Epistemic Theology Part 3
(Parts 1 and 2)
Took me long enough to get here, didn’t it?
Lee Strobel, in his book, A Case for Faith, Tells a story of how Billy Graham came to decide that the Bible is the Word of God. I have no idea where he got it, so I’m quoting him, in probable breach of copyright:
The year was 1949. Thirty-year-old Billy Graham was unaware that he was on the brink of being catapulted into worldwide fame and influence. Ironically, as he readied himself for his breakthrough crusade in Los Angeles, he found himself grappling with uncertainty — not over the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus, but over the fundamental issue of whether he could totally trust what his Bible was telling him.
In his autobiography, Graham said he felt as if he were being stretched on a rack. ….
“If I was not exactly doubtful,” Graham would recall, “I was certainly disturbed.” He knew that if he could not trust the Bible, he could not go on. The Los Angeles crusade — the event that would open the door to Graham’s worldwide ministry — was hanging in the balance.
Graham searched the Scriptures for answers, he prayed, he pondered. Finally, in a heavy-hearted walk in the moonlit San Bernardino Mountains, everything came to a climax. Gripping a Bible, Graham dropped to his knees and confessed he couldn’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions that Templeton and others were raising.
“I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken,” he wrote. “At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. ‘Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word — by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.’”
It was a powerful experience, I’m sure, but how does it help me? How do you get this faith? If it comes from within yourself, if you just up and decide to believe one day, then your faith is futile. Not because faith is powerless. A firm conviction can lead people to do amazing things. But unless faith has an objective correlation with the truth, then you haven’t determined the truth. You’ve only determined what you’ve decided to believe. So where does faith come from?
I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this word, partly because we only use it in a religious context these days, so the word automatically takes on these religious overtones. People usually interpret the word to mean “belief,” or better, “really really strong belief.”
But the word “faith” comes from the Latin “fides,” which means something along the lines of “trust” or “adherence,” not just belief. It’s also the root word for “fidelity,” which I think we understand better, thanks to hi-fi electronic equipment (that would be your stereo). The dictionary definition of fidelity is, “Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event—accuracy,” or, in regard to machines, “the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.”
What I’m trying to get across is that the word faith carries with it the concept of alignment. To have faith in something is to align yourself with that thing. This is an important concept because it means that you can’t have blind faith. I don’t mean you shouldn’t have blind faith. I mean it’s impossible. It’s as much of an intellectual absurdity as deaf radio.
Consider your stereo. Before the advent of digital media, fidelity was the number one indicator of an instrument’s quality. Everything was recorded in analog format, which is to say, an exact representation of the sound. If you take a cone and attach it to a needle and run that needle along a blank wax record, and then speak into the cone, the needle will vibrate in tune with your voice and the vibration will cut an exact representation of that sound into the record. You could then run that needle back over the record at the same rate, and it would vibrate back at you, making the exact same sound—almost. Fidelity would be the measure of how faithfully the instruments reproduce the original—your voice. With digital media, the record is reduced to a series of numbers, which can then be reproduced exactly, so fidelity is much less an issue.
For your stereo to have blind fidelity, it would have to reproduce a sound with out a record of the original. I think it could be a new wave: Bli-fi: Sound Without Substance!
Faith must always have an object. If I may wax metaphorical, it is the needle of your soul. The record is what your faith is in. You can’t just have faith in the bible, because it requires faith to believe the bible in the first place. There has to be something more foundational, more fundamental than the bible for you to rest your needle on. And the more closely your needle is aligned with this other thing, the more clearly it resonates within you.
So the question for Billy Graham, for you, for me, for my stereo—for everybody—is “faith in what?”
neumatikos 
I wondered how they made records..happy birthday
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Hey! You stole my comment!
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I already knew how they made records. That’s because no matter how many birthdays you have, at least to a point, I will always be older than you. It’s on record.
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I’m a member from R.A.T.S. and I was reading this post. I under stand what you’re saying, and agree, but I think you’ve fallen into an anachronistic trap. You say:
People usually interpret the word to mean “belief,” or better, “really really strong belief.” But the word “faith” comes from the Latin “fides,” which means something along the lines of “trust” or “adherence,” not just belief.
