Just Believe!!!

[liamconnor]

Christians are often ridiculed for their "blind faith"; skeptics retort to evangelical attempts with "show me some proof!" Sadly, Christians will appeal to "faith over reason".


But is this not a distortion of the N.T.?

Two quetions: Did Paul (our earliest Christian writer) require blind faith when he championed the doctrine of "solo fidei" (yes, a latin anachronism)? Or was "by faith" not an apologetic doctrine, but a soteriological one?

Where, when and/or why did "faith" become an appeal to unintellectual assent to a doctrine?

[Overcomer]

Biblical faith has never been blind. Biblical faith has always been faith based on knowledge and evidence. It was atheists like Richard Dawkins who defined it as blind because it suited their purposes. After all, it's easier to refute a straw man argument than a real one. See here:

https://www.bethinking.org/atheism/dawk ... d-evidence

Here's how the Bible defines the kind of faith the Christian has:

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1).

It is not saying that we are to believe without evidence. It simply means that, while we do not see God, we can trust him with certainty for the things we hope, especially the hope of salvation. Why is that? Because of the evidence. It is imperative to look at that verse in the context of the whole Bible. It cannot be read -- or understood -- in isolation.

The Bible is big on evidence as the basis for faith and on our employment of reason.

In Matt. 22:37-38, we read, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.� In other words, we are to engage our minds when it comes to God.

The Bible encourages believers to examine everything as noted in the following verses:

1 Thessalonians 5:19-21:Do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophetic utterances. But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good…

1 John 4:1:Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

Romans 14:5:Let each man be fully convinced in his own mind.

2 Timothy 3:14:You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them…

The Bible states that faith must be based on evidence:

John 14:11: Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.�

Acts 1:2-3:…until the day when He was taken up, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. To these He also presented Himself alive, after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God.

The apostle Paul used reason in his preaching and teaching:

Acts 17:2-3: And according to Paul’s custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead.

And Christians are called to use reason when making a defence of their faith:

1 Peter 3:15:... always (be) ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you…

Therefore, the Bible itself doesn't promote blind faith. It promotes warranted faith.

I take the sum total of the evidence for God -- cosmological, ontological, axiological, teleological, experiential, fulfillment of prophecy, historical and archaeological -- to be convicting and convincing. Therefore, my faith is warranted. Having seen God answer literally hundreds of prayers in my life and in the lives of others down through the years, and having seen miracles, I have learned that my trust in him, even though he is not visible, is warranted just as Heb. 11:1 states.

Of course, the next step, beyond recognizing that God exists, is to figure out which of the world's religions presents the right understanding of him. If one does a comparison, it is obvious that all religions except Christianity fail in the key areas of correspondence, coherence and viabliity. Again, one has to apply one's intellect and ability to reason to figure that out. Therefore, again, a Christian's faith is warranted.

And Christians have always viewed their trust in God as something that must be arrived at through reason and investigation as well as experience. Justin Martyr, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Calvin, Wesley, Warfield -- if you read their writings, you will see that they don't just speak of the necessity of reasoning through Scripture, they apply their reasoning abilities TO Scripture.

I cannot conclude this post without remarking on one other thing about trust in God. Being a Christian is about being in relationship with God through Jesus Christ by the infilling of the Holy Spirit. The more time a person spends getting to know the Lord through reading the Bible, praying, listening for his responses, recognizing his actions in one's life, etc., the more one learns to trust him. It's all about relationship. Compare that with other religions. None of them involve a relationship with God. That's just one of the many key things that makes Christianity different from all other religions.

I recommend ex-atheist J. Warner Wallace's site:

http://coldcasechristianity.com/

I also recommend Ravi Zacharias' Jesus Among Other Gods for a good comparison of the world's largest religions.

Lastly, I encourage those who love philosophy to read J. P. Moreland's Love God With All Your Mind as he explores the role of reason in Christian belief as well as Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. See here:

http://www.reonline.org.uk/knowing/what ... plantinga/

I leave you with an accurate definition of Christian faith. It is the trustful human response to God's self-revelation in his Word and actions. Or, to put it another way, Christian faith is drawing a warranted conclusion about the unknown based on knowledge about the known.

