Basic Training with R. C. Sproul, “What Is Faith?”, 1

In our first session, we're going to consider the opening statement of the Apostles' Creed and give a little bit of historical background to the creed itself before we tackle the content.

Of it.

The word creed itself comes from the Latin verb credo, which means what? We have some pastors here that I know. It means, I believe.

Huh?

And the idea for a creed, which many people find somewhat distasteful in the 20th century because there have been so many controversies and so much hostility generated over church creeds and confessional statements, and so many people have said, well, why do we even need any creeds at all?

Because as history would indicate, the earliest Christian creed traced back to the New Testament itself was very simple. It was the simple affirmation, Jesus is Lord, Iesous ho curios, Jesus is Lord. And then, as we try to put the pieces of history together, because not all of the documents from antiquity have survived, and some of this is conjecture and scholarly opinion, but the general consensus is that the idea of creeds emerged rather gradually, beginning very early in the New Testament time period in the early church with catechetical questions and formulas.

Somebody wanted to join the church, and before they were accepted for baptism or for membership in the church, certain questions were posed to them. Do you believe that Jesus is Lord? Do you believe in one God, the Father Almighty, and so on?

And so the creedal statements were really either baptism or catechetical formulae given to people who wanted to join the early Christian community. And then, as time passed, the church began to make positive creeds rather than interrogative creeds, that is, question and answer type formulations, and usually those kinds of solidifications of doctrinal confessions and creeds are provoked by some problem that the church engages.

Just as, for example, the canonization of the Scriptures was brought about because the church was under attack by the Gnostics in the second century, well, also church historians tell us that this Gnostic movement, which threatened to undermine the Christian community in the second century, provoked the church to establish what they called the church's.

Symbol.

Not symbol in the sense that we use the term symbol as a sign or a pointer to something beyond itself, but rather it was that which incorporated the essence of the church's faith. And so at first we had what was called the Roman symbol, which contained for the most part the basic outline that is now found in the Apostles' Creed.

And then as the years passed, certain other tiny points were added to the Roman symbol, which wasn't really finalized until somewhere around the year 400. But the Roman symbol was in use certainly in the second century and maybe even at the end of the first century, and since its content dated to apostolic times and was built upon the message and the proclamation of the Apostles, the later revised and amended version of the Roman symbol began to be called the Apostles' Creed.

Not because it was written by the Apostles in the form that we know it, but because it had its roots in the apostolic teaching and through the tradition of the church. So as soon as we talk about the Apostles' Creed, we've got to put that to bed right away, that it wasn't written by the Apostles, and it's a creed that took literally centuries to reach its final formulation, but the essence of which was already operating in the first century Christian community.

Now what I want to do in this opening session here is to talk about what it means to say I believe, and what faith is. Faith of course is so vital to Christianity that sometimes Christianity isn't even called a religion, but it's called what?

The Christian faith, and the word faith is sometimes used as a verb, that is when I refer to my faith in something or I believe that belief is something that I do or that I'm involved with, but also sometimes it's used as a noun to refer to the content of Christianity.

But the concept of faith is a very complex one, and the sister concept of believing is very complex, and as I said, I want to take the time here to talk about the way in which faith functions in biblical Christianity, and what do we mean by faith.

Now I'm going to approach this at the beginning by saying, first of all, what faith is not, or to try to clear up some of the confusion that exists in our contemporary society about the nature of faith.

So often faith is seen in antithesis toward or opposition with, on the one hand, reason, and on the other hand, what I'm going to call here sense perception. Now I realize that this term is somewhat philosophical, and you could even put here science, or you could put here empiricism, if you will.

So that here, faith is set in opposition to other ways in which we learn things, ways in which we know what we know. One of the subdivisions of the science of philosophy is the science of epistemology, and epistemology is concerned with answering basically one question, how do we know?

Now, you know, how many times a day do your children say to you, or say to each other, you know, somebody says something and says, how do you know? Or what makes you think so? Well how do you know what you know?

How do we learn what we learn? That's one of the oldest questions that philosophers have sought to answer, and the science of epistemology tries to answer that. And through the ages, people have taken either one side or the other, or a mixture of the relationship of sense perception and reason.

What that is, is that we somehow grasp that our knowledge, our learning, the whole process of education involves two dimensions. It involves the mind, and the mind functions according to certain categories of rationality.

We try to think in terms of logical progressions. We don't always succeed. Sometimes we make incorrect judgments, and our deductions are incorrect, they're illegitimate. But the mind functions on a rational basis to order the knowledge that we have in some kind of coherent, intelligible, logical pattern.

And there are those in history who have tried to see the true knowledge as being exclusively located in the mind. And what do we usually call those in simple terms, that school of thought? Rationalists, or rationalism, that puts a heavy emphasis upon the mind as the real source or the source of truth and for knowledge.

But we also recognize that in addition to the thought processes of the brain, we gain a lot of information that the mind is thinking about and ordering and making deductions from. How do we get that information?

From what we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingers, what we taste with our mouth, and we talk about the five senses, so that any experience that we have of being in touch with the external world through the senses we call a perception.

