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The chain of events which led me to write this essay may not be of any special relevance to the content itself, but I have to start somewhere and this may provide some helpful context.
Working on research for my collaboration for the Absences podcast, and after a conversation with one of my patrons (thanks to Cora for the inspiration), I started looking into the surpising events of history—not so much in terms of the factual occurences but in terms of their historical perception. Certainly the Crucifixion of Christ ranks at the top of the list: what could be more surprising than that God manifest in human incarnation and then die the death of an ignoble criminal. Indeed, this was much of the inspiration for the entire Christian religion: some explanation was needed as to why things went so contrary to expectation, and the explanation offered was that the apparent defeat in Christ’s earthly struggle was in fact a victory in a greater, spiritual struggle between good and evil.
This led me to consider other such events, such as the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham, patriarch of the Hebrews, was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac and was about to carry it out when an angel of God appeared and halted him. The underlying surprise of this event was explored by the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard by way of his seeking to understand and explicate the nature of faith. I returned to Kierkegaard’s works, and was at the same time reading a book by Walter Kaufmann, whom my audience might know as a translator of the works of Nietzsche. Kaufmann’s own book is called The Faith of a Heretic, and in reading it alongside Kierkegaard (whom Kaufmann also engages directly), I came to wonder again about my own faith. This is a subject I’ve touched on before, but here I’ll be coming at it afresh, looking for what it is that I can say about my faith and saying it as clearly as I can.
We’ll begin with a review of those words translated into “faith” from the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible.
Ultimately, the word “faith” comes to us from the Latin fides. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates Deuteronomy 32:20 as follows: “[God] said: I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faithfulness.” In the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome, the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church, “children in whom there is no faithfulness” is translated with characteristic Latin brevity as “infideles filii,” and in this we can see the relation of the word fides to the English infidel, “one who is faithless.”
This verse occurs in the context of a speech called the Song of Moses, the last great speech of Moses to his people before his death. God had told Moses that the Hebrews would break their covanent with God, and for this Moses repudiates them at length. In this verse in particular, Moses is saying that God will be thoroughly disgusted with them and will, for this reason, “hide [his] face from them.” The word at the end of the verse, “faithfulness,” is translated from the Hebrew אמון (emun), which appears in the Old Testament only in this verse. The related אמונים (emunim), typically translated as “faithful” or “trustworthy”, appears in four other places, for example, Proverbs 20:6: “Many proclaim themselves loyal, but who can find one worthy of trust?” More common is the feminine form אמונה (emuna), commonly translated as “faithfulness” and, like emun, meaning “belief” in what I think is the most straightforward reading, although there are also translations such as Exodus 17:12: “Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady [from emuna] until the sun set.” All of these are related to the verb אמן (aman), which is sometimes translated as “to confirm” or “to support” but more often “to believe,” and serves as the root of the English word “amen.” It may also be translated as “lasting,” such as in Deuteronomy 28:59: “…then the Lord will overwhelm both you and your offspring with severe and lasting afflictions and grievous and lasting maladies.” Forms of this verb occur frequently throughout the Old Testament, referring both to what we might call “belief in” (used if I were to say, for example, “I believe in you”) and propositional belief or “belief that” (used if I were to say “I believe in gravity”—“I believe that gravity exists”—or “I believe that cars run on gasoline;” in other words, my stating that I assent to the truth of a given proposition). I’ll note here that “belief in” reduces to propositional belief: if I say “I believe in you,” the underlying meaning is that I believe that you will act a certain way, do certain things, accomplish certain things, and so forth.
In the Greek of the New Testament, “faith” is translated from πίστις (pistis), which is a somewhat different word from emun or aman. The most straightforward reading of πίστις is likely “trust,” which matches up with what I referred to as “belief in;” propositional belief would typically be translated into Greek as δόξα (doxa)… or, at least, that was the case in the earlier Attic Greek of Plato. By the time Attic Greek had transitioned to the Koine Greek of the New Testament, δόξα had come to mean “glory” (we might imagine that, in Attic Greek, a person of glorious repute would be referred to as a person “of good opinion”— i.e. opinions about this person were favorable—and over time δόξα would have just came to mean the glory itself). So, in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament read and referenced by the authors of the New Testament, emun and aman are typically rendered as πίστις or as the verb πιστεύω (pisteuo, “to trust”).
