Understanding Your Assumptions
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Hebrews 11:3 NIV
By faith – “by faith.” So, what does that mean? Does it mean that I simply take a leap into the non-rational and “believe”? Does it mean that I don’t have to have evidence because this is a matter of unwavering, individual commitment? Does it mean that my mind is placed on hold while I venture into an emotionally warm and fuzzy experience? How about “none of the above”?
pístis (in this case, the dative, pístei), like its Hebrew counterpart, emunah, is generally about trust and reliability. Accordingly, “faith is the human reaction to God’s primary action.”[1] But there are nuances:
The range is broader in this usage, the translation “firm,” “reliable,” “secure” being only an approximation. Thus we find the ideas of permanence, devastating effect, correspondence with the facts, and specificity. In the two last instances it is not just a matter of logical connection but of living experience as well. When used of people, e.g., servants, witnesses, messengers, or prophets, what is conveyed is truthfulness, perceptiveness, retentiveness of memory, understanding, and the ability to portray. The qualities vary; the point of intersection is the relationship between the qualities required and those actually present.[2]
Did you notice the implications of the last statement? The “point of intersection is the relationship . . .” “By faith” is about experiencing the living relationship between the claims asserted and the persons involved, as either vouching for the claims or receiving the claims. In other words, we might say that faith is a dialogue between parties, in this case, one party is God, His actions, His words and His demands upon us, and the other party in the conversation is you and me, and how we respond. What faith is not is a creed, a list of doctrinal propositions, a membership agreement. If there isn’t any dialogue, there isn’t any pístis. Weiser notes that pístis acknowledges “the relation into which he [God] has entered with us, and setting oneself in that relation.”[3]
Now let’s examine the assumptions that lie behind this relationship. First, of course, is that God exists. The Bible never attempts to prove or justify this. It simply is the case. Second, God’s universal sovereignty is assumed. What He demands of us does not need explanation. He is God. That’s enough. And third—perhaps the most important of these assumptions—is that God communicates with us. Now this is a bit tricky because if we accept the biblical text as God’s word, then we also accept that these words are what God is communicating. There are many other ways God could have chosen to communicate with us, but we assume that the Bible is the record of what He wants us to know. This is also a completely unproven axiom of biblical faith. And this is the problem (or the answer, if you choose), because there are other voices claiming our affiliation, not least of which is the religious organizations that enlist the Bible for their authority. So we will have to decide how we are going to understand these claims and what we are going to do about them. It’s not obvious (unless you choose to make it obvious). As Zornberg notes:
“The whole of Torah, writes Sefat Emet, is a complex of hints, allusions to the unattainable.”[4]
“By faith.” The context seems to be relational, dynamic, volitional. It’s not the world of certainty, one right answer, and truth and error that we grew up with in the Platonic West. But then life isn’t much like the static, frozen, indubitable image of Plato either. So I suppose I’m inclined toward Buechner’s view:
“What I began to see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, or moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts—in fact, not really a religious book at all in the sense that most of the books you would be apt to find in a minister’s study or reviewed in a special religious issue of the New York Times book section are religious. I saw it instead as a great, tattered compendium of writings, the underlying and unifying purpose of all of which is to show how God works through the Jacobs and Jabboks of history to make himself known to the world and to draw the world back to himself.”[5]
Topical Index: faith, pístis, emunah, true, Hebrews 11:3
[1]Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged, p. 849. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[4]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, p. 27.
[5]Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life(HarperOne, 1992), p. 35.
