Some recent discussions I have been involved with have led to a critical question about the nature of Christian faith. Is faith irrational? Is it super-rational? Or is faith perfectly rational? If faith is irrational then it is for those who want embrace the absurd and implicit, if not explicit, contradictions in concepts. If this is right then we are asked to believe in spite of good reasons not to. If faith is super-rational, meaning that it is above our ability to reason with, although not necessarily contradictory and irrational, then it is of a blind nature where one is asked to believe apart from sufficient reason. But if faith is rational, meaning that it is logically coherent and corresponds to reality, then we are asked to believe in something or someone for good reasons.
Admittedly, Christians of different stripes throughout the history of Christianity have contended for all of these different ideas of what faith is. But to simply point out that there have been significant disagreements about the nature of faith should hardly lead us to the conclusion that there is no right view and that all of the views are equally valid or invalid. Although some Christians have embraced the idea that we should believe against reason and that evidence and reason are actually the opposite of faith (indeed they are mortal enemies according to some) I would contend that this is not even close to how the Bible asks us to believe in Christ nor anything else.
When the Scripture says “believe in the Lord Jesus”, what is it saying? The most natural understanding of this command is that we are to “trust” in the Lord Jesus. Or to put it another way, we are to have “confidence” in the Lord Jesus. When Jesus said “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” what did he mean? The Bible is explicitly clear what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean to believe in Jesus in the sense that we are merely to give mental ascent to the proposition that Jesus was a real person. James 2 tells us that even demons believe factually accurate statements about God, but this has no salvific effect for them nor does it mean that they have endearing feeling towards God. Rather the most obvious sense in which Jesus communicates that we should “believe” in him for eternal life is in the sense that we should trust him, rely on him, have confidence in his ability to save us.
So let’s take all of the mystery away from the concept of “faith” as though it is a thing in itself that has existence. Faith is by necessity tied to an object. When people use faith in our culture today as some sort of mystical word by saying “I just have faith that everything will work out” but that faith has not object to which it is attached, this is admittedly absurd! But this is not how the Bible uses faith. Faith is always attached to an object in the Bible, indeed more than an object, a person…God.
Take Abraham as an example (indeed we ought to because the apostle Paul in Romans 4 makes him the archetype example of salvific faith). In Genesis 15 God promised Abraham that he would give him a son through whom he would give Abraham many decedents and make a great and powerful nation. The Scripture tells us that Abraham believed God and it was counted to Abraham as righteousness. Paul expounds on this in Romans 4 saying that Abraham was made right with God by his faith in this instance. Now was Abraham irrational in his faith in God? Some would say yes because he was believing something that seemed impossible since his wife was barren and well beyond child bearing age. Abraham would indeed have been irrational if he had simply believed that he would have a son apart from that belief being tied to anything but just shot in the dark optimism. But this is not what Abraham did, no, Abraham believed/trusted/ had confidence in God that he would have a son. This wasn’t a blind leap this was trusting in the character of a capable person who was able to bring about the promise that he had made. So likewise when we trust in Jesus, we are not believing in pure optimism that everything is going to be okay, we are trusting a person, a divine one at that, who is able to save us just as he says. This is not a non-evidenced trust, but a trust built on a reputation that God has shown himself to be faithful and worthy of our confidence.
So faith, as the Bible uses the concept, is not inherently irrational because it is tied to an object. Were faith used in a subjective sense without any external attachment then it would be irrational to begin with but, again, this is not a biblical usage of the term although it may be used this way in popular culture and even by Christians at times. Since biblical faith carries the concept of trust or confidence in a person (God or Christ) then it is not inherently irrational. The question then turns to whether ones reasons for faith in God are rational or irrational. Someone could approach you and tell you that there is a tree in their yard that is the source of all life on earth and it is truly a deity and they might invite you to come and worship the tree with them. If you were to then sell all your possessions and buy the highest grade fertilizers to bring as an offering to this tree and devote yourself to worshiping the tree and making new disciples for the tree, then I would argue you have made an irrational decision to place you faith/trust/confidence in this tree in your neighbor’s yard. Why? Because there does not seem to be any evidence that supports your neighbors claim that this tree is anything more than a normal tree and now you have attached you faith to this object for no good reason whatsoever.
But is this picture similar to that of your neighbor inviting you to have a relationship with God through faith in Jesus of Nazareth? To the person hearing the message of Jesus for the very first time it might seem so, but under investigation of the claims of the Christian worldview (such as God exists and made the universe, made mankind in his image, our rebellion hurled the world into sin and chaos, we have lost our relationship with God, God still loves us and made a way back to him through Jesus his son, and by faith/trust in Jesus we can be restored to a right relationship with God) it would seem like there might be some good reasons to believe this is so. When one considers the solid arguments in favor of God’s existence from the origins of the universe, the existence of objective morality, and design in the universe and biological things, as well as, the unique nature of the Bible and its preservation and historical reliability, to the evidence that suggests Jesus really did rise from the dead, deciding to trust in Jesus is not irrational at all.
Now I will grant you that some will not find the evidence and reasoning in favor of the Christian worldview to be compelling enough for them to go ahead and believe it is true and place their faith in Jesus, but to call it irrational (apart from or in contradiction to reason) is really not accurate at all. In fact, even if Christianity turned out to be wrong that still would not mean that Christians were irrational for having believed it. How many things have rational people throughout history believed for good reasons just to later be shown that they lacked sufficient information to have formulated a correct belief? It would hardly be fair to have called a person irrational for believing the sun rotated around the earth before we had sufficient technology to determine otherwise. At the time, given the information they had, this was a rational inference.
So as a Christian, perhaps I am wrong but I am not irrational. But as an atheist, perhaps you are wrong. I am not going to call your position irrational. I do think that that the evidence is in our favor that our beliefs are the correct ones about the way things really are in the world, but if you can put one logical foot in front of the other and present a respectable case for your point of view I will not stoop to calling your position irrational, I will just continue to offer counterpoints and hope that by God’s grace you will come to see things as I believe they really are.
For our next post we will continue this discussion into a different nuance and interact with the question “What is the relationship of faith and reason and how does this relate to salvation through faith?
