The dangerous thing about faith

Listening to: Nothing

Faith lies at the very heart of Christianity: the mechanism by which we take hold of the gospel. Sola Fide. Justification by faith alone. We are saved not by works but by faith. Jesus tells people over and over, 'Your faith has made you well'. Great victories are won 'by faith'. We hear of people taking 'steps of faith', 'living by faith', and 'walking by faith, not by sight.' Faith is pretty great. Yet it's faith (and particularly, thinking about faith) that can get Christians into some of their deepest troubles. It's faith that can cause the greatest doubts, and faith that can often violently oppose the gospel. That's the dangerous thing about faith.

Here's why: faith is deadly as soon as it becomes self-conscious. Phil Cary brilliantly explains this in his essay, Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin. He suggests that in the minds of most Protestants, faith works like this:
Major Premise: Whoever believes in Christ is saved.
Minor Premise: I believe in Christ.
Conclusion: I am saved.

So, to be saved the condition I must meet is that I believe- I must have faith. In order to know that I'm saved (conclusion), I must know that I have faith (minor premise). This process leads to us being quite emphatic about conversion- a moment where a sinner hears, receives, and claims the gospel. 'Do you believe the gospel? Yes? Then you're saved.'

It seems harmless enough, but Cary shows us something terrifying in the middle of it all. It requires of us not only that we believe, but that we know we believe. For assurance of salvation, what we tend to look for is faith, and knowledge. 'It's not enough just to believe; you have to believe you believe, maybe even know you believe.' Doesn't that strike you as dangerous? Cary calls this 'the requirement of reflective faith'- a faith that must be self-conscious in order to bring assurance.

The requirement of reflective faith will have haunted many, many Christians. It haunted me during my younger years: I'd become a Christian, and apparently done what needed to be done- yet at times I couldn't disentangle my motivations from one another. Did I really believe? Or was I pretending to believe, since that's what I thought I should do? Had I believed only for self-centred reasons like escaping hell, pleasing my parents? Was I really an unbeliever who'd tricked themselves into thinking they'd believed? These things, and the other problem of being surprised by my own capacity for sinfulness meant that I 'became a Christian' many times! What if the previous time wasn't real? Surely my sin meant it couldn't have been real faith. Surely I'd not properly got it yet, and what I needed was just to surrender everything this time- fully trust God. Aided by alter-calls and youth leaders on camps, I must have become a Christian about a million times, just to be safe.

The requirement of reflective faith also haunted my Nana, Mavis. She died in October 2005, a happy Christian lady whose life had been full of prayer, often given to teaching and encouraging others, and brimming with love and joy. Yet all through her life, Nana struggled with similar questions. What if she didn't really believe? What if it was just learned behaviour? Especially as she struggled with various illnesses, she wondered if God was trying to get the message through that she didn't have enough faith. She struggled with having assurance because she so often wondered about her own faith.

For me and my Nana (and I suspect all honest Christians), the requirement of reflective faith is just too much. Cary says this,

It discourages us from confessing our unbelief and encourages us instead to profess our belief. This actually becomes a technical term in English Calvinism: the Puritans spoke of those who were "professors of religion," meaning that they professed to know that they had been truly converted and regenerated by faith in Christ, whereas those who were not professors might be baptized Christians, able to confess the creed with all sincerity but not able to profess that they had true, saving faith. Those who thus could sincerely confess the faith but not confidently profess faith were taught to believe they were not truly regenerate or born again. A peculiarly Protestant agony of conscience lies here, as Calvinist ministers realized, and they devoted much of their pastoral practice to dealing with it, addressing the problem they called "the assurance of faith." The problem was to attain assurance that you really had true faith. If that’s your problem, then you are quite Protestant.

Cary's answer isn't to become Roman Catholic rather than Protestant, but a little more Lutheran. Luther famously had scratched-into his desk Baptizatus sum, I am baptised. At first glance, that's an odd place to go for your assurance, but Luther's reason for going here is a good one. It's a different promise to 'Whoever believes in Christ is saved.'
Major premise: Christ told me, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
Minor premise: Christ never lies but only tells the truth.
Conclusion: I am baptized (i.e., I have new life in Christ).

