In its widest sense, faith is an assent to truth upon the exhibition of evidence. It does not seem necessary that this evidence should be of the nature of testimony; for we are commonly and properly said to believe whatever we regard as true. We believe in the existence and attributes of God, though our assent is not founded upon what is strictly called testimony.
1. The testimony that is always valid is that of the Holy Spirit. It is the faith founded on that witness that is the faith commended in the New Testament—a faith which rests upon the manifestation by the Holy Spirit, of the excellence, beauty, and suitableness of the truth. This is what Peter calls the precious faith of God’s elect. It arises from a spiritual apprehension of the truth, or from the testimony of the Spirit with and by the truth in our hearts.
Of this faith the Scriptures make frequent mention. Christ said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Luk_10:21). The external revelation was made equally to the wise and to the babes. To the latter, however, was granted an inward illumination which enabled them to see the excellence of the truth that commanded their joyful assent. Our Saviour therefore added, “No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.” When Peter made his confession of faith in Christ, our Saviour said to him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood bath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Mat_16:17).
Paul was a persecutor of the Church; but when it pleased God to reveal His Son in him, he at once preached the faith which he before destroyed. He had an external knowledge of Christ before; but this internal revelation he experienced on his way to Damascus, and it effected an instant change in his whole character. There was nothing miraculous or peculiar in the conversion of the apostle, except in the mere incidental circumstances of his case. He speaks of all believers as having the same Divine illumination. “God,” he says, “who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2Co_4:6). On the other hand, he speaks of those “whose minds the god of this world hath blinded, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”In the second chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, he dwells much upon this subject, and teaches not only that the true Divine wisdom of the gospel was undiscoverable by human wisdom, but that when externally revealed, we need the Spirit that we may know the things freely given to us of God. For the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them; for they are spiritually discerned. Hence the apostle prays for his readers, that the eyes of their understanding (heart) might be opened, that they might know the hope of their calling, the riches of their inheritance, and the greatness of the Divine power of which they were the subjects (Eph_1:18-19). And in another place, that they might be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” (Col_1:9). By spiritual understanding is meant that insight into the nature of the truth which is the result of the influence .of the -Spirit upon the heart.
Since faith is founded on this spiritual, apprehension, Paul says, he preached not with the enticing words of man’s wisdom, because a faith which resulted from such preaching, could be at best a rational conviction; but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that the faith of his hearers might stand, not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God (1Co_2:4-5). Hence faith is said to be one of the fruits of the Spirit, the gift of God, the result of His operation (Eph_2:8; Col_2:12). These representations of the Scriptures accord with the experience of the people of God. They know that their faith is not founded upon the testimony of others, or exclusively or mainly upon external evidence. They believe because the truth appears to them both true and good, because they feel its power and experience its consolations.
We must do away with the claim that faith, like every other means whereby men seek to come to God, is a human work. Had we to admit the unqualified truth of this claim with regard to the faith of which we speak, then even our faith would be an effort to lay hold on God by human means. But it is just this that we ought expressly to exclude from the communion of the Christian with God. It is well known that in their opponents the Reformers encountered the view that faith is one among many human efforts all equally necessary to union with God. “They think that faith is a thing which it is in their power to have or not to have, like any other natural human work; so when in their heart they arrive at a conclusion and say, ‘Verily, the doctrine is right, and therefore I believe it,’ then they think that this is faith. Now when they see and feel that no change has thereby taken place in themselves and others, and that works do not follow, and they remain as before in the old nature—then they think that the faith is not enough, but that there must be something more and greater.” Thus Luther knew a kind of faith which a man himself begets by bringing himself to assent to doctrines of some sort. Luther calls such a faith worthless, because it gives us nothing. [Note: W. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with, God, 214.]
2. But if faith means assent to truth, it is obvious that its nature and attendants must vary with the nature of the truth believed, and especially with the nature of the evidence upon which our assent is founded. A man may assent to the proposition that the earth moves round its axis, that virtue is good, that sin will be punished, that to him, as a believer, God promises salvation. In all these cases there is assent, and therefore faith, but the state of mind expressed by the term is not always the same.
What are the truths which the Spirit of God commends to our acceptance? They are the truths which are summed up in the gospel.
