| Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
Although the beginning of the New Year may be in some ways tumultuous, things are off to a great start for Reasonable Faith! Our fall Matching Grant campaign was a huge success, setting us on a sure footing for the year ahead and enabling us to pay for the development of the WLC Center this year without cutbacks to our other outreaches. The development of the Center proceeds on schedule, and my work on my systematic philosophical theology continues to advance, along with other projects.
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| Jan and I continue to record my weekly Defenders lectures for podcast, live stream, and YouTube. We’re currently on Doctrine of the Church, examining the ordinances/sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Kevin Harris and I recorded some more Reasonable Faith podcasts remotely, since we can’t get together in person. We’ll do another batch this month as well.
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| Some of you may recall our wonderful English Schools Speaking Tour two years ago, which took us, among other places, to Canford School. We had such a marvelous experience at these so-called “public schools” (which are really elite private schools) that when I received an invitation to do a remote interview with the schools hosted by Canford, I jumped at the chance. Sam Leiper, who teaches philosophy at Canford, conducted the interview, which featured questions sent in by students from a variety of schools. Our topic of choice was the kalām cosmological argument. Remarkably, students in the U.K. actually study my defense of the argument in their required Religious Education courses! The interview was a great chance to clear up common misunderstandings of the argument and to answer objections to the argument.
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| I also recorded a podcast with Raul Jaramillo, our Reasonable Faith Chapters Director for Latin America, who translated me into Spanish. Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking chapters are springing up all around Latin America. Out of our 196 chapters globally, we now have 29 chapters in Latin America, and I won’t be surprised if the number of Latin American chapters eventually surpasses the number of our chapters stateside!
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| Finally, I also appeared on Joshua Swamidass’ podcast Peaceful Science, talking about my forthcoming book on the historical Adam. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Prof. Swamidass, since he’s an expert in computational biology and genetics and always asks penetrating questions. We talked quite a bit about some heat I’ve been getting from young earth creationists, which enabled me to distinguish for our audience between attacking a person’s view (which is legitimate) and attacking a person’s character (which is the ad hominem fallacy). Too often people are unable to draw the distinction.
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My writing on faith is progressing very well, I’m happy to report. In my chapter I’ve decided to handle two main questions: (1) What is the nature of faith? And (2) how is faith rationally justified? I’ve just completed the section of the chapter on the first question and am working on the second. Let me try to summarize what I have to say about the nature of faith.
In talking about the nature of faith, it’s important to draw various distinctions.
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Saving Faith and Secular Faith
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First, we need to distinguish between what I call saving faith and secular faith. Secular faith would be, for example, faith in your dentist or faith that your son will return from war. Saving faith is the kind of faith spoken of in Ephesians 2.8: “by grace you have been saved through faith.” It is the sort of faith that is the means of salvation. In a systematic theology one is obviously interested in saving faith.
In order to determine the nature of saving faith we must turn to the teaching of Scripture. Unfortunately, too few Christian philosophers have dug into the biblical material. They typically look at examples of secular faith and then uncritically apply such analyses to Christian faith. Such a flawed methodology is apt to result in a theologically inadequate concept of saving faith. For God may set conditions on saving faith that are different than, say, faith in your dentist.
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Personal Faith and Propositional Faith
Second, we should distinguish between personal faith and propositional faith. In English we usually do this by differentiating between faith in ________ and faith that ________. For example, I have faith in Jesus in the sense that I have committed my life to him and trust him. I also have faith that Jesus died for my sins, rose from the dead, and so on.
I argue that, biblically speaking, saving faith implies both personal faith in Christ as well as propositional faith that certain doctrines are true. Paul says, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10.9-10). As Martin Luther affirmed, saving faith is not just assensus (assent to certain truths) but also fiducia (trust in a person).
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Doxastic Faith and Non-Doxastic Faith
Finally, we must distinguish between doxastic propositional faith and non-doxastic propositional faith. I realize that this terminology may be unfamiliar to many of you. So I need to unpack these ideas at greater length. I invite you to put on your thinking caps as we delve deeper!
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The word “doxastic” has to do with believing something to be true. According to the traditional view, faith is a doxastic attitude, that is to say, it involves believing that something is true. So if you have faith that Jesus rose from the dead, you believe that Jesus rose from the dead. But a surprising number of Christian philosophers, beginning in the 1980s, have argued for non-doxastic views of faith. That is to say, having faith that something is true doesn’t imply believing that it is true. Rather saving faith may involve a weaker cognitive attitude than believing—for example, accepting or assuming that something is true.
To see the difference, mathematicians and scientists often accept axioms or make assumptions that they don’t believe in order to see what follows from them. So on a non-doxastic view of faith, you don’t have to really believe that Jesus died for your sins or even that God exists. You just have to accept or assume this and then live accordingly (pray, go to church, worship, serve, etc.) On this view you can be an unbeliever and still have saving faith.
