Faith sees. Faith knows. Faith apprehends.
We know that without faith it is impossible to please God, and the converse is also true. Whenever genuine faith is present and active, that faith is a gift from God, and God is always pleased with His own gifts. If He stirs us up to something, then He will always take pleasure in His own work.
Faith is the gift that God gives us that enables us to see what He is up to. When we do not have that gift, we see nothing more than the skin of divine mysteries. We see the shell, the outside. If you would crack open the shell to obtain the kernel, then you must have faith.
This is important because without faith, everything presented to us presents only the shell. Preaching, attending church, singing psalms and hymns, receiving the waters of baptism, partaking of the bread and wine . . . all of it is simply the external shell.
But with faith, the metaphor becomes glorious. When faith cracks open the shell and obtains the kernel, all the bits of shell become the kernel also. Without faith, the nut is a solid shell, all the way through. With faith, the nut is nothing but kernel, all the way out.
This is why men of faith can sound like superstitious idolaters in how they speak of the sacraments – but they only sound that way to superstitious idolaters. And this is also why men of faith can sound like iconoclastic rebels, but they only sound that way to superstitious idolaters.
Bread and wine you did not require, but a humble and a contrite heart. And whoever partakes of the bread and wine is partaking of Christ Himself. How can these paradoxes be resolved? Only by faith, by faith alone, sola fide.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.
I certainly agree that without faith it is impossible to please God. But knowledge isn’t the same as faith and I must say that knowledge is better than faith. Knowledge is better than faith because God is omniscient but never has need for faith. I am not aware of God’s quality of faith at all. As we grow towards God faith decreases and knowledge increases. I would say that faith and knowledge are two ends of a continuum of certainty with faith toward the uncertain end and knowledge toward the certain end. You can have faith in anything (including falsehood)… Read more »
Doug, I tried to write a ThM thesis on this topic, but never got it past the committee. This faith thing that turns shell into kernel, straw into gold, is not as mysterious as theologians make out. It is recursive. It operates on itself. This means it is also subjective, since it depends on the person using it. But all this is completely describable in mathematics or engineering or programming, because we do this all the time. It is just that the Enlightenment managed to discredit subjectivism as something bad, and we lost the ability to talk about faith. As… Read more »