When Luther wanted assurance, he turned to the promise made to him in baptism, rather than to his own capacity for faith. Now I don't go with Cary in all the ways he spins this out- but I think he makes a brilliant point using Luther. The point of faith is always its object. Faith is never about itself, but only ever about the truthfulness of God (hence the massive difference between this minor premise and the first minor premise). For Luther, Romans 3v4 is paramount in this: 'Let God be true, and every man a liar.' God is truthful, trustworthy, and right. Making faith about anything other than that is to turn faith into a work, and making it perilous ground for Christian assurance. Here's how Cary sums-up where Luther got it right:

...to say that God speaks the truth is, of course, to make a kind of profession of faith— but... it is not reflective. We're not required to talk about our faith, to know we have faith, to profess, "I believe." We are required, of course, to believe. We must believe that what God says is true, and we must stop calling God a liar (and furthermore, not incidentally, we must believe that Christ who makes the promise is God). But that, of course, is what faith essentially does: it believes in the truth of the Word of Christ. The problem with reflective faith is that it must do more: if reflective faith is required, then believing in God's Word is not quite enough, because we must also believe that we believe.

Here's where I think Luther's got it fundamentally right. What faith says, fundamentally, is "God speaks the truth." Only secondarily, and not fundamentally, faith may also say, "I believe." But faith may also say, "My faith is weak" or "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief" or "I have sinned in my unbelief and denied my Lord, like Peter the apostle." Faith may confess its own unbelief. What it cannot do, if it is to remain faith at all, is stop clinging to the truth of God's Word. For faith does not rely on faith, but on the Word of God. Christian faith, if Luther is right, does not have to be reflective.

Doesn't that make your heart feel very glad? Faith may confess its own unbelief. Though my heart will lie to me every day- and with good evidence for its case in my sin!- still God speaks the truth, the gospel is for me, and I am saved! For people like me, and my Nana, and most likely you, it's ok for us to weep daily over our sin and doubt because the grace of Jesus is great enough to contain it. Our salvation isn't ever threatened by our behaviour, since our justification doesn't depend on our faith, but on the Word of God. In fact Luther says, '...he who doesn't think he believes, but is in despair, has the greatest faith.'!

'There is quite a difference between having faith, on the one hand, and depending on one's faith, on the other...' says Luther, and Cary explains 'Sola fide does not mean we rely on faith alone, but rather that we rely on the Word alone. For that's what faith does: it relies on the truth of the Word, not on itself.'

So in all our doubt and questions about our faith: its strength, goodness, quality, genuineness, and whatever we're encouraged to be pretty down on it. It's not good. We're not good! But I don't have faith in my faith, my faith is in the One who alone is good and true. Indeed, '...because we find we have nothing at all to hang on to but the bare truth of God's word, which we scarcely feel we believe, and indeed we mostly feel we don’t believe. And the only comfort is that this word is true, despite our desperately inadequate faith. Let God be true and every man a liar—including myself. Let me recognize as clearly as I may that my own heart is full of lies and unbelief; nonetheless God speaks the truth. That I can believe, even when I don't believe I believe.'

Matt Jenson is crystal clear when he says 'Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else... In other words, faith couldn’t care less about itself. Faith wants you to stop thinking about it, too, because in thinking about it, you are thinking about how you have (or don’t have) it. And so, you’re really just thinking about yourself.'

That's how dangerous faith is! Eyes up!

How about this most helpful quote from Spurgeon (thanks to Glen),

If you will give yourself wholly up to Christ and trust Him, then you are one of God’s chosen ones; but if you stop and say, ‘I want to know first whether I am elect’, you ask what you do not know. Go to Jesus, be you never so guilty, just as you are. Leave all curious inquiry about election alone. Go straight to Christ and hide in His wounds, and you shall know your election. The assurance of the Holy Spirit shall be given to you, so that you shall be able to say, ‘I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him.’

Over at Theology Network, I've just uploaded a brand new interview with John Piper on the subject of Justification.

This is a repost of this previous post, for the www.challies.com Reformation Day Symposium.