My wife and I vacationed the previous two weeks of October. This was a time of physical relaxation and a time I finally read Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. This entry will start with some basic traditional thoughts about faith I posted sometime ago. It follows some thoughts of the late John Murray of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. In upcoming entries I'll get to some interesting insights that Dr. Plantinga discussed in his book. There is an interesting distinction between the typical traditional discussion of faith that Dr. Murray presents and the insight Plantinga presents (or to be fair and probably more accurate, my take on what Dr. Murray said). Plantinga has thought deeply on what justification or warrant a Christian has in her beliefs. His treatment is not novel, it has a firm foundation in the history of the Christian Church, such as Augustine, Aquinas and Jonathan Edwards -- but I think aspects of the enlightenment philosophy of the past few hundred years has subtly influenced my view on faith.
If you hang around religious people, you'll sooner or later come across the word
faith. What exactly is faith? This entry will introduce the concept of faith used in the
Christian faith. Faith is defined in various ways
1. This discussion will use the term faith as defined in historical Protestant Christianity that has its roots in the German, Swiss, English and Scottish Reformation. Originally when I wrote this article I said,
faith means being satisfied to the reality of something because of certain reasons. If we use the word faith with respect to a certain event, we mean we believe that the event has occurred. If we use faith with respect to an object, we are saying we believe that the object is trustworthy for the purpose we have in view.
I now think this definition of faith is inadequate in some ways. I will continue in this vein for the rest of this post and point out some issues in following entires.This judgment about the reality of something may be the result of deliberate, careful and conscious reasoning. It may also be the result of very quick reasoning that appears spontaneous and intuitive. This judgment may also come from a very long process where we are unable to reconstruct the series of steps that caused us to arrive at that judgment. The judgment can be based on good, sufficient evidence, or be based on poor and unjustified evidence.
Another characteristic of faith is that it is compelling. Faith is
forced consent
2. The evidence is judged by the mind to be so sufficient that belief or faith is the inevitable outcome. We may will to the contrary, have a desire to the contrary, even an overwhelming interest to the contrary, but it cannot make us believe to the opposite of our judgment with respect to the evidence.
Faith, specific to the Christian faith, has by its nature, three elements that compose it. These elements are not a time ordered sequence, but all are present in what is called saving faith.
Notita
Knowledge -- this is the cognitive foundation. Faith has as its base the knowledge of the content of the Christian faith. It understands that the content of this knowledge is propositional truth about the Christian faith. Elements of this propositional truth include: the perfection and holiness of God, the fallen and rebellious nature of every living human, the just results of the fallen and rebellious nature is eternal judgment and death, and that Jesus' death paid for the punitive eternal judgment for all who depend on Jesus.
Assensus
Assent -- this is (a) the intellectual or cognitive conviction that all the knowledge that one has acquired about Christ is indeed factually true, and (b) that this applies exactly to one's spiritual needs.
Intellectual knowledge and assent to the propositions of truth is not sufficient for saving faith.
Fiducia
Trust -- this consists of entrustment to Christ. "In faith there is the engagement of person to person in the inner movement of the whole man to receive and rest upon Christ alone for salvation. It means the abandonment of confidence in our own or any human resources in a totality act of self-commitment to Christ."3
Roman Catholic theologians have historically defined saving faith as notitia (knowledge) and assensus (assent). The Protestant Reformers put an emphasis on faith as fiducia in opposition to Rome, which taught that faith was assent.
Perhaps an example will help illustrate the difference with these three aspects. When my wife and I had small children, we had a difficult time leaving our children with baby-sitters (partly because of some terrible experiences people we knew had with some baby-sitters). When we got to know some mature teenage girls, we intellectually got to know their character (notitia). When we knew them well enough, we knew that they would be good baby-sitters and that they would fit in the needs of our family when we needed to go someplace without our children. However, we were still reluctant to leave our children with the potential baby-sitters. Even though we intellectually knew the baby-sitter and agreed in our minds that the baby-sitter could do the job and provide the needed service, we could not entrust our very precious children to her. Finally, there came a time when we felt we could entrust our children to the baby-sitter. This is when intellectual assent passed into entrustment (fiducia) with our children.
Even though this discussion divides faith into three parts, these parts are so intermingled together that we really cannot conceive of saving faith without any one of these components. Neither is saving faith a process of walking through one of the parts chronologically into another. All of these parts work together. Murray writes:
"There is an interpermeation of these various ingredients. Even in assent there is incipient trust. And in trust there is the full assent to the veracity of God's promise and to the word of Christ. But what we need to appreciate in connection with these elements is that faith, however simple it is as an act of trust, is a complex act and that diverse factors enter into its constitution. The trust that the infant may be said to be simple but, after all, it is complex, and we soon find out if we try to substitute for the mother."4
Finally, there is diversity in the individual temperament with respect to faith. For some the intellectual aspect is more predominant, in others feeling, in others will. So as various people come to initial faith, some will see the outstanding feature in their act of faith as the intellectual understanding where they came to see the light of understanding in their reasoning. Another person may have had an emotional crisis that is prominent in their coming to faith. In each of these people, no matter what the temperament, these "coalesce to make faith the proper exercise of intelligent, confident, loving trust."5
Footnotes:
1 In this discussion I am summarizing insights of John Murray, in the chapter, "Faith", in Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol 2: Systematic Theology.
2 Murray, p. 237
3 Murray, p. 258
4 Murray, p. 260
5 Murray, p. 261
