Faith - what it is and what it isn't

To find out what faith is NOT you merely have to ask those who should know but don't.

Ask a Christian the definition of faith and you may be told this :

"Belief without knowledge"

Ask another and it may be

"Belief without evidence"

Ask a Bishop and you may get a Bible quote :

"What is faith? It is that which gives substance to our hopes, which convinces us of things we cannot see." Hebrews 11:1 (Knox Bible).

That Bishop seems never to have reflected on those words: they don't answer their own question. Even the rest of the passage only tells us very indirectly.

Graham Greene expresses a common understanding of faith, often quoted “There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all.” A poisonous mix of words.

The problem goes deep: Monsignor Roderick Strange, Times columnist and Rector of a Catholic seminary for training priests, wrote in his own article: "Isn’t that the essence of faith, belief without sight." Times April 17th 2009. He is quite wrong but his view is repeated by Christians everywhere and at all times. He goes on to claim that perhaps faith and doubt are compatible, with Graham Greene for inspiration (see box to the right),  in direct contradiction of official Catholic teaching CCC Section 1, Article II, para 157: "Faith is certain", not my emphasis. I'll come to why faith is certain in a future post and what it means if you aren't certain.

So what is the real definition of faith?

“Assent and adherence to divinely revealed truth”  

Catholic Catechism Section 1, Article II, para 150.

That means that faith is not at all "Belief without knowledge", quite the opposite, nor is faith blind. It also means that faith is not belief.

Faith is not belief?!?!?!? You crazy fool!

No, really. In fact the origin of  the word is in the Hebrew for steadfast/loyal/faithfulness; nothing to do with belief. Of course you must believe else faith is impossible but belief may have been present for some time before; rather faith is an act of obedience to God's revelation of truth. The devil believes but doesn't assent. Part of the mystery of faith is free-will, which presumably a god could lend us as with lending us existence, but there is no mystery in why one believes: a god could show itself, as we claim.

The reason for all those confused definitions is partly from a misreading of Christ's words:

"Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have learned to believe." Jn 20:29

Monsignor Roderick has presumed that therefore faith is without any kind of sight but Christ did not necessarily mean anything more than the sight of our bodily eyes.

Here the atheist may admit that faith is bordering on reasonable but they will still insist that such an experience of a supposed revelation of a god is nevertheless 'subjective': it could be a trick of the mind perhaps as the product of desperate wishful thinking. How can you really know it is a god? If you can't trust even your own mind then it does seem an unanswerable question.

Ironically the atheist has a smiilar problem: it's also impossible to prove one's own sanity; one can't even prove that Dawkins exists. Philosophy has no solution to this basic problem.

Stay tuned for the solution and much more...