In the Latin of the Vulgate, the verb “to believe” is typically translated using the verb credo (“I believe;” infinitive credere), whence such English words as “credit,” “credible,” and “creed.” Fides seems roughly equivalent to the Greek πίστις and the English “trust” and distinct from the Attic Greek δόξα and the English sense of propositional belief. Certainly trust is a kind of propositional belief, but not all propositional belief is trust. Trust, it seems to me, is a propositional belief that someone or something can be relied upon to work to my benefit despite opportunity to do otherwise. I believe in gravity, but I do not trust (or distrust) gravity because whether it works to my benefit depends on the circumstances. Were I a skydiver, however, I would trust my parachute and trust the one who packed it; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t plan on stepping out the side of a perfectly good aircraft.
The Book of Hebrews in the New Testament gives us an explicit definition of faith (πίστις): “…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” An assurance of things hoped for seems not too far from the notion of trust: if I trust my friend, I am assured that they will not secretly work against me, and I can say this even if I am not certain of this beyond a shadow of a doubt; I need only be sufficiently certain to plan and act according to that trust. But the translation to “assurance” in the New Revised Standard Version is curious. In the Greek, the word is ὑπόστασις, hypostasis, from ὑπό-, meaning “under,” and στασις, meaning “standing,” but there is no relation here to the English word “understanding,” which would in Greek be ἐπιστήμη, episteme, meaning roughly “standing upon” in a literal gloss. Ὑπόστασις means that which stands under reality, the fundamental substance (from sub- and stance, so a literal gloss of ὑπόστασις) of something.
The translation to “conviction” is even more curious. The Greek reads ἔλεγχος (elegchos), which is in translation a refutation. We might here suspect another change in meaning from Attic Greek to Koine Greek, but we find elsewhere in the New Testament and even elsewhere in the Book of Hebrews the related verb ἐλέγχω (elegcho) used clearly to express reFutation, reproach, or reprimand. The English conviction is actually not too far off, but only if understood in the accusational sense, as in one convicted of a crime. So we might retranslate Hebrews 11:1 as “The substance of things hoped for, the refutation of things not seen,” and this seems utterly paradoxical but is clarified by the next few verses: “Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Hebrews 11:2-3). In other words, what faith refutes, according to the unknown author of Hebrews, is the presumed unreality of things unseen on the basis of their being grounded in what is seen. This accords with the use of ὑπόστασις in the first half of the verse. Faith, the author of Hebrews saying, is fundamentally grounded in reality, and so we might offer yet another translation of the verse: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the proof of things unseen.” And if you were to use “evidence” instead of “proof,” which seems sufficiently justified, you would find yourself with the King James Version’s rendition of the verse. This isn’t the first time the New Revised Standard Version—supposedly the standard for scholarly research—has led me down the garden path, and I’m starting to wonder whether I’d do better for myself by starting my research with King James.
The remainder of Hebrews 11 reviews in brief the entire history of the Old Testament, noting particular events in which something or other occured “by faith:” “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain’s,” (11:4); “By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household,” (11:7). Now, this isn’t the modern idea of knowledge through rigorous empirical justification, but nor is it any sort of blind faith. If we step into the ancient Hebrews’ way of thinking in which the world is self-evidently created, we find a faith which follows from what is believed, rather than belief which follows from faith.
What is key for our purposes is that at no point in the Bible do we see faith as the mere belief in the existence of God or of any sort of propositional attitude which is to be explicitly endorsed regardless of the absence of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary. Certainly the various Hebrew words I covered reference propositional belief, but keep in mind the context: for the ancient Hebrews, the existence of one or more gods was a given, and we never see in the Old Testament examples of anyone who denies the existence of God entirely. God spoke directly to Abraham, and to many other of the Old Testament’s characters. It would be absurd to talk of faith in such an elevated way if it referred only to the mere propositional belief in something whose existence was already clearly evident. Faith—biblical faith, if we are to take the common attitude of viewing the Bible as a unified whole—is trust grounded in knowledge, and explicitly not belief absent evidence.
We turn now to faith as it appears in Walter Kaufmann’s Faith of a Heretic (1961), written, in part, contra Kierkegaard and the 20th-century protestant theologian and existential philosopher Paul Tillich.
