The Word Abused . . .

THE NATURE OF FAITH

The biblical terms faith and faithful are generally abused in theological circles, and they are commonly sectarianized, used as they are to preserve some factious notion. It has been so throughout the history of the church, even from the beginning. The blind man healed by Jesus (John 9) was condemned by the Pharisees for believing in the one who had restored his sight. He was no longer faithful once he questioned their authority and their system. They cared more for their orthodoxy than for his well-being. So with the Judaizers who hounded Paul from city to city, for they measured faithfulness in terms of conformity to their legalistic creed, not in terms of trust in a Person.

History is replete with this kind of stuff. The Arian controversy (on the nature of the Trinity) raged for 60 years. It was a question as to whether the Logos, or preexistent Christ, was created by God or eternal with God. It concerned one word, homoousious, meaning “same nature.” Was Jesus of the same nature with God or not? In 325 A.D. three hundred bishops gathered in Nicaea to settle the matter. They decided that Jesus is “very God of very God” and “consubstantial” with the Father. Anyone who believed otherwise was anathematized. To be “faithful” one had to subscribe to the Nicean Creed.

I was visiting with a brother recently who is an Arian without realizing it. He holds the view that God created only one thing, the Logos, and from that point on the Logos created everything. This would mean that the Word which became flesh was not eternal with the Father, but was a created Being. Despite the Nicean edict, I believe the brother is as faithful to Jesus as any of the rest of us, for faith is not a matter of doctrinal exactitude.

That is our thesis in this installment: faith is not doctrinal but personal. But the church through the ages has been all too slow to learn this lesson, and so she has persecuted her own sons, sometimes burning them at the stake, for some doctrinal aberration, when in fact they might well have been among the most faithful saints Calvin burned Servetus at the stake in 1553 in Geneva as a “heretic,” for he did not believe in infant baptism or predestination and did believe in premillennialism. He cried out from the flames, “O Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have pity on me.” Even his dying prayer was doctrinally suspect since it was not soundly Trinitarian, but his personal faith in Jesus may have been as high as the sky and as deep as the ocean.

Conversion throughout the ages has been made more doctrinal than personal. A Roman Catholic is considered “converted” if he begins to believe like a Protestant and vice-versa, but not if one simply comes to a deeper conviction of Jesus as the Lord of his life. A Baptist considers you “converted” — really converted — when you go over to his side. To become a Mormon one must believe the Joseph Smith story, and it really isn’t all that important as to how devoted one may be to Jesus. To “convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses” doesn’t mean that one has been touched by the gospel story and that Jesus has changed his life, but that he has embraced a particular brand of doctrines.

On and on it goes. We are judged more by what doctrines we hold to than by the hold we have on Jesus. One is not “faithful” unless he is a capella or non-class or amillennial or non-cooperative or direct support. A congregation is not of “the faith” unless it serves the Supper in a certain manner or restricts its budget to noninstitutional programs. “Obedience to the faith,” a beautiful scriptural concept, is made to apply to every opinion imaginable, and if one does not kow-tow to a particular opinion, held to so dearly by the party, he is branded as unfaithful. And so we “convert” each other to our own sects, announcing to the world that someone has found “the faith” and is no longer in error. This usually has little to do with a person’s relationship to Jesus as Lord. If one leaves us, we presume that he has “departed from the faith,” when in fact he just might leave us for the sake of the faith.

This brutalization of a scriptural concept is frequently evident within congregations, in the way a preacher, elder or member is treated when he dares to veer from the party line. He may do no more than to attend “denominational” services or express doubts about our position on instrumental music (Can we be sure that it is a sin?, he innocently asks), but he is nonetheless treated as one who has lost the faith. He is sometimes “withdrawn from,” as if he had become an infidel or a heretic, when in fact he may be growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord more than at anytime in his life. It may be a “charismatic” brother that gets the treatment, one who has really found Jesus at a level he did not know existed. As often as not we drive such ones from us in one way or another, as if the Body cannot bear such diversity. We must “preserve the faith,” say our leaders, and we often resort to underhanded tactics in doing so. It does not occur to us that kindness, gentleness, sensitivity, veracity, and justice may be as much related to being faithful as is one’s position on the workings of the Holy Spirit. Now really, does it make any sense at all, for a Church of Christ (of Christ, mind you) to “withdraw” from the very ones who are most endeavoring to be like Jesus?

