Four Meanings of Faith

Thus faith is utterly central to the Christian life. But what does the word
mean? In the history of Christianity, it has four primary meanings. The first of
these is closest to faith as a “matter of the head.” The remaining all three all
understand faith as a “matter of the heart.” As I describe these four meanings, I
name each with a Latin term in order to show its antiquity, even as I name each in
English. I then explain each relatively concisely, and also speak about the opposite
of each, for seeing the opposite of a word is often illuminating.

Faith as Assensus
The meaning of the Latin word assensusis suggested by its English
equivalent: “assent.” This is faith as belief – that is, as giving one’s mental assent
to a proposition, as believing that a claim or statement is true. Sometimes called a
propositional understanding of faith, this is the dominant meaning today, both
within the church and outside it.
But this notion – that Christian faith is primarily about assensus, about belief,
about a “head” matter – is recent, as I have briefly mentioned. It is illuminating to
see how this happened. Two developments account for its dominance in modern
Western Christianity.
The first is the Protestant Reformation, which not only emphasized faith, but
also produced a number of new denominations. Each defined itself by
distinguishing itself from other Protestants by what they “believed,” that is, by their
distinctive doctrines or confessions. Lutherans believed x, Presbyterians believed y,
Baptists believed z, and so forth. Roman Catholics followed suit, distinguishing
themselves by what they believed compared to what Protestants believed .
Christian faith thus became believing in the right things, having “right” beliefs
instead of “wrong” beliefs.
This development changed the meaning of the word “orthodoxy.” Before the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, orthodoxy referred to “right worship” or
“correct worship.” If you did the liturgy right, the practice right, you were orthodox.
Then, in the aftermath of the Reformation, orthodoxy began to mean “right belief”
or “correct belief.” And faith began to mean “believing the right things.”
The second development was the birth of modern science and scientific ways
of knowing in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment
has pervasively shaped modern Western culture. Two of its effects are most
important in our immediate context. On the one hand, as mentioned in Chapter 1,
the Enlightenment identified truth with factuality: truth is that which can be verified
as factual. Modern Western culture is the only culture in human history that has
made this identification. On the other hand, the Enlightenment called into question
the factuality of parts of the Bible and of many traditional Christian teachings.
The effect on the meaning of “faith” and “believe” has been extraordinary.
For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true –
as assenting to the truth of claims that have become “iffy.” According to a modern
American dictionary, this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of
“belief.” Its first definition of “belief” is “an opinion or conviction.” And then, as an
example, it provides a mistaken belief, “the belief that the earth is flat.” Belief is
about believing a notion contrary to evidence, contrary to what reasonable people
know.
I find this understanding among my students. I ask them, “What do you
understand the word ‘believing’ to mean? When do you use the word ‘believe’”?
Their most frequent response: “When you’re not sure, or when you don’t know.”
There are some things you know, and other things you’re not sure about, and so you
can only believe. Believing and knowing are contrasted. Faith is what you turn to
when knowledge runs out. Even more strongly, faith is what you need when beliefs
and knowledge conflict.
Thus, for many modern people, faith as assensus has become primary
because the central claims of Christianity have become questionable. For many
today, faith means believing in spite of difficulties, believing even when you have
reasons to think otherwise. It means believing “iffy” things to be true.
This is very different from what faith as assensusmeant prior to the modern
period. Imagine for a moment what assensusmeant in Christian Europe in the
Middle Ages. Most people took the truth of Christianity and the Bible for granted. It
was the conventional wisdom of the time. There was no conflict between
Christianity and science. In that setting, faith as assensus was effortless, and the
emphasis was thus on the other meanings of faith, which we will soon consider.
Indeed, in the most common modern sense of the word “faith,” accepting the
Christian vision of the way things are didn’t take faith. But now, faith as assensus
has become effortful.
