Faith is not Blind!

At the end of my previous blog post, I had indicated that biblical “Faith” does not mean “belief without evidence”. So what exactly does it mean?

One of my favourite apologist JP Holding in his article (link) regarding biblical “Faith” offers four different ways people understand the word “faith”:

1. A “faith healer” named Benny Pophagin offers to heal Joe of his lumbago. Benny lays hands on Joe and prays, but the lumbago remains. Benny waves Joe away, saying, “This is your problem. You don’t have enough faith.”
2. A Christian faces several objections to his beliefs that he cannot answer. He says, “I don’t care what people say, I still have faith.”
3. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard “contends that the scriptures included in the Bible verify that the Christian belief system is based on a leap of faith, not on tangible proof.” This is because Christianity involves paradoxes offensive to reason.
4. The famous skeptic Mark Twain said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

The third and fourth points are much closer to the modern use of the word ‘faith’ by skeptical polemic while the first and second points reflect the folk understanding of ‘faith’ by religious people. However, Holding indicates that:

The Greek word behind “faith” in the NT is pistis. As a noun, pistis is a word that was used as a technical rhetorical term for forensic proof. Examples of this usage are found in the works of Aristotle and Quintiallian, and in the NT in Acts 17:31:

Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

If you are used to thinking of “faith” in terms of our first two examples, this will assuredly come as a surprise. The raising of Christ is spoken of here as a proof that God will judge the world.

The concept of ‘faith’ is also expanded to include “trust”. Quoting Holding again:

With a form of pistis used over 240 times in the NT, it will not be possible to examine every instance of it. But it is enough to highlight some of the more obvious examples.

Matthew 8:5-10 And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed… When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

We see the definition of “faith” in terms of loyalty to, or trust in, a deserving patron, exhibited quite clearly here. The centurion knew of Jesus’ miraculous abilities (v. 8). His faith was not “blind” but based on the evidence of Jesus’ past works. He considered Jesus worthy therefore of his trust and came to him for help.

This is the sort of “faith” also exhibited by other people who come to, or are brought to, Jesus for healing. The man with palsy, the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus, the blind man (Matt. 9), the Syrophoenician woman (Matt. 15) — all came knowing of Jesus’ abilities to heal. Their actions were based on evidence and proof. Of course one may argue that their trust was misplaced and that Jesus was a charlatan, but contextually that is beside the point. Our point is that faith is not “blind trust.”

Now, this might come as a surprise to many; it was certainly to me when I first read it as I too had been caught up with the ‘blind assent’ characterisation of the word ‘faith’ and had mistook it for the biblical word ‘faith’. Holding’s article makes so much more sense as he develops the contextualised concept of ‘faith’. I can relate to this type of ‘faith’ readily as I come from a collectivistic culture. I would not say that the culture I was raised in was similar to Ancient Near Eastern culture, but certainly I can relate to these concepts of ‘loyalty’, ‘honour’, ‘trust’ as explained by Holding intuitively, more so than an average person in an individualistic culture.

Many times I have encountered dialogues where a skeptic in trying to prove that the Christian’s faith is in fact blind will resort to a dictionary argument where a dictionary is used as an authority to support the premise. I find it very comical in that, in scientific discourse a word/phrase describing a concept is defined by the scientists using them–the word might have an entirely different meaning in the general/normal use but if that word is used in a scientific context it will have the specific meaning attached by the scientists working in that field. So what would an expert in the field think of a lay person trying to demonstrate that the scientific word means what is meant by the normal/every day use of the word by using a dictionary? Some skeptics find it hard to give a similar privilege to theological concepts. Certainly they would not allow another meaning for ‘faith’; For the ‘blind’ view of faith as used by them gives much emotional force to their arguments and/or rhetoric and a theological meaning like the one explained above would destroy the polemical force of the word.