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Now I argue that such non-doxastic views of faith are seriously defective. Among other things, I make two main points:
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(1) Non-doxastic views of faith import into the literature of the ancient world and into the New Testament in particular a modern philosophical distinction between belief and acceptance (or assumption) which is alien to the mentality of the ancient world. No attempt was made at that time to distinguish between “to have faith” (pisteuein in the Greek) in the sense of “to believe” and in the sense of “to accept (or assume).” The fact that New Testament commentators never discuss the question whether propositional Christian faith implies anything other than belief is abundant testimony to the foreignness of the distinction to ancient mentality.
(2) The New Testament teaching on faith requires that faith involves belief. Let me mention here just two points:
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(a) The Gospel of John connects pisteuein (to have faith) and ginōskein (to know). Twice they are paired in such a way that it is hard to differentiate their meaning:
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Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6.68-69).
“Now they know that everything that thou hast given me is from thee; for I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from thee; and they have believed that thou didst send me” (John 17.7-8).
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Moreover, ginōskein and pisteuein appear in close proximity in Jn 3.10-12; 8.27–32; 8.43–6; 14.7–10. About a dozen of the 34 passages in John where ginōskein has to do with theologically significant knowledge concern propositional knowledge, for example,
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Jesus answered them, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me; if any man’s will is to do his will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority” (John 7.16-17).
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Such use of ginōskein with respect to propositional truths is decisive, since knowledge entails belief. If anyone wills to do God’s will, then he shall not merely accept or assume Jesus’ teaching without belief, but he will know and, hence, believe that Jesus’ teaching is from God.
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(b) James’ statement on faith shows that the cognitive stance required by saving faith is belief.
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You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder (James 2.19).
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Shema Yisrael at the Knesset Menorah in Jerusalem
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| The proposition at stake here recalls the Shema, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6.4), stating what would have been a fundamental and hallowed truth for James’ Jewish Christian readers. Pisteuein when used with respect to the demons’ cognitive stance can only be translated “believe,” for they lack the favorable attitude toward Jewish monotheism characteristic of faith, as is evident from their response: they shudder. Thus, their cognitive stance toward the proposition that God is one is that they believe it. Moreover, the demons would hardly be terrified as a result of accepting or assuming a proposition without believing it, not to mention the fact that if anyone knows that God exists it is the demons (Mk 1.24). So we have firm grounds for understanding pisteuein with respect to demons to mean nothing more and nothing less than “believe.”
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But now consider pisteuein with respect to James’ correspondents, whom he addresses as “brethren” (1.2; 2.1). They share the same cognitive stance toward the same proposition as the demons. So although they no doubt have a favorable attitude toward what they believe, their cognitive stance is the same as the demons’: they believe that God is one, and James commends them (however sarcastically) for it. Moreover, the context of James 2.14-26 shows that it is no less than saving faith that is at issue here. James’ discussion of the faith that justifies is a counterpoint to Paul’s, James insisting that mere belief is not enough for saving faith. James 2.19 is thus not just an offhand, isolated remark but a theologically significant comparison concerning the nature of saving faith. It tells us that saving faith involves nothing less than belief.
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Closing Thoughts
I think that non-doxastic views of faith are not merely mistaken but dangerous. While motivated by a laudable desire to be inclusive of those in doubt, these views, I fear, endanger such persons spiritually, for these views may lull unbelievers who are in fact merely nominally Christian into a false sense of security concerning their spiritual condition, when they are, in fact, unregenerate persons. We can make room for those struggling with doubts by emphasizing that belief comes in degrees, from very weak belief to very strong belief. Persons claiming to no longer believe but merely to accept Christian truth claims may in fact have very weak belief. When struggling with doubts, we can always cry out with the man who besought Jesus, “I believe! Help thou my unbelief!” Persons who have first come to accept Christian truth claims without yet believing such truths may be on the pathway that leads them eventually to saving faith.
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Well, that’s a snippet of what I’ve been working on. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is vitally important material. While this time of the coronavirus pandemic is difficult for so many, I can't help but relate to this Isaac Newton meme that I came across!
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Now on to the rational justification of faith!
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| For Christ and His Kingdom,
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"Dr Craig and Reasonable Faith ministry have been a huge help to me. I didn't even know how to ask the questions I had in my faith journey - a friend suggested I borrow the copy of Reasonable Faith the church library = mind blown. I had to renew the library-loan many times, because I could only get through a page or two before I had to stop and do R&D, read scripture, think long and hard before moving on (not that I'm saying "I got it all"!). This got me to the RF site, and to Defenders. ...which is faith-life affirming. Defenders has helped me understand just how solid a rock I'm standing on, has helped me mature in my thinking, and has inspired my thirst for more of God and knowledge about Him."
-Robert
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