you buy from a grocery store or restaurant. Is it safe to eat? Faith. When you go to the doctor or dentist? Faith. When you plant seeds in the garden? Faith. Without faith there would be no farmers. Farming is a leap of faith because the uncertainties and difficulties are endless.
From these few examples it is apparent that faith is transformational, that believing or trusting something or someone when you can’t have absolute certainty changes things, for good and for ill. We can put our faith in the wrong thing or the wrong person, and bad things can happen. The German people in 1933 put their faith in Adolf Hitler, and that didn’t turn out so well. That means epistemology, or what we know, is a critical component of faith. As my definition implies, our faith and actions are always based on some kind of evidence, or what we think we know. Faith is a human necessity and like everything else about us, both glorious and fallen. This is why wisdom and knowledge are so emphasized in Scripture. When we step out in faith in any circumstance, we don’t want to do that in ignorance, or what we call blind faith. Faith should never be blind.
Christian Civilization and Faith
If we take a look throughout the history of the world there is a stark contrast between BC and AD, between the world before Christ and the world after Christ rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We might even look at it as before and after faith. Even though faith has always been required for human beings to exist, Christianity changed the nature of what people believed in, and that made all the difference for human existence. Everything started to change well before that, however, when the Hebrew people were introduced to the world. Christianity was the fulfillment and the flowering of the change in perspective God brought through his people. Let’s look at some of these changes.
In The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Change the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Thomas Cahill explores the many ways Jewish belief and practice was completely unique in the ancient world. As we look at just a few of these gifts, it’s apparent these ideas transformed the faith of people, what people came to believe and trust in, and which would eventually transform the world.
Fate: Before the Hebrew people came along, life was viewed as something determined by inscrutable forces beyond any person’s control. There was nothing to be done about it but submit. That changed forever when God revealed through Scripture that He created man, male and female He created them, in His own image.What Judaism and then Christianity brought to the world was the concept of human agency, that we are not just cogs in the endless grind of existence that have to accept whatever fate and the gods bring our way. We can actually change things. This didn’t fully come to fruition until Christ because instead of this unique worldview being only available to one ethnic people in one geographic location, it became available to every person on earth. It’s easy to see how fate is inimical to faith, to believing we can make a difference and then having the trust to act on it.
Time: Prior to the idea of “In the beginning God,” all peoples of the world viewed time cyclically, one season moving into another, a wheel turning forever going nowhere. The people of Israel, by contrast, introduced the concept of past, present, and future; that history was going somewhere, something inconceivable to all other ancient peoples.This idea of history going somewhere, of it having some kind of telos or purpose, is so radical it could only have come from a divine source. It is what made Christian Western civilization possible, what transformed a brutal ancient pagan world into a modern world of comfort, security, and abundance. Referring again to America’s founding, those men realized they were creating something for their posterity because people could build on their making history and be blessed by it.
A transcendent, personal Creator God: All other ancient peoples believed in gods who were visible (idols), and in fear of the forces of nature, believed they could manipulate the gods who presumably controlled the forces. The Hebrews introduced a concept no other peoples could conceive: a personal God, in some way like them, and the only true God. I can imagine an ancient person encountering these strange people saying, One God… who created everything? That’s crazy! Cahill writes that the God of Abraham, “no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer—is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.”In other words, this is a God we can trust, who wants our good, who is committed to guiding and blessing us if we would just listen to him.
For me when speaking about faith, I always go back to God’s covenant promises in Christ. Unlike the gods of the ancient pagans who were fickle and unpredictable, our God is faithful to his promises for our good and his glory.
God’s Covenant Promises: The Foundation of our Faith
One thing I learned early is that my faith was never in my faith. Most Christians are familiar with Jesus’ saying “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The reason is that the issue isn’t the quantify of faith we possess, but rather what we have faith in. And as Jesus said, “with God all things are possible.” Faith is a powerful human dynamic even without God, and that is because faith is always in something other than the person exercising it, in some vision of what can be, in the possibilities of what doesn’t yet exist, the dream. When faith turns inward is when it usually dies.
First, we’re made in God’s image, which is why faith is possible, and what makes it so powerful as a transformational force. In Romans 4 Paul is speaking of the faith of Abraham, that which was credited to him as righteousness. He says of God that he “gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.” Literally, he calls things into existence that do not exist. That is some serious power! We call the creation of the world in Latin, Creation ex nihilo, or that God created everything out of nothing and not out of pre-existing matter. God merely said, and it was. As his image bearers, we have a similar power to call things that are not as though they were, but for us we have the raw material of creation and transform it into something useful and glorious that can bless others. This can be music or stories or buildings or cities or a home or children or businesses or schools or civilizations—the possibilities are endless.
All of this, though, goes back to God’s covenant promises to bless. Sadly, this is one of the most neglected and overlooked of God’s purposes in salvation, that he wants to bless his people. And I don’t just mean “spiritual” blessing, but material blessing as well. We can see the radical change in both after Christ accomplished his mission, as I said above, about the contrast between BC and AD. The book of Genesis, the foundation of our faith, is a book of blessing. The word is used over 60 times, more than any other book of the Bible, with Psalms and Deuteronomy coming second and third. Blessing is serious business to God, and he backed it up with his promises, what we know as covenants, basically ancient legal agreements that cannot be broken.
The reason we can trust in God’s promises is that they have nothing to do with us. The foundation is the covenant of redemption, where in eternity the Triune God made the promise to save his people from their sins before the world was even created. Then once man fell, God promises in the garden to defeat Satan. Then in Genesis 12 he promised Abram that all peoples on earth will be blessed through him, and confirmed it with a legal ceremony in Genesis 15. He reiterates his covenant promises to Isaac and Jacob of which Christ was the ultimate fulfillment. The blessings couldn’t go to all peoples until Christ came to restore man to his rightful place in creation.
All of this is accessed by faith, by trust, by as the writer to the Hebrews defines it, confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Many years ago now I read the classic work by George Gilder called Wealth and Poverty. It was published in the first year of Reagan’s presidency, and was instrumental in building the “supply side” revolution in economics that would pull the American economy out of the Carter malaise and turn the decade into the “Go Go 80s.” Prosperity was back, and faith made it happen. I will quote a paragraph from early in the book. Next to it I have the word “Classic!” written, and it says perfectly what I’m grasping at trying to say in this post.
Faith in man, faith in the future, faith in the rising returns of giving, faith in the mutual benefits of trade, faith in the providence of God are all essential to successful capitalism. All are necessary to sustain the spirit of work and enterprise against the setbacks and frustrations it inevitably meets in a fallen world; to inspire trust and cooperation in an economy where they will often be betrayed; to encourage the forgoing of present pleasure in the name of a future that may well go up in smoke; to promote risk and initiative in a world where the rewards all vanish unless others join the game. In order to give without the assurance of return, in order to save without the certainty of future value, in order to work beyond the requirements of the job, one has to have confidence in a higher morality: a law of compensation beyond the immediate and distracting struggles of existence.
It was Christianity alone that made such faith possible. That’s why he wraps up his list of faith with the providence of God. The blessings of prosperity, or wealth, of the good things that allow us to enjoy this life and it not be in a constant struggle for survival come from God’s covenant promises given long ago to bless the nations. Christ as the fulfillment of redemptive history allowed the conditions within the human heart for this kind of faith to be exercised. It was only in the Christian West that it could have developed. God’s promised blessing to the Patriarchs were always intended to express themselves materially in the material world. Spiritual blessings always do.
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