1. FAITH is a personal relationship. It is between persons; it is not between things. Nor is it between persons and things. We can trust ourselves to a ladder, a bridge, or a boat; but it is evident that confidence in the uniformity of natural law and in the adaptability of any such inanimate instrument as a ladder or a boat to our purpose, is not faith but knowledge founded on inference, and certain in proportion to the validity of the reasoning on which it is founded.
We might say that we have faith in a fact or a truth, but only when we have some personal interest in it. It might be demonstrated to us that the planets are inhabited; but we should not say that we had faith in that fact until we could feel ourselves personally concerned in it. Many things may be affirmed or proved respecting the Divine nature (purely speculative theories), which, for the same reason, stand in no connexion with our faith. So, too, the truth that appeals to our faith must be about some other person. We may be convinced of abstract principles; but before they can elicit faith, they must be clothed in personality. We know that goodness exists, but we have faith in a good man. All can recognize the wisdom and love that pervade a beautiful universe; but faith must feel them as the wisdom and love of an ever-present God. Faith contemplates the truth it receives as a precious golden link, binding in some sort of fellowship the believer and some higher spiritual being. It is this peculiarly personal character of faith that gives to it that warm glow of emotion which we feel always belonging to it, which enables us to say that we believe with the heart, and which accounts for faith so essentially and profoundly governing the springs of character and of life.
Faith which is the foundation of our spiritual life is before all things a personal relation between ourselves and Christ; it is an affection of our whole soul in regard to Him; and by no means a merely intellectual relation of our mind to a truth or a system of truths. It is true, in a sense, to say that the “object” of our faith is the Apostles’ Creed, which is a bundle of propositions set forth, commented on, and considerably amplified by the Catholic Church. But faith in the teacher comes before faith in the teaching. We must believe in Christ and in the Church before we believe in what they teach us. [Note: G. Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, 41.]
2. There are very few passages in the Gospels where Christ uses the word “faith” or the word “believe” to describe an intellectual attitude toward certain truth. Christ constantly uses “faith” as a term that is not applicable to the relation of a man to an opinion, or of a man to a thing. He uses “faith” as a term that is applicable only to the relation of a person to a person. I believe not things that people tell me, I believe the people themselves, and my belief in them is faith. A little child, knowing very little of life, sits on the father’s knee learning its first lessons of life, and believes what the father tells it. Now its belief in what the father says is not an act of faith, it is a fruit of faith. It is the relationship of confidence between the child and the father that makes the child believe anything the father says, and its belief in what the father tells is simply one of the accessory sequences of its faith in the father. Faith, with Jesus, is personal confidence in Himself. Faith, with Jesus, is the answer of a man’s soul to His soul, the touch of a man’s personality upon His personality, the surrender of a willing life to Jesus Christ as its Lord and its King.
That is the explanation of the healing of the man with the withered hand. There stands before the Christ a man with a withered arm. The limb hangs perfectly useless by his side. The nerves have ceased to act in the shrunken limb. Its muscles have atrophied; they no longer obey the command of the will. Movement has long since ceased to be possible. And Christ says, “Stretch forth thy hand.” We should find it easy to excuse the man if he had burst into the laugh that declares an embittered spirit. “Stretch it out? Why, that is the very thing I have wanted to do all these years. If I could do it at all, would I have waited for your instructions? You are making what I need as a gift the condition of your giving. You must give me first some other power, and then there will be some chance of my doing what you say. Don’t tell me to do what I want you to give me the power of doing.” Just for one moment the man stands looking into the quiet eyes of Him who knows both the innate powers and the sad paralysis of the human heart. Just for one moment; and then something stirred within the man. It was faith in Christ. Only that; but how much it was! The nerves that had long since been utterly irresponsive, dead fibres of a useless limb, began to tingle, as once again there flowed along them the almost forgotten vibration. The feeble muscles obeyed, grew full and round again, and slowly the long palsied limb was lifted up, and into all its dry and desolate channels there came once more the blessed tide of life. That power to use his arm, was it a product or a cause? Did he not obey the initial impulse? Did he not receive the fuller power? His power sprang from his faith; it issued in power. It was from faith; it was to faith. The final issue was life.
3. When we realize that the central feature of Christian discipleship is a relation to a Person, the word “faith” assumes that meaning of trust which is really the highest meaning it is capable of bearing. The first and last meaning of faith for the Christian must be trust in a Person. All other meanings of faith are subordinate to this one. The Christian ought to be able to think of his life entirely in the terms of trust. His conduct ought to be the practical issue of that trust, his theology ought to be the formulated statement of it, and as a member of Christ’s Church he is, ideally speaking, one of the company of the faithful. Directly we allow abstract and artificial ideas to govern and determine our conceptions of Christian conduct, knowledge, and organization, we are bound to lower the meaning of faith and take away from it its rich personal significance.
The insistence of the New Testament on the feeling of trust as the root of true faith is clear enough in the original Greek, but is obscured in the English version through the lack of a simple verb to express in one word the phrase “to-have-faith-in.” The translators of the New Testament have had to fall back upon the word “believe,” which quite obscures the original meaning of the writers, and seems to lay the chief stress on the intellectual element in faith. But in numberless places where the phrase “believe-in” or “believe-on” occurs, it is not belief that is emphasized but, in reality, confidence or the feeling of trust. A reference to such passages will show that the object of this faith is a person, “God” or “Christ,” so that the phrase “to-believe-in,” or “to-believe-on,” or “faith-toward” connotes trustful reliance upon the personal object mentioned. This appears in such representative passages as, “Believe-on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Act_16:31); “Ye believe-in God, believe also in me” (Joh_14:1); “To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness” (Rom_4:5).
When the birds one day—in a beautiful story of Mr. Warde Fowler’s—were discussing the nature and character of man, they were much puzzled by him. They thought him harsh and difficult to understand—all but one bird. At the end of the debate the swallow, spreading its wings to fly up into the boundless air, said, “We live by love and trust. As for understanding, that will come afterwards.” [Note: A. F. W.Ingram, Banners of the Christian Faith, 17.]
There is a very curious illustration of how completely the traditionary theological idea of faith, now so rarely met with outside of the theological systems, had, almost to our own day, occupied the mind of the church to the exclusion of the New Testament idea. Never was an honest sermon so searched for heresies as Albert Barnes’s sermon on “The Way of Salvation”; and yet of all its gainsayers, no one thought of objecting to the mistake that lay patent on the surface of it. The preacher, drawing out in ample argument his views of the method of the divine government, of atonement, and of regeneration, exclaims with impassioned earnestness, “Fly to this scheme!” “Commit your eternal interests to this plan! “Upon which Drs. Junkin and Breckenridge reply, with equal earnestness, “Don’t do anything of the kind I Don’t fly to Mr. Barnes’s scheme—to the New England plan! Fly to our scheme—commit yourself to the Scotch system, or the Dutch!”—and never saw that the gospel “Way of Salvation” was, not to commit oneself to anybody’s “scheme,” but to “commit oneself, in well-doing, to a faithful Creator.” [Note: L. W. Bacon, The Simplicity that is in Christ, 35.]
What is the point where himself lays stress?
Does the precept run “Believe in good,
In justice, truth, now understood
For the first time?”—or, “Believe in me,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of Life? ” Whoever can take
The same to his heart and for mere love’s sake
Conceive of the love,—that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense. [Note: Browning, Christmas-Eve, xvii.]