So sense perception has to do with hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. So there are those, who I say, who emphasize sense perception as the true basis for knowledge and they're traditionally called empiricists.

But what we've seen in modern culture is the extraordinary and indeed astonishing revolution brought to culture as a result of a revolution in epistemology, which produced a synthesis, a coming together of these two activities of reason and sense perception in what is commonly and simply called the scientific method that employs both induction, which is we gather the facts, we gather the evidence, we look through our microscopes, we look through our telescope, we collate all the data that we can get.

And then now we get that data from the laboratory and just to make it simple, what do we do? We stick it in a computer and try to organize it into some kind of rational, coherent sense. And what the computer does really is follows the process of deduction.

It's a rational process. And so the scientific method marries these two. Now the question we have is how does faith fit into this? I read in a novel not too long ago where the novelist was narrating a dialogue that was taking place between a priest and a scientist.

And the novelist makes the editorial comment at the end, the priest expressed his faith, the scientist expressed his reason. And here we saw a clear example of faith being set in polar opposition to reason or to sense perception or science.

And there are many Christians who walk around believing that faith is irrational or anti-sense perception, that to be, to have true faith that you must function without reason and without sense perception.

Now one of the points that we try to, as a drum that I beat all the time, is that I don't find that in the Bible. I don't see the model of scriptural faith as being anti-reason or anti-sense perception.

But I see, if I can use a paradigm to illustrate this, that it looks something like this. That this is the foundation of knowledge, and it includes both reason, that is the mind thinking, and sense perception.

And that faith rests upon this foundation, but takes you beyond the limits of these two dimensions. Now that may come as sounding strange to you, and it may sound even heretical to you, because as I said, we are living in an age that is extremely anti-intellectual, and wants to compartmentalize faith as a completely separate way of knowing apart from these other two.

Aspects.

But as Saint Augustine said centuries ago, how can you receive any knowledge from God if it is not intelligible to the mind? I mean, can you even say, Jesus is Lord, without having some understanding of what the concept Lord means, what the verb is indicates, and what the name Jesus refers to?

In other words, you can't even hear the gospel without hearing it first in the mind, and understanding it to a certain degree. Christianity is also a faith or a religion that has a book, which contains teaching and doctrine that is designed for our understanding.

The Bible doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense to write any kind of written document if we understand faith as something that bypasses reason. On the other hand, is sense perception involved in the biblical record of Jesus?

Certainly, the Apostle Luke says, you know, I undertake to write those things to which we have been eyewitnesses, and to testify to those things. And Peter says, you know, my beloved brother, we don't declare unto you cleverly devised myths or fables, but we declare unto you what we have seen with our eyes, and have heard with our ears.

Now, why is it that sometimes we think that to have faith, we have to crucify our minds or get rid of reason, or shut our eyes, take a deep breath like Tiny Alice, and stop being scientific, stop using our sensory organs that God has given us, and sort of take it by what some people call blind faith, or a leap of faith.

What does blind faith mean? But a faith that has its eyes shut, a faith that can't see anything, a faith that's negating the senses, or the leap of faith, which has been glamorized and romanticized in our age, that it's something virtuous to plunge into irrationality, and that the more irrational you are, somehow the more heroic in belief that you are.

But the Bible nowhere calls you to take a leap into darkness. In fact, the Bible tells you to leap out of the darkness and come to the light. But why would Christians ever think like that? Because what happens if you say all reality is that which is knowable or contained through reason alone?

Will reason alone, functioning as a naked tool, get you the truths of the Christian.

Faith?

Can you crawl into Descartes' Dutch oven and deduce the cross of Christ?

No.

So that pure reason isn't going to get you the Christian faith. How about sense perception alone? What does the New Testament say? One place it defines faith this way. It says, now faith is the substance of things hoped for.

And then what? The evidence of things not seen. Now the very verse has been used as an indication, we'll see, faith is against what you see. And people say, you know, that we walk by faith and not by sight.

Does that mean that faith repudiates sight?

No.

But do we ever walk in areas where we don't see where we're going? Does God ever call us to commit ourselves to things that no one has seen? Does God ever call us to believe in things that none of us have ever seen?

Has anybody in this room ever seen God in the sense of a visible experience of God Himself? You've seen the handiwork of God. You've seen the heavens that declare the glory of God. You've seen a theater.

You've walked, as Calvin said, through a magnificent theater of natural revelation. But has anybody seen the deity Himself? No man shall see God and live. That we hope for finally when we experience what is called the beatific vision or the visio dei, when we will actually see God.

But not in this world.

We don't see God.

God is invisible, yet we believe He's there. Now, not only is God invisible, and we believe that He's there, but He tells us other things that we have not seen. We haven't seen our departed loved ones in heaven.

But does God tell us that they are there? Does God tell us that there is a heaven? There are all kinds of things that God tells us that we have not seen, and we are called to believe Him. Now, faith is the evidence of things not seen.

Well, why do we believe in things that aren't seen? The other category that we deal with in knowledge is the category of revelation. Did I misspell that? I have a hard time spelling it on a blackboard.

