Episode Details

As flagged last week, the Bible often sees the Christian life as a matter of “faith, love and hope”. “These three”, as Paul describes them 1 Corinthians 13, seem to capture the essence of our response to the gospel and growth as a Christian. I made the point last time that we don’t tend to use this triad of virtues so much these days in talking about Christian living and maturity, and wondered what we were missing or neglecting by not doing so.

Over the next few posts, I’m planning to answer that question by exploring faith and love and hope as the basic virtues of the Christian life—starting this week with faith. 

Words, like middle-aged men, tend to sag and expand with time. 

Perhaps that’s one reason ‘faith’, ‘love’ and ‘hope’ have fallen a little out of favour in recent times as descriptions of the Christian life. All three of these words have put on quite a bit of weight and are barely recognizable in comparison to what they looked like in their New Testament youth. 

We’ve no doubt all heard sermons that have pointed this out, especially about ‘faith’: faith does not mean a blind leap in the dark; faith is not a mystical substance that some people have or don’t have (“I wish I had your faith”); faith is not a sentimental willingness to overlook the claims of evidence and reason, and so on. 

All the same, ‘faith’ does retain an air of mystery to many people, and its nature continues to be debated, not just in conversation with the world, but within the Christian academy. 

Matthew Bates, for example, has recently written a book called Salvation by Allegiance Alone, in which he contends that the traditional definitions of faith (which revolve around conviction or trust in something being true and reliable) are inadequate. He says ‘allegiance’ or ‘embodied loyalty’ is a much bigger and better way of translating the Greek words we normally translate as ‘faith’ or ‘faithful’ or ‘to believe’—and moreover that this important discovery will allow us to solve all those pesky debates between Protestants and Catholics about justification by faith alone, to secure the place of good works in the Christian life, and generally to save the church from various catastrophes. 

I’m not going to waste too much time engaging with Mr Bates’s proposal, having a high degree of faith in Will Timmins’s polite scholarly demolition of the whole idea. My favourite line in Will’s essay: “When taken together, along with the other problems noted above, it becomes apparent that Bates’s lexical argument… consists of little more than a pastiche of citation, inference, and assertion” (p. 609). That’s about as brutal as genteel academic talk gets. 

I mention Will’s essay because in it he highlights the importance of Romans 4 for understanding what sort of faith the NT is talking about. Along with Hebrews 10-11, and parts of Galatians, Romans (and in particular chapter 4) is one of the key sections of the NT to apprentice ourselves to if we are going to understand what sort of faith the Bible speaks of. 

I say “what sort of faith” because the word ‘faith’ itself is not at all mysterious or difficult to understand. The noun ‘faith’ (according to the standard BDAG Greek lexicon) means three things: “that which evokes trust and faith (faithfulness, reliability)”; “the state of believing on the basis of the reliability of the one trusted (trust, confidence)”; “that which is believed (body of faith/belief/teaching)”. 

‘Faith’ envisages the possibility that there is an object or statement or person that can be regarded as true or reliable. One becomes convinced that this is indeed the case. One trusts or relies on or has confidence in this person and their word. The Reformation had three Latin words for this: notitia (the matter or person worthy of trust); assensus (the mental conviction or