How long can we go on penalizing our brothers and sisters for thinking, impugning their motives for asking questions, rejecting them for seeing things differently, suspecting them for their new experiences?

Many of us are sick and tired of such insipid sectarianism, and we insist that it is high time for all such nonsense to cease. This business of reducing “the faith once for all delivered” to the narrow confines of childish partyism should no longer be tolerated. We must come to realize that we ourselves will be judged by that judgment whereby we are judging each other. If you do not want your faithfulness to be determined by opinionism, then you must not impose your opinions upon others, measuring their faith by what you see as necessary for yourself.

Faith is a simple and loving trust in Jesus as Lord. It means to love him and to seek to conform one’s life after his purity and holiness. Being truly faithful means to love Jesus with all one’s personality. One with this kind of faith may be wrong about various points of doctrine. He is right about Jesus, and that is the point of faith. Faith is therefore centered in a Person, not doctrinal tenets, whether Thomism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, or Campbellism. One may be burdened with Calvinistic errors, but still very much alive in his faith in Jesus. One is “unfaithful” only when he knowingly neglects or repudiates the will of Christ in his life.

Faith comes from belief in testimony of what God has done through Christ. This is the gospel. When men share this precious faith that Jesus is Lord, they are in fellowship with each other because they are in Christ together. Doctrine (the apostles’ teaching) is something basically different and is not necessarily related to the gospel of the faith. Doctrine deepens and strengthens faith, but it does not create it. Only the gospel does that. The faith that saves is the faith that believes and obeys the gospel. This is Paul’s point in 1 Cor. 4:15: “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel” The various guardians will doubtless differ in their teaching, and so there will almost surely be some errors in our doctrinal understanding. But it is the gospel that gave us faith and made us sons of God.

The scriptures make it clear that we are justified by faith. Rom. 5:1 puts it: “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We should never tire of Eph. 2:8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Gal. 3:26 says we are all “sons of God through faith,” and goes on to show how this faith expresses itself in baptism. So does Mk. 16:16: “He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.”

While such saving faith begins in the assent to the facts of the gospel — in believing that Jesus is the son of God — it goes on beyond that. It reaches beyond the intellect to man’s heart and becomes trust. This is the quiet assurance that Jesus is Lord and that he will really do all that he promises. In Acts 2 Peter is insistent that God has made Jesus both Lord and Christ. An intellectual faith may acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ, but it is trust that enthrones him as the Lord of one’s heart. This is what it means to be faithful or full of faith.

This is dramatically set forth in John 6, the only place in scripture where we have many of Jesus’ disciples turning away and following him no more. They turned away when he attempted to move them from an intellectual faith to a childlike trust. They believed he was the Christ, but faltered when he taught: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” He is the bread come down out of heaven, he told them. and “he who eats this bread will live for ever.” To them this was a hard saying, and so they turned away, many of them, leaving him with the twelve. To them he said: “Will you also go away?” It was Peter who said: “Lord, to whom shall we go. You have the words of eternal life.”

This is trust, not mere acceptance of certain facts. Peter saw Jesus as the bread of heaven, the only one who has the words of eternal life. That is what eating his flesh and drinking his blood has reference to, not to the Lord’s Supper. Jesus is life itself and the only source of all life. He is heaven’s bread to man. One must therefore cleave to him as a hungry man holds on to bread. Most of his disciples were unwilling to commit both mind and heart to him. and so they rejected the concept of lordship. They turned away, while Peter stayed at his side. The beloved fisherman realized there was heavenly bread nowhere else. He implicitly trusted his Master, accepting whatever he taught without question.

This is the nature of faith. It is rooted in a Person, the one who is the bread come down out of heaven. It is not loyalty to any doctrinal system, however praiseworthy be that system. It is a mark of sectarianism to regard faith as assent to a particular set of tenets. Our faithful brothers and sisters are all those everywhere who are in Christ Jesus, implicitly trusting in him as the Lord of their lives. —the Editor