[steveb1]

Christians are often ridiculed for their "blind faith"; skeptics retort to evangelical attempts with "show me some proof!" Sadly, Christians will appeal to "faith over reason".


But is this not a distortion of the N.T.?

Two quetions: Did Paul (our earliest Christian writer) require blind faith when he championed the doctrine of "solo fidei" (yes, a latin anachronism)? Or was "by faith" not an apologetic doctrine, but a soteriological one?

Where, when and/or why did "faith" become an appeal to unintellectual assent to a doctrine?

In Christianity alone there are about a half dozen differing definitions of faith, only one of which resembles "blind belief in intellectual/verbal assertions". The original English term for "believe" derives from a word that means "to belove", as in trust.

Faith as blind adherence to doctrinal assertions really only came into play with the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, it did not take much faith to believe the NT literally. Rationalism and the scientific revolution had not yet occurred, so it was easy to take things on faith.

Post-Enlightenment, the issue became a matter of taking the NT literally, as opposed to what critical scientific and literary studies were saying about religion and its origins. Both the rationalists and the religious literalists agreed on the Enlightenment notion that if a religious text or conceptualization is not historical or scientific, then it is necessarily untrue - thus creating a simplistic "fact fundamentalism" for both warring parties.

Neither side is willing to look at an alternative view, which states that a proposition can be profoundly true without being factual. Only in post-Enlightenment times as the fallacy arisen that truth must be scientifically/historically accurate. A truth, it was and is said, must be a fact, or else it is a falsehood. Which, of course, deviates the mind from the consideration that most spiritual truth is not about material fact, but is about the Spirit as disclosed through parable, allegory, analogy, and metaphor..

So, even today, the silly war continues with both sides arguing for fact over metaphorical truth. Authentic faith has no difficulty with science because, as S.J. Gould said, science and spirituality are separate, non-overlapping magisteria or domains. Where science concerns itself with physically quantified fact, spirituality concerns itself with metaphors in order to attempt, to the extent it is possible, to disclose the nature of the ineffable divine through the specialized language of metaphor and myth.

[rstrats]

"Just Believe!!!" seems to suggest that beliefs can be obtained by simply choosing to have them. Does anyone here think that is possible?

[polonius]

Overcomer posted:

It is not saying that we are to believe without evidence. It simply means that, while we do not see God, we can trust him with certainty for the things we hope, especially the hope of salvation. Why is that? Because of the evidence. It is imperative to look at that verse in the context of the whole Bible. It cannot be read -- or understood -- in isolation.

QUESTION: What evidence"precisely?

[polonius]

Overcomer posted:

It is not saying that we are to believe without evidence. It simply means that, while we do not see God, we can trust him with certainty for the things we hope, especially the hope of salvation. Why is that? Because of the evidence. It is imperative to look at that verse in the context of the whole Bible. It cannot be read -- or understood -- in isolation.

QUESTION: What evidence"precisely?

[Elijah John]

Paul attempted to appeal to reason in addition to faith, with mixed results.

His sucess is obvious, the Church as we know it today is based on Pauline blood- redemption theology.

But that whole theology is based on a shaky foundation, a) that there was a literal Adam who caused the fall of man, and b) that Christ was the "second Adam" who truimphed where Adam fell and made the Cosmic correction.

And his theoolgy contains some glaring non-sequitors. Consider:

1) "If we could be saved by works of the Law, then Christ died in vain".

(Do martyrs ever "die in vain"? Even if Christ did not die to redeem, he still died for his beliefs, his vision of the Kingdom of God.)

2) "If Christ is not raised then your faith is in vain, and you are still in your sins".

(Really? Where did YHWH through His prophets ever teach that His mercy was dependent on resurrection of a sacrificial victim and not repentance? Were John the Baptist and his disciples "in their sins"? Or had they repented and lived righteously? That was before Christ died and before Paul even taught his blood-redemption theology.. There are many other Biblical examples of people who were were deemed righteous without "embracing the Messiah as their personal Lord and spiritual savior" though his *expected?* death and resurrection. )

Paul seems to have been on more solid gound when he appealed to Creation to establish the reality of of God.