The opposite of faith as assensushas both milder and stronger forms. The
milder form is doubt; the stronger form is disbelief. If you have doubts, you don’t
have much faith. And disbelief is the absence of faith. And if one thinks that
“belief” is what God wants from us, then doubt and disbelief are experienced as
sinful. So it was for me as an adolescent. I experienced my doubts and burgeoning
disbelief as sins and I prayed for forgiveness. Most often, I ended my prayers with
words from the gospel of Mark: “I believe, help thou my unbelief.”
This understanding of faith is very widespread, so pervasive that for many it’s
hard to see that faith could mean anything else. But it puts the emphasis in the
wrong place and thus distorts the meaning of Christian faith.
That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think
about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads –
as if “believing the right things” is what God is most looking for, as if having
“correct beliefs” is what will save us. And if you have “incorrect beliefs,” you may
be in trouble. It’s remarkable to think God cares so much about “beliefs.”
Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent,
relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage.
You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the
right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true
has very little transforming power.
There is more to be said about faith as assensus, and near the end of this
chapter I will return to it and its role in the Christian life. Now I turn to the meanings
of faith that have more to do with the “heart.” These meanings are relational. They
see faith as not very much about believing. Instead, faith is about the relationship
of the self at its deepest level to God.

Faith as Fiducia
There is no close English word for faith as fiducia. The closest is “fiduciary,”
which doesn’t get us very far. So I move to the best English translation: fiduciais
faith as “trust,” as radical trust in God. Significantly, it does not mean trusting in
the truth of a set of statements about God; that would simply be assensusunder a
different name. Rather, it means trusting in God.
 Faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean. I owe the metaphor to
SorenKierkegaard, a radical Christian and one of the philosophical giants of the
nineteenth century: faith is like floating in seventy thousand fathoms of water. If
you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you
relax and trust, you will float. It’s like Matthew’s story of Peter walking on the water
with Jesus – when he began to be afraid, he began to sink.
To help an adult class see this meaning of faith, my wife asked them, “How
many of you have taught a small child to swim?” Many had. When asked to
describe the experience, all said that the biggest hurdle was getting the child to
relax in the water. Their consistent refrain was “It’s okay, just relax. You’ll float,
it’sokay.” Faith as trust is trusting in the buoyancy of God. Faith is trusting in the
sea of being in which we live and move and have our being.
To move from a sea metaphor to other biblical metaphors, this is faith as
trusting in God as our rock and fortress. The point is the same: we trust in God as
the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe
place.
We can also see this meaning of faith by turning to its opposite. The opposite
of trust is not doubt or disbelief, but mistrust. More interestingly and provocatively,
its opposite is “anxiety” or “worry.” We see this meaning in familiar words
attributed to Jesus. He invites his hearers to see reality as marked by a cosmic
generosity:

Consider the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet God
feeds them....Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you,
even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Four times in the extended passage in which these familiar lines appear,
Jesus says to his hearers, “Do not worry,” in other words, “Do not be anxious” – and
then adds, “You of little faith.” Little faith and anxiety go together. If you are
anxious, you have little faith.
Thus we can measure our degree of faith as trust by the amount of anxiety in
our lives. I mention this not to provide yet one more failing for which to chastise
ourselves, but because of the good news implicit in this realization. Growth in faith
as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say
nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free
we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would
be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power.

Faith as Fidelitas
As with assensus, the meaning of the Latin term is suggested by its closest
English equivalent: faith as “fidelity.” This is faith as “faithfulness.” Faith is
faithfulness to our relationship with God. It means what faithfulness does in
acommitted human relationship: we are faithful (or not) to our spouses or partners.
Faith as fidelity means loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of the self at its deepest
level, the commitment of the “heart.”
Faith as fidelitasdoes not mean faithfulness to statements about God,
whether biblical, creedal, or doctrinal. Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to
whom the Bible and creeds and doctrines point. Fidelitas refers to a radical
centering in God.