My response is that it doesn’t matter what faith means, if faith is not a good translation of pistis and pisteuoo. “Belief” is just as legitimate a translation as faith. And I think faith is misleading. You may ask a hundred different people what is faith, and you will get a hundred different answers. You attempt to show the meaning of faith by tracing it, correctly, to its Latin origin of fides and then showing that fidelity is an english derivative of fides. You then seek to use fidelity to define faith. This is rather anachronistic and misleading. Fidelity does not mean the same as faith, though there may be overlaps.
Also, I think you run into some theological problems with wanting to define faith as differently than belief. Many reformed (and not reformed) theologians see 3 steps in saving faith. 1. Understanding 2. Assent 3. Trust. Yet, even though I am reformed, I see problems with this setup. Most people want to define “assent” as “merely tipping the hat”, or “nodding the head”, and yet this does not what assent means. It means to agree, to concur.
What does the Bible say about the gospel? One must believe the gospel. But to define faith as you are doing, seemingly would have to make an extra step beyond belief inorder to have “faith”. Gordon Clark tackles this in several books, “The Johannine Logos” and “Saving Faith”. The problem with people that don’t have faith is not that they believe the gospel but don’t trust Jesus, it’s that they don’t really believe it.
The problem is not that the Pharisees believed but didn’t trust, but Jesus tells them that they do not really believe Moses, for if they believed Moses, they would believe Jesus. Now, there are implications to true belief, for if I truly believe that the lovingkindness of God is better than life, then I’m going to act in accordance with that. This isn’t easy believism, this is true belivism.
So while I agree with the thrust of your post, I believe your energy would have been better spent looking into the meaning of pistis and pisteuoo. I believe that biblical faith is simply belief. There are those who claim to believe and do not actually believe. It’s not that they believe and don’t trust, it’s that they don’t really believe.
Great post.
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Thanks Zac. It’s good to have somebody really engage and debate me. (I would say Praxis is a good thing, but I’m not so sure praxis should be discussed outside the bedroom 😮 )
You did catch me in an error. I knew I should have reviewed before I started posting these. I completely forgot to look the original word up. Usually I do better than that. When I get done with the series, I’ll go back and do some more research before I republish as a single document.
I think the metaphor still holds, though. You don’t believe the message, you believe the messenger. I don’t believe the Word of God the same way I believe my school report card. I believe the word of God the way I believe my stock broker. He says the market’s going up and I invest. What’s more, I tell all my friends to invest, because by golly the market’s going up.
I don’t have my Strong’s with me here at work, or I’d check myself, but Jesus repremanded the disciples for having little faith. This corresponds quite well, I think, to a low fidelity stereo. It’s playing the right music, but the quality is so low that it’s hardly evocative.
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I’m glad we can have some constructive interaction. My point of contention isn’t in the main thrust of your posting, but something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now…what is faith? Is it merely belief or is it more?
Well, because I’m not writing a paper, but commenting on your blog I’ll make this short…hopefully. I think that biblically faith is belief. The noun is pistis, the adjective is pistos and generally the verb is pisteuoo (the “oo” being an omega). Generally the noun pistis is rendered “faith” in most translations–though this may speak more of the tradition involved than an adequate translation.
The adjective, pistos, is generally translated faithful, believe or believers. The verb, pisteuoo (a cognate of pistis), is in the vast majority translated believe. Before proceeding it’s obvious that generally speaking one word can never communicate the full range or exact nuances of another word in another language. But it has become my belief that we hide behind vague terminology in our theology of faith.
You say: “You don’t believe the message, you believe the messenger.” I hope I don’t come on too strong (for we don’t really know one another), but this is just silly. You’ve just forced a false disjunction between believing the message and believing the messenger. Now obviously, I admit that in persuasive speaking there are the traditional 3 parts to persuasion. The pathos, logos and ethos of the speaker. So yes, the ethos of the messenger does play a part in our being persuaded, but when one says, “I believe the messenger,” we ARE stating that we believe the messege.
What does it mean to believe a person? It is to believe that which they say. The message. Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” The problem with the Pharisees is that they really didn’t believe the propositions in the Scriptures. By the way, I’m arguing that only propositions are objects of knowledge. The Pharisees searched the Scriptural propositions, and these propositions testified of Jesus, and yet we see that they were unwilling to come to Jesus (i.e. believe the propositions of Scripture).