Revelation, Christianity, whatever else it is, is a revealed religion. That God not only reveals Himself through nature, but as Francis Schaeffer has said, we don't just believe in a God who is there, but a God who is spoken.

Now, when we talk about faith is the evidence of things not seen, what we're talking about here is believing God, not just believing in God. But biblical faith is believing God, where you say, okay, God, there are things that I have not seen.

There are dimensions to reality that You tell me are there that I take on faith. Now, it's not an irrational faith. It's not an unscientific faith. There are all kinds of reasons that You've made it very rational for me to believe that You're there.

How could we have a universe if You're not? You have broken into time and space. You have given us a whole historical record of Your activity in history. We have seen that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.

He was seen. He rose from the dead in this plane of history, and we believe that testimony, which rests on that foundation of reason and sense perception, but now You're telling us things that we can never verify in a scientific laboratory.

Now, is it irrational to believe in one who has vindicated himself as the incarnation.

Of truth?

I don't think so.

But, we do trust Christ in what He said, so that the real opposites of faith, biblically, are not reason and sensation, but credulity and superstition, which are really two sides of the same coin. To believe in something that has no basis in reality, and you have no good reason for believing it whatsoever, that we call being credulous, easy believism.

Or to believe in something that is magical, that has nothing to do with the Word of God, can be superstitious. And we remember Paul's rebuke at Athens when he came and he found a city given to idolatry.

The cultural center of the ancient world, Paul says, I see that in all these things you are to what?

Superstitious.

And I mention that because if I say to people, where do you think superstition exists today? And people say, well, in Haiti, in the practice of voodoo and something like that. Well, I say, you know where I find superstition all over the place?

In the Christian church.

It can easily creep in to our own religion. That's why we're constantly have to measure our religion by the Word of God. Now, I just have a few minutes left in this introduction, and I want to remind you of a very important principle of faith that came out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

I doubt if there's ever been a time in church history where more energy was spent, or more thought invested in the whole concept of faith than was done in the 16th century.

Why?

What was the central issue of the Protestant Reformation? Justification by faith alone. Well, that opened up all kinds of questions, like the question that immediately came to the fore was, what kind of faith justifies?

And in trying to analyze that, what the Reformers came up with, which I think is of value to Christians, whether they're in the Reformed tradition or what tradition they're in, to understand it, trying to understand the whole concept, the New Testament concept of faith from the Greek, pistalo, to believe, they said there are at least three distinguishable elements of biblical faith.

And they set it forth in Latin, and we'll do that here. First is what's called the notae, or what we would call in English simply the data. When we say justification is by faith alone, does that mean it doesn't matter what you believe just as long as you're sincere?

Am I justified in the presence of God because I believe the moon is made out of green cheese? That's faith.

That's belief. I'm believing.

But the content isn't Christian content. In a New Testament church, there is content that is proclaimed that Christ is the Son of God, that He is the Savior, that He has died for your sins, that He has rose from the dead, and the apostles preached that and called people to believe it.

Now before I can believe it in the sense of submit to it, first of all I have to be able to understand it with my head. So there's the information, or the content. And then the second phase of faith is what they call a census, which is the intellectual assent, the mind assenting.

If I say to you, Ray, do you believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States? Do you believe that?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, you believe that. Now I haven't just asked you if you've put your personal trust in George Washington as your Redeemer or anything like that. I've just asked you as a matter of historical reality, do you think there really was a man by that name?

Do you think it's true that George Washington was? You said, yeah, I believe that. I think that that's true. I assent to that proposition. And so early Christians have said, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?

Some people said, no, I don't. Some didn't believe that. Other people said, yes, I believe that. But is that enough to make you a Christian? This is what St. James was getting at. The first people to recognize the identity of Jesus were the demons.

They knew who he was.

If you would have asked Satan, do you think Jesus is the Son of God, you know, except for the fact that he's a liar, he would say, certainly, I know that.

But he hated it.

And that's why Luther and the Reformers said there's got to be that third dimension, which they called fiducia, which is a personal trust and embracing. This involves the will, it involves the heart, what Edwards called the religious affection, so that now I love and adore Christ, whereas before I was estranged from him and hostile towards him.

But the point we want to get at is that when I say I believe, which means I embrace with my heart, I will the victory and the triumph of Christ. That's what a statement of faith is. I don't just say, I'm just not reciting a creed here and say, yeah, I think that's true.

The point I'm making is that faith is more than intellectual assent, and it's more than knowledge, but it is not less. Say it one more time. It is more than knowledge, more than intellectual assent, but it is not less.

Now in the rest of our sessions, we're going to examine the content that goes back to the earliest Christian church in terms of what is the essence of the Christian faith according to classical mainstream Christianity.

The contents of the Apostles' Creed cross over denominational boundaries. We won't get into the distinctives of Lutheranism and Methodism and Baptists and Presbyterians and all of that, because the classical information that all Christians have affirmed throughout the church history is found in the Apostles' Creed, and we'll look at that in the rest of the lessons that we have.