 Its opposite is not doubt or disbelief. Rather, as in a human relationship, its
opposite is infidelity, being unfaithful to our relationship with God. To use a striking
biblical metaphor, the opposite of this meaning of faith is adultery. When the Bible
speaks about adultery, most often it is not speaking about human sexual
relationships. Sometimes it is, as in the Ten Commandments and in some other
passages. But when the prophets indict Israel as adulterous or Jesus speaks of an
“evil an adulterous generation,” they are not saying that there is a lot of spouse
swapping going on. Rather, they are referring to unfaithfulness to God and God’s
covenant.
Another vivid biblical term for infidelity to God is idolatry. Though the
command to avoid idolatry includes not worshiping graven images, its central
meaning is giving one’s ultimate loyalty or allegiance to something other than God.
Idolatry is centering in something finite rather than the sacred, whois infinite and
beyond all images. As the opposite of idolatry, faith means being loyal to God and
not to the many would-be gods that present themselves to us. Christian faith
means loyalty to Jesus as Lord, and not to the seductive would-be lords of our lives,
whether the nation, or affluence, or achievement, or family, or desire.
In the Hebrew Bible, faith as fidelity is the meaning of the first of the Ten
Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me.” In the New Testament,
it is the meaning of the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your life force, and with all yourmind, and with all
your strength.” It is followed immediately with a second “like it”: “You shall love
your neighbour as yourself.” Fidelitas means loving God and loving your neighbor
and being faithful, above all, to these two great relationships.
And how are we faithful to God? Though challenging, faith’s ways are also
simple. It means paying attention to our relationship with God – just as faithfulness
in a human relationship means not only “not straying,” but being attentive to the
relationship. We are attentive through the simple means of worship, prayer,
practice, and a life of compassion and justice. To be faithful to God means not only
to love God, but to love that which God loves – namely the neighbour, and indeed
the whole of creation. Faith as fidelitas thus includes an ethical imperative.

Faith as Visio
As the closest English word, “vision,” suggests, this is faith as a way of
seeing. In particular, this is faith as a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing
“what is.” I owe the germ of this understanding to the mid-twentieth-century
theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in his book The Responsible Self. In it, he speaks of
the central importance of how we see the whole of what is, for how we see the
whole will affect how we respond to life. Hence in the title of his book, the
responsible self refers not to the especially dutiful or conscientious self, but to the
responding self.
There are three ways we can see the whole, and each goes with a particular
way of responding to life. First, we can see reality as hostile and threatening. The
clinical form of this is paranoia, of course, but you don’t have to be paranoid to see
life this way. The bottom line is that none of us gets out of here alive. And this is
the fate of not just me and us, but of everybody we love, including our children and
grandchildren. Death will get us all. Moreover, astrophysicists tell us, even the
earth and the solar system will one day be destroyed as the sun explodes in its
dying gasp. On a more finite level, life is filled with threats to our existence:
accidents, disease, violence, unemployment, poverty. Life looks easily threatening.
 If we do see reality this way, how will we respond to life? In a word,
defensively. We will seek to build systems of security and self-protection to fend off
the hostile powers as long as possible. The attempt to secure ourselves in the face
of a threatening reality takes many forms, secular and material as well as religious.
Indeed, many forms of popular Christianity throughout the centuries have
viewed reality this way. Godis the one who is going to get us – unless we offer the
right sacrifices, behave the right way, or believe the right things. This is the
“threat” of the earlier paradigm: God will judge us and punish those who “didn’t get
it right.” But if we do “get it right,” then perhaps the consuming fire that will
otherwise devour everybody and everything will spare us.
In the second way of seeing the whole, it is perceived as indifferent. Not as
paranoid as the first, this view doesn’t assume reality is “out to get us.” Rather,
“what is” is simply indifferent to human purposes and ends. This is the most
common modern secular viewpoint. The universe is made up of swirling force fields
of matter and energy, but it is neither hostile to nor supportive of our lives and
dreams. Though it may be perceived as elegant and even magnificent, it is
ultimately indifferent to human meanings.