So what does it mean to know a person? It means to know and believe certain propositions about them. Again Jesus says to the Pharisees, “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me.” But people often point to James, “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.” People point out that there must be a qualitative difference between believing something and having faith, or else why would the demons believe and not be saved?
The word for believe here is pisteuoo…it could be translated “The demons also have faith…” But it’s not a qualitative difference, it’s a quantitative difference. The reason demons aren’t saved is that, at least here in this passage, the object of their belief (and only propositions are objects of belief/knowledge) is monotheism, and James is saying monotheism won’t save you.
But people may respond and say, “No, it takes more than just belief, but it takes trust as well.” My response is, “What is trust?” Trust is simply believing someone’s word. At the heart of trust is belief, it is simply emphasizing something about the concept. Many people believe that one may believe but not trust…or to put it another way…one may believe something but not act in accordance with that belief.
I’m saying that we always act according to our strongest beliefs. As Christians we all believe that the lovingkindness of God is better than life (Ps. 63:3), but at the moment that we sin, we simply do not believe that to be true, thus the man said to Jesus, “Lord I believe, only help my unbelief!”
To have faith in God is simply to believe God’s Word. Not to claim to believe, but to believe. To say that we must trust God’s Word is another way of saying, “You must really believe, not just claim to believe God’s Word.” To say that we must trust in Jesus is another way of saying, “We must believe the Words that Jesus spoke.”
People, affected with anti-intellectualism, like to claim that my sort of thinking offers up dry orthodoxy, and that we don’t have faith in some doctrine, but in God. This is simply a farce. Propositions are the only objects of knowledge. A person cannot be an object of knowledge, but we may believe and know certain propositions about them. The Scripture says we must believe God’s Word, the Scriptures. There are certain, central doctrines that must be believed, and that is what saving faith is.
I’ve rambled, and now I must leave work, I’d love to discuss this more. Grace.
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“Propositions are the only objects of knowledge”
I think I disagree pretty strongly with you on that statement. I can konw a great number of things without reducing them to discrete statements. I may or may not be capable of clearly expressing such knowledge, but I can know know them just the same. Take the classic example: “Adam knew Eve” (Hebrew. Strongs # 3045. To know, properly, to ascertain by seeing–I did my homework on that one 😀 ) There is a kind of knowledge that is wholly experiential and cannot be reduced to a single proposition (such as “Eve makes good babies”).
I was an English major, so please forgive me while I adamantly stand by my metaphor. You seem to wish to reduce belief to a binary statement, a thing that is either on or off, a 1 or a 0. Binary oppositions serve a very useful purpose, primarily for evoking clarity and making fine distinctions. Nevertheless, life is experienced in analog.
To know God, you must experience Him. Any number of statements about him would be insufficient, the same way any number of statements about my fiance would have been insufficient to convince me to marry her. In the same way, belief in God is not the sum of assents to certain theological proposiitons. That’s belief in a creed, not belief in a God. A creed is what you create after the fact to reduce your experience to clear, mentally digestible understandings.
Granted, if you have experience the same God that I have, you and I should be able to reduce our experiences down to roughly the same set of doctrines. But the doctrines must follow after experiencing God, or we will be in danger of idolizing our doctrines in place of the living God.
You pointed out that believing the message is essentially the same as believing the messenger. This is true. As long as the message did in fact come from the messenger. Ever play telephone? If I “add to or take away from” the message before I pass it on, then the message is no longer from the same messenger. Then you can believe the message all you want, but you’ve got the wrong messenger, and your belief is useless, because your message has lost a certain degree of truth. That’s the point I was trying to bring out with my discussion about “alignment.” I’m not trying to make a controverted disjunction between the message and the messenger; I’m trying to join them as closely as possible. The only way you can ensure that you have the right message is to ensure you have the right messenger. An overwrought focus on the message will eventually result in “sound without substance” while your internal voice tries to go on saying the message from memory without constantly checking it against the original messenger.
There. Now I’ve rambled too. 🙂
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Good interaction. Sometimes with text one cannot discern a light-hearted conversation and an argument, so before I begin I’ll reiterate that I mean all of this in friendship.
