By Faith
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sola fide
sola fide
As good heirs of the Reformation, we all know that we are saved sola fide, by faith alone. Because of this we talk about faith, we promote faith, and we use the language of faith when we talk to each other. For all of this, when you try to pin someone down on what exactly faith is, that can be tricky. For some, faith is something like intellectual assent. This is sometimes called creedal faith, and we bear witness to this type of faith every time we confess the creed together. In this case, faith is giving intellectual assent to these doctrines of faith that cannot be proven but are testified to by the universal Church and the Scriptures.
The difficulty with this kind of faith is that we all have met people who may stand up and confess the creed every single Sunday but that faith doesn’t seem to have any impact on their lives. They go out from the church on Sunday morning and live their life from Sunday afternoon to Saturday evening exactly the same as the would if they didn’t confess the creedal doctrines of the Church.
On the other end of the spectrum from creedal faith is what we might call Experiential Faith. Experiential faith is faith lived out. This is a faith that is alive and vibrant. It affects a person’s every day life, and it would be impossible to explain how they live their life without accounting for this lived experience of faith. This type of faith is faith in practice, faith lived out.
This difficulty with this kind of faith, however, is that it is not uniquely Christian. Every religion in the world has its stories of faith, stories of people who believed the impossible and the impossible became possible, stories of people who did incredible things all because of what they believed to be true about God. Furthermore, even if this experiential faith is located in a distinctly Christian context, we’ve all met people who might be on fire for Jesus, but when you ask them what it is they actually believe about Jesus, things get a little sketchy. For example, what does it mean to be on fire for Jesus if what you believe about Jesus is quite obviously heresy?
Objective vs Subjective
Objective vs Subjective
The first kind of faith, creedal faith, is objective. It points to the creeds, which point to the Scriptures, which point to the realities to which Scriptures testify. The objective question is: “Do you believe, i.e. give intellectual assent, to these statements composed by the Church and testified to in Holy Scripture?” If you say yes, that’s faith.
The second kind of faith, experiential faith, is subjective. The “I” is central here. Do I believe? Does it impact my daily life? Am I a different person because of my faith?
Let me see if I can explain this by an example. I want you to imagine something red, like a red box. If the box were real, it would be objectively red, although even that statement is loaded with difficulties. The point is though, that the box IS red. That’s the objective question. The subjection question is “Do I perceive it as red?” If I’m color blind, if the lights are too bright, if there are no lights at all, if there’s dirt in my eye, or for any number of reasons, I might not be able to perceive the red box. That’s the subjective side. The box is red, but I might not be able to perceive.
When we speak about faith, therefore, what we are after is for the subjective and the objective to be aligned, i.e. the box is red and I perceive it to be red. We have to know what it is we believe and that belief has to be impacting our every day lives. Disciples of Jesus Christ, which is what I am here to continue to form you into, must have knowledge AND that knowledge must affect the way we live our lives.
Our reading from Hebrews begins like this:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
I like those two words: assurance and conviction. The necessitate a certain amount of knowledge of something. You must be assured about something or convinced of something. But also, they imply some sort of corresponding action. What would it mean to be assured of something or convinced of something without the appropriate corresponding response.
Take Noah for example. The author says:
By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
So Noah hears about judgment that is to come. By comparison, we might think about the line in our creed “he will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Noah hears about judgment that is coming, and then what? He builds an ark. What would it have meant if Noah didn’t build the ark? What would it mean if Noah had a service once a week where he stood up and confessed that God’s judgment was coming upon the world and then he went out from that place and didn’t build the ark? To have faith, you need knowledge about something you cannot know for sure and actions that correspond to that knowledge.
Consider also Abraham, who the author discusses in the next few verses. I’ll just read the first one.
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
Abram is called by God to leave his ancestral home and go to a place that God will show him because God would make of him a great nation and bless him and in him bless all the families of the earth. What would it mean if Abram never left his father’s home, and yet he went around telling people every day with absolute certainty about this blessing that would be one day be his? Is that saving faith? No. Saving faith requires knowledge of something that you cannot know for sure and actions that correspond to that knowledge.
This is why the often overlooked epistle of James is critical to this conversation about faith because it’s the counter-balance to a narrow reading of Paul. To be clear, I don’t think Paul and James actually disagree as many would argue, but it’s not hard to see why some would think that. It’s because of sections like the one I’m about to read that Martin Luther called James a right strawy epistles and questioned its canonicity. James writes:
What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?
If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,
and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?
So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.
And a few verses later, after discussing Abraham, we get the very best way for us to think about faith:
You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works;
Don’t be confused by the language of faith and works here. What James is talking about is the objective and subjective dimensions of faith. Read that verse again and replace “faith” with “objective faith” and “works” with “subjective faith” and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
To be a Christian then, to have saving faith, is to have both objective and subjective faith; it is to know what you believe and to act accordingly. This means that becoming mature disciples of Jesus Christ, which is what we are after here as a church, must involve building up and strengthening both our objective and subjective faith. And frankly, a couple hours each Sunday isn’t enough time to do that well. So I expect you to go home and read your Bibles. I expect you to have a time of daily prayer. I expect you to be working on a deeper understanding of what it is you believe and (to use the language of James) on how to bring that faith to completion in everyday life.
And what you should expect of me and of this church is opportunities to do exactly that. If you aren’t finding those opportunities, or if you need help developing these habits on your own time, then come talk to me. Or grabs some else and talk to them. That’s what I’m here for. That’s what we’re all here for: to help each other become better disciples of Jesus Christ by developing a deeper understanding of what we actually believe and by learning the habit of bringing that faith to completion in every day life. That’s the goal. That’s discipleship. That’s saving faith. Knowing what we believe, and walking outside those doors and living it out.
Amen.