Kaufmann expresses throughout his book a general disdain for labels:
Perhaps the single best example of the common lack of high standards in questions of honesty is our tendency to think in labels. Terms like existentialism, pragmatism, and empiricism, liberalism and conservatism are, more often than not, so many excuses for not considering individual ideas on their merits and for not exposing oneself to the bite of thought. For less educated people, words like Jew and Catholic, Democrat, Republican, and Communist do much the same job.
p. 47
When we look at faith, then, we should seek to get past the word as it traditionally confronts us in discourse and try to figure out what’s really going on. Well, we’ve certainly done that as far as biblical faith is concerned, but what is in the Bible and what is professed by Christians are often two very different things. As well, more to Kaufmann’s point, what is said about faith by philosophers and theologians and what is understood by audiences to whom they may be speaking in other contexts also may be two very different things.
In his book Dynamics of Faith (2001, originally published in 1956), Tillich substantially redefines many of the core terms of Christian religion, most centrally “faith.” He opens the book by stating that “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned” (p. 1). What ever our ultimate concern—our most fundental concern, that which supercedes all of our other concerns—that is our faith. The rest of the book presents strong arguments justifying and applying this viewpoint, but the faith of which he speaks is clearly not biblical faith. Kaufmann sees this as problematic in itself, but we might say to Tillich, “Alright, perhaps this faith you speak of is not biblical faith, but we accept that it may remain a useful and practical concept in itself, whatever it’s called.” I’ve certainly been plenty willing to accept Tillich’s unconventional definitions in the past, though that was before I’d looked into the biblical etymology of those terms. But Kaufmann accusses Tillich of a disingenuous double-speak: “It becomes clear that when Tillich preaches, writes, or lectures, he is not saying what those who don’t know his definitions think he says” (p. 122). In other words, when Tillich writes his philosophical texts, he explicates a particular definition of faith which he thinks that audience will find amenable, but when delivering his sermons, he doesn’t make it clear to his audience that this is the definition he’s using, and so the audience takes it in in terms of what they think faith is. “Literalists,” Kaufmann says, “thus feel reconfirmed in their beliefs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable” (p. 123). Worse, Kaufmann cites some passages indicating that Tillich is entirely aware of this and does this intentionally.
Reading Tillich’s sermons (as published in The Shaking of the Foundations, 1953), I think that calling him disingenous is a bit unfair. He is clearly making the attempt to lead people to his understanding in terms of what they already believe. That this is condescending, misleading, and misguided remains arguable, and thus Kaufmann’s point remains valid (albeit in a weaker form), but I don’t think it’s disingenuous.
Regardless, Kaufmann is correct that we should seek to confront our language head-on and not weasel our way around our words, equivocating between a public meaning and a secret meaning of any particular term. We should, in Kaufmann’s quotation of Jesus: “let our Yes be Yes, and our No, No” (p. 110). At the same time, though, we can’t act as if the common, public understanding of a term is the only possible way to understand that concept. As Kaufmann recommends, we need to get past the labels, see what’s really going on, and say what we really think as clearly and as directly as we can manage.
Kaufmann is more favorable towards Kierkegaard, calling him “a representative who deserves our respect and in many ways our admiration” (p. 83). Whether or not we agree with Kierkegaard’s conclusions, we can at least say that he was honest in confronting faith and did not try to redefine it so as to better conform to his rational sensibilities.
Kierkegaard took as his model of faith Abraham and the story of the Binding of Isaac, and explored this story in his famous work Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard, himself a devout Lutheran, was vehemently opposed to the Christians of his day and to the state church of Denmark. Much of Christianity in Denmark was at the time rooted in German idealism and in particular the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a rationalist who believed that religion was a stage through which and beyond which one had to pass in order to reach the standpoint of Absolute Knowing. Kierkegaard, who saw religion as the highest human aim and fundamentally beyond reason, took aim both at this particular perspective and more generally at those who praised Abraham without understanding the true meaning of his story.
Fear and Trembling is written from the perspective of Johannes de silencio, “John of the silence,” a pseudonym of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had determined that the knight of faith, as he put it, cannot justify their faith to others through discourse or reason, and so Kierkegaard took the brilliant step of writing from another perspective so that he could look at faith from the outside. As Alastair Hannay says in the introduction to my edition, “…it is perfectly clear that Abraham is not to be understood as someone who could decide not to believe that God existed; his choice concerns rather what one is to hope for or expect given that God does exist” (1985, p. 20). Here again, faith follows from what is believed. Traveling for three days to the mountain in Moriah, Abraham, from his belief in God and in his own duty to obey God’s commands, had faith that he would keep his son. That this is absurd is exactly the point: “[T]he movement of faith must be made continually on the strength of the absurd,” Kierkegaard writes (ibid., p. 67).