You say:
“Take the classic example: “Adam knew Eve””
I think you’ve fallen pray to a figure of speech. It’s very apparent that the term “know” is not speaking of what we are speaking of, namely intellectualy apprehension. The term know here refers to affections, completely different. It’s similar to me saying, “God heard my cry.” Well God has no ear drums, so God didn’t hear anything in the sense that we hear something, it’s a figure of speech.
“There is a kind of knowledge that is wholly experiential and cannot be reduced to a single proposition (such as “Eve makes good babies”).”
I will simply disagree with this. Define knowledge that is experiential. Many mystics have tried to hold to such things…a big modern day way of saying it is, “You can know with your head, and with your heart.” But that’s simply undefined double-talk. I do not disagree that one has experiences, but all knowledge is propositional. Truth is a characteristic of propositions alone.
“To know God, you must experience Him.”
False. To know God you must know the propositions that are in His Word. And what does this mean “experience”? I believe this is another undefined term that carries little weight with me. Experience how? Everyone experiences His providential love and control, so does that mean everyone knows God? Can one know God apart from His Word, the Scriptures?
“Any number of statements about him would be insufficient, the same way any number of statements about my fiance would have been insufficient to convince me to marry her. In the same way, belief in God is not the sum of assents to certain theological proposiitons. That’s belief in a creed, not belief in a God. A creed is what you create after the fact to reduce your experience to clear, mentally digestible understandings.”
False. Your confusing interaction with knowledge when speaking of your fiance. On the contrary the Scriptures repeatedly proclaim that to know God is to know His revelation. The only way we come to know God is through revelation, and all revelation is propositional. Only propositions are objects of knowledge. Repeatedly the Scriptures tell us how one is saved…and what is it? To believe. To believe what? God’s Word…i.e. the Scriptures…i.e. the propositions that God has revealed to us.
“But the doctrines must follow after experiencing God, or we will be in danger of idolizing our doctrines in place of the living God.”
Again, I’ll wait for you to define what you mean by “experiencing God” in a way that does not include every single person ever to have lived…in that case the word would have no meaning. But one would only idolize one’s doctrines if they believed the doctrines were God. On the contrary, I believe epistemologically one can only know propositions, and thus to believe in God is to believe His revelation about Himself. So when one asks me, “How do I know God? How can I be saved? What does it mean for me to believe God?” I’m not going to respond, “Go experience Him man, and then I’ll tell you about some doctrines…” No…on the contrary, I will do what the prophets, Jesus and the apostles did…point them to God’s Word, i.e. the Scriptures. It’s naught for not that the Bible says, “In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth”, “you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God”, “faith comes from hearing and hearing from the Word of Christ.”
What of Lazarus and the rich man? The rich man begged that God would send Lazarus back to warn his family that they might be saved. His plea was rejected, but what was told him? “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.” But then the rich man pleads again, saying that if someone from the dead visits them, they will believe, and what was told him at last? “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.”
It’s through reading and being persuaded to believe the Scriptures that one is saved. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life…” He does then say, “But you should seek some experience from God…” But what does our Lord say? “It is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” He basically says, “You are right to look in God’s self-revelation to man, but you simply just don’t believe it!”
I am also still waiting for an explanation by what you mean “We believe the messenger, not the messege.” 🙂
“You pointed out that believing the message is essentially the same as believing the messenger. This is true. As long as the message did in fact come from the messenger. Ever play telephone? If I “add to or take away from” the message before I pass it on, then the message is no longer from the same messenger. Then you can believe the message all you want, but you’ve got the wrong messenger, and your belief is useless, because your message has lost a certain degree of truth.”
You’ve simply evaded the issue. If the message is “added to or taken away from” then it is no longer the message. That is X+Y no longer equals X. I completely agree with this section of the statement, that if one does not believe the true message (the gospel) then belief is useless. There are certain key doctrines that one must believe, there is disagreement (as always) as to what the essentials are, but I think they are probably:
1. There is one God, perfect and Almighty, who exists in a Trinity
2. This God deserves to be glorified by us
3. We have not glorified Him, but in fact have rebelled against Him and deserve only His eternal wrath
4. Christ, who is God, came and lived righteously to earn a righteousness for His people and died to bear the wrath of God for His people
5. Those who believe this testimony that Christ is their righteousness, that Christ bore their wrath and they are made right with God solely on the basis of His life and death, they are imputed with Christ’s righteousness
Something to that effect.