And when he appealed to the Athenean commemoration of the "Unknown God" and proceeded from there.

Or when he champions love as the greatest virtue.

But when he starts on with his human sacrifice blood-redemption theology and attempts to link it to the priestly tradition of slaughtering animals, he (in effect) reverts to an even more primitive and barbaric prescedent.

By doing this, Paul opens a whole can of fallacy. There are many logical problems with the substitionary atonement of one man, no matter how "perfect" and no matter how "Divine".

Many of those problems have been addressed on this site.

In sum, Paul was more preacher, pastor and (flawed) theologian than prophet.

[Divine Insight]

In sum, Paul was more preacher, pastor and (flawed) theologian than prophet.

I totally agree with the above observation. Paul was clearly nothing more than a confused average man who actually used extremely flawed logic in his reasoning.

As Elijah John correctly points out Paul preached the following:

1) "If we could be saved by works of the Law, then Christ died in vain".

So this requires blind faith on Paul's part. To begin with Paul must first believe in the his original idea that all men are sinners and all have fallen short of the glory of God. In fact, he even preached that.

"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God"

This is an entirely faith-based premise upon which Paul applies his further logical reasoning. Paul was already convinced that all humans have been condemned by God. So Paul was already working from a position of blind faith before he even speaks of Jesus.

Notice in this second proclamation from Paul the idea that people are still in their sins remains a core premise of Paul's thinking:

2) "If Christ is not raised then your faith is in vain, and you are still in your sins".

So Paul so-called "logic" is entirely based on his faith-based belief that all men have been judged to be sinners by some God and Jesus death somehow changes this.

In other words, Paul's entire line of reasoning is based on faith-based premises.

Paul also appeals to the following flawed logic.

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:"

Here Paul is trying to claim that anyone who doesn't believe in the Hebrew legends of Yahweh is without excuse. But that doesn't follow at all.

To begin with even if Paul's claim were true (which it isn't) and we could conclude that there must be a designer God because the world appears to be designed to the layman's eye, it wouldn't logically follow that Hebrew God mythology must then be the one true religion.

So Paul makes many errors in reasoning and his entire method of preaching is based purely on blind faith that what his culture had taught him to believe must be true.

Obviously if Paul had been brought up in ancient Greece he would be making the same arguments for Zeus and Apollo.

So yes, Paul was preaching "Just Believe!", whether he realized this himself or not.

And that's also what he himself was doing. He was just believing in the local religious superstitions of the culture in which he lived.

[marco]

Two questions: Did Paul (our earliest Christian writer) require blind faith when he championed the doctrine of "solo fidei" (yes, a latin anachronism)? Or was "by faith" not an apologetic doctrine, but a soteriological one?

Where, when and/or why did "faith" become an appeal to unintellectual assent to a doctrine?

Fides, faith, is a feminine Latin noun whose ablative is fide. So you want "sola fide" - by faith alone. Solo fidei has no meaning. Justification by faith alone split Christianity. The absurdity that Christ being nailed to a cross somehow gave salvation to humanity is partly responsible for giving "faith" a bad name. When faith can embrace absurdities - as it does - then faith may be held in contempt.

Augustine and Anselm held to the incomprehensible: crede ut intellegas - believe that you may understand which to the reasonable mind appears to put the chariot before the horse. But paradox is the life blood of Christianity - death is life. Though we might snigger at the faith of an Anselm or Augustine, it has provided vast income for the main Christian Church.

[bluethread]

Augustine and Anselm held to the incomprehensible: crede ut intellegas - believe that you may understand which to the reasonable mind appears to put the chariot before the horse. But paradox is the life blood of Christianity - death is life. Though we might snigger at the faith of an Anselm or Augustine, it has provided vast income for the main Christian Church.

I understand that this forum is not a place for deep discussion, but rather short clarification and argumentation. That said, I think your summary does not really give justice to the struggle of the church fathers. The relationships between life and death, faith and reason are very complicated and not just a means of deriving income.