What is faith?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: What, exactly, is ‘faith’?

At its most general, “faith” is a word we use to reference a particular kind of way people relate to other people, things or concepts. Zooming in a little, the English word ‘faith’ derives from the Latin fides which means something like ‘trust’ and, in that sense, we might say faith is a universal human experience inasmuch as it is a relational concept, and we humans are relational beings. It is not possible to exist in this world as a human beings without faith, confidence, or trust in something or some sense to some degree.

But in contemporary usage, the word “faith” has come to collect so many connotations in all manner of contexts leading to quite a bit of confusion as to what, exactly, it is. I mean, we talk about having faith in our loving spouse; having faith in qualified doctors and airline pilots; the religious tell us ‘we’re saved by faith’ while religious critics tell us, well in the words of one author, quote ‘faith is pretending to believe in this you don’t know’. It’s a verb, it’s a noun, it’s an adjective, it’s… complex!

So I welcome this question – ‘What, exactly, is ‘faith’?

It’s not clear to me how many people today would recognise Biblical denotations of ‘faith’. So what I’ll do here is be selective and zero in on, not simply this idea of faith generally, not even the idea of ‘religious faith’, but specifically the nature of Christian faith as revealed in the Biblical use of the term. This, I believe, is a necessary preliminary to any formal exposition of the doctrine of saving faith, so understood by Christianity.

So with that, I want to sketch at least three ways the Bible denotates faith, before making some final comments on what, then, constitutes ‘saving faith’.

First: faith as a verb in the sense of trusting and believing.

When study the use of ‘faith’ in the Bible, we see that the New Testament advances far beyond the Old, yet in a way that builds on top of Old Testament foundations. By far the most common use of the word is as an act of belief or the state of believing someone or something to be true, authentic, real – worthy. This is the sense in which we find the word “faith” in the vast majority of cases in the New Testament.

For example:

• When asked “What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:28–29). Here, the word for belief is pistis, the Greek word for faith.
• Or towards the end of his gospel, John writes: “These things have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and that by believing in His name you may have life” (John 20:31)
• Or in the words of Paul, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9).

Now, notice in each of these examples how faith in this sense of trusting and believing, it doesn’t fit the mould of religious critics today. It’s sometimes said that faith is the antithesis or opposition of reason, you know, if you have faith you have it in place of reason, or if you’re reasonable, you are so because you are not faithful. Even Christian thinkers have fed into this idea with sentiments like ‘reason only takes you so far, then you need to continue the journey by faith’.

Well, this concept of faith in place of reason – it isn’t Biblical. You won’t find faith denoted in any such sense from Genesis to Revelation. I mean, take that statement in John 20:31 as an example. Faith in the sense of trusting and believing is based on knowledge grounded in evidence.It is not so much a ‘way of knowing’ as it is a ‘response to what we know’; it is a way of trusting something or someone; trusting that which you have reason to believe is true. And in the context of the New Testament, the object of what is trustworthy for Christian faith is God, Christ, the gospel, His word, His truth, His promises, such that ‘having faith’ in this active sense, signifies commitment following conviction in God, His person, word and deed. For after all, it is not faith that matters; it is faith in what or whom. 

A second use of Faith in the New Testament is as a noun in the sense of ‘the contents of Christian belief’.

We read, for example:

• In Jude 3 of “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people…”
• Or Romans 1:5, Paul writes of an “obedience that comes from faith for his [Jesus’] name’s sake.”
• Or again in 1 Timothy 4:1, Paul speaks of faith as something we can abandon, walk away from.

These occurrences of faith as a noun, denote the body of truths believed by Christians, and from about the 2^nd century on, was referred to by the Latin phrase regula fidei, or rule of faith, playing an obvious role in what constitutes orthodox and heterodox beliefs.

And, perhaps hard to dissociate from this sense, is the use of the word faith (pistis) as a name for Christianity, itself. Faith is so vital to Christianity that sometimes Christianity isn’t even called a religion but, ‘the Christian faith’. We see this in Galatians 3:23 and following, where Paul says “before faith came, we were held captive under the law… but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian”

A Third use of faith in the New Testament is as an adjective in the sense of ‘being faithful’.

This sense is born out in passages which speak of human faithfulness, such as Galatians 5:22 “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness…”, and other passages such as Romans 3:3, which speak of God’s faithfulness “What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?” Incidentally, this question is answered by another passage, 2 Timothy 2:13 “If we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself.”

This sense of faith or faithfulness is stressed at length in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms, but also in the later prophets and earlier Pentateuch. For example, Deuteronomy 7:9 reads: “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments” (Gen. 24:27; Exod. 34:6). Through these examples, we see that faithfulness in this sense is a description or way of characterising the relationship of Christians towards God, and God towards His people, conveying in its use notions of ‘firmness’, ‘stability’, truth and covenantal grounding like a marriage…

So there’s three senses in which faith is denoted in the Bible:

• As an act of trusting and believing
• As the contents of that belief
• And as the covenantal foundation of that belief

There are a few minority cases where faith is used in reference to an attitude or expectation, especially in times where Jesus did miraculous works on earth, and also where it’s described as a special gift given to certain believers to edify the church (e.g., 1 Cor 12:9). But taken altogether, we come now to see the significance of how these funnel into what is meant by ‘saving faith’.

Negatively, saving faith is not merely a rational act – of belief that something is the case. One of the first pronouncements of Jesus’ identity given in the Gospel is made by demons who declared Him to be Son of the Most High! Belief that Jesus is who he says he is – God, Lord and Saviour – is necessary for salvation, but it is not sufficient anymore than merely believing that my wife is who she says she is makes her my wife! My belief that she would make a good wife needs to be acted upon by a belief in her. You see, faith involves intellectual assent, it involves reason and knowledge, but it is no less than these… it is more.

And in this way, faith comes to hallmark the life of the Christian as ‘the faithful’.

‘[W]hat must I do to be saved?’ the trembling jailer cried. ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved’ was all that Paul replied (Acts 16:30, 31).

Yet this belief, itself, is not meritorious… we don’t ‘act faithfully to be saved’ … 1 Corinthians 12:3 “… no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit’…” In other words, saving faith, faith which yields eternal life for believers in the forgiveness of sins, is principally a work of God in us – a paradox to be sure, but one summed succinctly in Mark 9:24, the words of the boys father, who exclaimed: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”…

You see, we need to place our faith in Jesus… but we can only do so because God has been faithful to us in sending Jesus – the light of the world – that we may believe in Him. He has been revealed that we may believe… and that by believing in his name, we may have eternal life.

The mistake of religious critics who mock faith as an inadequate way of knowing, is that they have a small unbiblical view of faith. When Paul writes “we live by faith, not by sight…” in 2 Cor 5:7, he’s not making a statement of how believers are to think, he’s making a statement of how we are to live which is no less than thinking, but so much more… As God pledges consistent fidelity to his promises, as He pledges a lasting relationship, so we are invited-indeed called-to commit our lives with a commensurate faithfulness looking unto Jesus, the author and perfector of… our faith!

Saving faith is not faith in faith – how much or how little you have – that would make us our own saviours. The true object of saving faith is ultimately God Himself in Jesus. Faith does not make God real. On the contrary, it is the only appropriate response to a real God who wants to be known to us.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast…” (Eph. 2:8-9)