Kierkegaard is honest about the implications of belief in the God of Abraham and what faith must be according to his story, and this much is respectable. But rather than leading Kierkegaard to question just what it is that he believes about God—whether his beliefs are tenable given that they sanction blind obedience, fanaticism, and a suspension of ethics sufficient to “make it into a holy deed to murder one’s own son” (ibid., p. 60)—he turns to a full opposition of reason itself, “abandon[ing] reason in his eager search for a commitment, and sanction[ing] atrocities beyond his own imagination” (Kaufmann, 1961, p. 74). This is not immediately apparent in Fear and Trembling, but Kaufmann provides us with some damning quotes from Kierkegaard’s journals, among them: “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed,” and “faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1961, p. 75).
We certainly should not follow Kierkegaard so far into faith that we abandon reason, but we must recognize that this was the failure of Kierkegaard and his beliefs and not of faith, which he saw clearly. Rather, we must ask, given our belief in reason, in what may we have faith? My faith as a Satanist follows from what I believe. Faith is trust, and trust involves a venture (Bishop, 2016), one which might be and should be grounded in reason, but certainty about the future is nowhere to be had, and so I must make a leap. I might say that my faith is the faith of Socrates. He knew his role well enough, and may even have supposed it God-ordained. Had Socrates been faithless, he would have recanted at his trial, or else accepted Crito’s offer and fled Athens. And it may be that Socrates should indeed have accepted Crito’s offer, but if I believed as Socrates believed, and for those reasons he gave in the Crito, I hope that I would have the courage to do as he did. Or I might say that my faith is the faith of René Descartes, who could not reconcile deception with the idea of God or his faculty of judgement with a God who would ever deceive. Believing in God, he had faith in his own rational judgement via that belief, and faith in God via that faculty of judgement.
Imagine, sometime long ago, a child sees a magpie alight on a branch. It flits about and chitters and the child sees not only its beauty but its intelligence. The bird seems to him a visitation of some higher principle, and he is enraptured. He later becomes an ornithologist and commits himself to the study of magpies and other corvids, his fascination having become an obsession with something he sees as noble and pure in a debased and chaotic world. Then one day, out performing field research, he sees a flock of magpies gathering around something in the grass. He approaches, and sees it to be the carcass of a deer, putrid and stinking, a cloud of flies swarming about, lifting and resettling as the magpies dance about. As he watches, one of the magpies bites onto a strip of flesh hanging from a rib, tears it off, and swallows it. The man never mentions this to anyone. When his book on magpies is finally complete, it describes the magpie diet as consisting of fruits, berries, and insects. No mention is made of their scavanger nature.
What are we to say of this man, who would claim the study of magpies as the great overreaching passion of his life? Is it the magpie whom he loves, or only his ideal of them, his fantasy, his memory of that hallowed day from his childhood?
Some, knowing me to be a Satanist, suppose that I must hate God, but this is not the case. To the contrary, it is from the depths of love that I seek the truth of God. “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). How then am I called? It is reason which has led me to the Bible, to seek the truth of God in the words of those who have sought the same over many thousands of years. Am I then to jettison both reason and the book and kneel among the child-rapists and world-eaters? Among those who tell me not to look at the book in terms of what it really is but only in terms what they wish that it were? Reason cannot take me all the way to my destination, this is true, but am I to understand that the work of faith is to lead me back in the other direction from the point I’ve already reached?
I have faith that the Bible has the most value to us in terms of what it actually is, and not in terms of what we might wish it to be.
As an experiment, I did a web search for “How do I know which religion is true?” and “How do I know Christianity is true?” Many of the results were articles and social media threads debating the question at the meta level: can any religion be said to be true in that sense? or, would it be better for one to ask which religion is right for them? But many of the results were from Christian websites which answered the question directly: one should compare between the different religions on the basis of reason and empirical evidence (There Are so Many Different Religions; How Do I Know Which One Is Right?, n.d.; With All of the Different Religions, How Can I Know Which One Is Correct?, n.d.; Zukeran, 2009). Unsurprisingly, the same websites proceeded immediately to offer their own evidence and rational arguments. I won’t waste your time with the particulars; even calling the arguments sophistry gives them too much credit. Sophistry implies an attempt to decieve through the appearance of reasoned argument, but I think it more likely that the authors of these articles are simply unfamiliar with and incapable of rigorous rational thought and would with all haste head in the opposite direction were it ever presented to them.
Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); but also, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16). The path overgrown with thorns and thistles can’t then be the way; nor can we come to truth by assenting to falsehood, nor come to life by means of death. And modern Christianity is in truth the worship of death.
They will protest this assertion, of course. “He has been raised!” they will say (Matthew 28:6; Mark 16:6; Luke 24:5; John 20:9). Yes, he was raised and then conveniently absconded to heaven before anyone who wasn’t already one of his followers could get a good look at him. But have it your way: let’s say that Christ was raised. Tell me, what is it that he was raised from? A deep slumber, perhaps? Had he fallen into a well? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). What is it to which God gave his only son? That which this verse tells us is the medium of salvation? Say, what’s that you’re wearing around your neck? “Everyone who believes in him may have eternal life,” the verse tells us. When is it that we receive this reward? “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). It is the dead who are judged according to their works in Revelation 20:12-13. But what until then? How is the Christian to live in the meantime? “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). That doesn’t sound like much of a way to live; how is this justified? “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:12). So it is in death that the suffering and injustice of life is vindicated. What’s more, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). An article I found while researching for this essay put the matter quite succintly: “Choose life: die every day.” The article concludes: “It will not kill you to die to your flesh. You are choosing life” (Bloom, 2016). I might answer them with Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” It is indeed the people of God who are the target of the prophet’s polemic in this verse, and he prophesies that God will send the Assyrians against them; the Assyrians: pagans who worshiped Ishtar, goddess of the morning star.
I have faith that there is a purpose to my existence. Here I must wrestle with language to express what it is that I mean: we commonly speak of purpose as that function for which something was created, and I do not think that there was any intention of function behind my creation. I was created by my parents, who had no say in who or what I would turn out to be, and I don’t think that there was anyone who had that say. Regardless, we might look at birds, who eat the fruits of trees and in doing so distribute seeds across their territory. They were not created so as to do this, but we can nevertheless say that birds serve a role in the order of things, and so do I. Like Socrates before me, and like Satan my exemplar, I am an accuser. I have faith that, given this purpose, God is not playing some devious trick on me, making it seem as though I am best suited for one thing when in fact my real role is to recant, fall in line, and worship with all the rest. Again I must wrestle with language: I do not believe in a God who has these sort of personal intentions, but the universe is ordered and comprehensible—chaotic as well, but in no sense do I think that it works to deceive me. Only humans do this. The Bible is quite clear about my fate, but I am like Abraham, called to my purpose, undertaking it in the service of faith. And if it were to turn out that the Bible is true in any more literal sense than I have taken it to be, my faith will stand regardless on the shoulders of my reason. I have faith that I will be condemned, and I have faith that I will be saved. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” Jesus says in Matthew 16:25. One might take Jesus as saying here that the false, earthly life is the one which one will lose if they try to save it, and that the true, heavenly life is the one which one will find if they lose their false life; or one might say that Jesus is speaking of the one and only true life the entire time. Shortly before, Jesus had said to his disciples that he would give them “the keys to the kingdom of heaven,” and then immediately told them not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah (Matthew 16:19-20), and indeed, I have faith that he is not.
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Bishop, J. (2016). Faith. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/faith/
Bloom, J. (2016, April 29). Die to Your Flesh and Live. Desiring God. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/die-to-your-flesh-and-live
Kaufmann, W. (1961). The Faith of a Heretic. Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Fear and trembling. Penguin Books ; Viking Penguin.
There are so many different religions; how do I know which one is right? (n.d.). CompellingTruth.Org. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.compellingtruth.org/different-religions.html
Tillich, P. (2001). Dynamics of faith (1st Perennial classics ed). Perennial.
Tillich, P. (1953). The Shaking of the Foundations. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
With all of the different religions, how can I know which one is correct? (n.d.). GotQuestions.Org. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.gotquestions.org/correct-religion.html
Zukeran, P. (2009, September 9). How I Know Christianity is True | Bible.org. https://bible.org/article/how-i-know-christianity-true