(1) Now, first of all, the gospel asserts Christ’s essential Godhead. Speaking of Him it says, “Who being in the form of God.” That was His proper form, the form that properly and naturally belonged to Him as the Eternal Son, of the Eternal Father. Yet, though He was in the, form of God, and by nature and right the equal of God, He “took upon him the form of a servant.” He had to take that. Being in the form of God He could have the form of a servant only by taking it. Hence, as He had covenanted to do a servant’s work, He “took upon him the form of a servant,” and so was “God manifest in the flesh.” Then another Scripture says, “when the fulness of the time was corn; God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” By natural and Divine prerogative He was the Lawmaker, and thus above the law. But He was made under the law, for, having taken the form of a servant, He must be under the law so as to be in circumstances to give service, to render obedience, and thus “fulfil all righteousness.”
(2) By thus taking manhood into God, and thereby blending our nature with His own, Christ became qualified to act as the Substitute of sinners. Under bond of the New Covenant, He had engaged to discharge all our liabilities. Accordingly, in our room He obeyed the law which we had violated, and endured the punishment which we had incurred. He lived to work out for us a righteousness, and He died to save us from the curse of death. Through His doing and dying in our stead the conditioned obedience was rendered to the law, and the requisite atonement was made to God. Hence it comes to pass that we have redemption through His blood, for His blood was the stipulated price of our redemption. “He was made sin for us.” Our sins were legally imputed to Him; transferred to His account. “The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all,” and “his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree.” And this transfer of our sin to Him was in order that “we might be made the righteousness of God in him”—that is to say, His righteousness is imputed to us, just as our sin was imputed to Him, and we are reckoned and treated before the law as righteous, because we are “made the righteousness of God in him.” Thus is Christ “the end of the law for righteousness.”
3. But faith as assent to truth is never purely intellectual, it always involves a moral act. No doubt, even in the writings of St. Paul, faith sometimes means simply the theoretical acceptance or intellectual conviction of the facts of salvation as in Rom_4:25, or in the declaration that God raised up His Son from the dead. But even in such a case there is always a moral element which depends not upon the knowledge of merely historical fact, but upon the personal confidence in God’s character and purpose. This confidence is not simply an assent of the mind. “With the heart,” says Paul, “man believes.” What Paul dreads and protests against in his Epistles both to the Romans and to the Galatians is that proud self-satisfied temper of legalism which assumed that mere theoretic acceptance or verbal assent was enough to make a Christian, the mere mental acknowledgment of the terms of the ancient covenant. He is everywhere contending for a new content of the word “faith” which will exhibit itself in overt practical life.
No one, probably, has ever found his life permanently affected by any truth whereof he has been unable to obtain a real apprehension, which, as I have elsewhere shown, is quite a different thing from real comprehension. Intellectual assent to truths of faith, founded on what the reason regards as sufficient authority for, at least, experimental assent, must, of course, precede real apprehension of them, as also must action, in a sort experimental, on faith of truths so assented to; but such faith and action have little effective life, and are likely soon to cease, or to become mere formalities, unless they produce some degree of vital knowledge or perception. [Note:Coventry Patmore, Principle in Art, 219.]
I think it is clear that all religious faith, if it is to be worth anything, must rest finally on choice and be able to maintain itself in face of hostile evidence. The point is beautifully illustrated in one of R. L. Stevenson’s “Fables,” called “Faith, Half-faith and No-faith-at-all,” in which three men, going on a pilgrimage, discuss the grounds of faith. One, a priest, bases his faith on miracles, another, a “virtuous person,” on metaphysics; the third, “an old rover with his axe,” says nothing at all. At last one came running and told them all was lost; that the powers of darkness had besieged the Heavenly Mansions, that Odin was to die and evil triumph.
“I have been grossly deceived,” cried the virtuous person. “All is lost now,” said the priest.
“I wonder if it is too late to make it up with the devil? ” said the virtuous person.
“Oh, I hope not,” said the priest, “and at any rate, we can but try. But what are you doing with your axe?” says he to the rover.
“I am off to die with Odin,” said the rover. [Note: H. A. P. Hill, The Interregnum, 10.]