If we see reality this way, our response to life will be less anxious and
paranoid than that of the first way, but we are still likely to be defensive and
precautionary. We respond by building up what security we can in the midst of an
indifferent universe. There can be a rich aesthetic to this life. We may seek to
enjoy its beauty while we are here, we may even seek to take care of the world as
well as we can, but ultimately we are likely to be concerned primarily for ourselves
and those who are the most important to us.
The third way we can see “what is” is to view it as life-giving and nourishing.
It has brought us and everything that is into existence. It sustains our lives. It is
filled with wonder and beauty, even if sometimes a terrible beauty. To use a
traditional theological term, this is seeing reality as gracious. It is the way of seeing
spoken of by Jesus in his words about the birds and the lilies. God feeds, them,
clothes them, and, to echo another saying of Jesus, God sends rain upon the just
and unjust. God is generous.
This way of seeing the whole makes possible a different response to life. It
leads to radical trust. It frees us from the anxiety, self-preoccupation, and concern
to protect the self with systems of security that mark the first two viewpoints. It
leads to the “self-forgetfulness of faith” and thus to the ability to love and to be
present to the moment. It generates a “willingness to spend and be spent” for the
sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves. Both the active and passive voice in
the phrase are significant: to spend ourselves and to allow ourselves to be spent. It
leads to the kind of life that we see in Jesus and in the saints, known and unknown.
Or, to use words from Paul, it leads us to a life marked by freedom, joy, peace, and
love.
To some, this way of seeing may seem naively optimistic. But Niebuhr was no
Pollyanna. He knew about the Holocaust and all the terrible things we are capable
of doing to each other. The point is not that reality is simple “nice,” or that one can
demonstratethat it is gracious. Rather, the point is that how we see reality matters,
for how we see “what is” profoundly affects how we experience and live our lives.
Thus faith as visiois seeing reality as gracious. Its opposite – “unfaith” is
seeing reality as hostile and threatening or indifferent. This meaning of faith is
closely related to faith as fiducia, as trust. What it adds, though, is that how we see
reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other. Trust and visio go
together; trust in God and how we see God go together.
As a way of seeing, faith as visioconnects to the emerging paradigm’s
emphasis upon metaphor. Metaphor has to do with “how we see.” For the emerging
paradigm, the Bible and the Christian tradition are understood as a giant metaphor
through which we see God. Christian faith is about living within the Christian
tradition as a metaphor of God.
Significantly, the last three understandings of faith are all relational. Faith as
visiois a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to “what is,” that is, to
God. Faith as fidelitas is faithfulenessto our relationship with God. And faith as
fiducia is deepening trust in God, flowing out of a deepening relationship with God.
The last three understandings are also the most important ones. The
experience of Martin Luther, one of the church’s heroes of faith and the spiritual
mentor of my childhood, exemplifies this. Perhaps more than any other person in
the last five hundred years, Luther is responsible for “faith” being so central to the
Christian vocabulary.
But for Luther faith was not primarily assensus. After his decision to enter a
monastery in a moment of terror during a lightning storm, Luther went through a
decade of agonizing torment and ascetic self-denial, seeking to be righteous enough
for God. During these years, he had assensusaplenty – and it terrified him.
Precisely because he believed “all of it,” he was filed with fear and anxiety. His
transformation occurred through an experience of radical grace that transformed
how he saw (visio, led him to see that life was about trusting God (fiducia), and led
him to a life of faithfulness (fidelitas) to God. For Luther, saving faith was not
assensus. It was about visio, fiducia, and fidelitas.
Faith in these three senses enables us to live our lives and to face our deaths
in a new way. In this life, a radical centering in God leads to a deepening trust that
transforms the way we see and live our lives. Seeing, living, trusting, and centering
are all related in complex ways. They are all matters of the heart, and not primarily
of the head. And in our deaths, dying means trusting in the buoyancy of God, that
the one who has carried us in this life is the one into whom we die.