“The only way you can ensure that you have the right message is to ensure you have the right messenger. An overwrought focus on the message will eventually result in “sound without substance” while your internal voice tries to go on saying the message from memory without constantly checking it against the original messenger.”
I’m not really sure what you mean in this quote…could you elaborate? I think the way you know you have the right message is to do what the Prophets continually tried to make Israel do…go back to the Word. We only know anything about God because of His revelation…so we turn to the Scriptures and steep ourselves in them.
Rambling is good for the soul…muhahaha…
I’m saying that biblical faith is simply belief. When I present the gospel, I don’t ask the person to seek some mystical encounter or spend 30 minutes trying to explain fidelity ;)…but I say what the Scriptures say…”Believe…take God at His Word…don’t nod your head and tell me you believe…BELIEVE…live by what God says, and not by what you say. If the Bible says you deserve hell, then believe that…truly believe that…if the bible says that the only way to be saved is to trust in Christ, then believe that…”
It’s not that I dislike the terminology “trust” or “faith”, but it’s that those terms are so vague and many people end up communicating something unbiblical. What is trust? Believing the proposition that this person’s statements are true…what they say is true and they will do what they say they will do…i.e. it is true. I trust my fiance because I believe the proposition that what she tells me is true. She tells me that she won’t cheat on me, so I take that as true.
I offer a friendly challenge to show that anything other than propositions can be objects of knowledge…hehe…that should only take 15 years or so…grace.
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By all means, friendship. No offense taken, I assure you.
However, I am at a bit of a loss for words. Each of us thinks that what the other person thinks is absolute nonsense. For instance, I consider intellectual apprehension to be the weakest part of knowledge, something that you forumulate after you perceive. I consider the initial perception to be the foundational part of knowledge. But this is because I am, in fact, a mystic. The creedal statements you listed are all things I believe, but I believe them as a direct result of a series of mystical experiences that I have had. If I had not had these experiences, I would not believe any of these statements, and I would have no reason to.
You ask, “Can one know God apart from His Word, the Scriptures?” But of course. Why do you ask such silly questions. Abraham was called the friend of God, and what did he have but mystical experiences? A voice or an angel telling him to sacrifice his son to God. A debate with an angel over destroying a city. A smoking torch passing between two sides of a ram. These were not universal experiences of God’s love and control. Nor was Israel’s experience with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Nor was Ezekiel’s experience with the valley of dry bones. They were real and specific experiences with a real and specific God.
A proposition about God may give you knowledge about God, but it doesn’t give you knowledge of God. This is why Job said “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,” because there is a difference between knowing propositions about God and actually encountering Him in person. I’ve already discussed my thoughts on this here. I thought I mentioned it in this series that I’m working on, but it looks like the link is broken. I’ll have to go fix that.
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You say:
“However, I am at a bit of a loss for words. Each of us thinks that what the other person thinks is absolute nonsense. For instance, I consider intellectual apprehension to be the weakest part of knowledge, something that you forumulate after you perceive. I consider the initial perception to be the foundational part of knowledge.”
I do not think that the content of knowledge comes from perception.
“You ask, “Can one know God apart from His Word, the Scriptures?” But of course. Why do you ask such silly questions. Abraham was called the friend of God, and what did he have but mystical experiences?”
Then you deny Sola Scriptura…which may of be no consequence to many, but some consider this an essential part of evangelicalism. Abraham had the Word of God, as we have the Word of God, except in the present time the Word of God is found only in the Scriptures. This will of course lead us to discussing cessationism. 🙂
“A proposition about God may give you knowledge about God, but it doesn’t give you knowledge of God.”
You’re using the term “knowledge of God” to really mean “experience of God”, which is simply using the same word “knowledge” in a completely different sense. But be that as it may, these experiences that you would claim to have…what do you know about them other than the propositions of what happened?
“This is why Job said “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,” because there is a difference between knowing propositions about God and actually encountering Him in person.”
Firstly I don’t think this is what Job is talking about. Secondly, I have not claimed that there is not a difference, I have simply claimed that an encounter of God is not an object of knowledge, only the propositions about an encounter with God are.
Grace
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