Salvation by Allegiance Alone: What Faith Is Not
Christianity is all about the human response of faith, or so popular teaching and perception would have us believe. Undeniably, faith is essential to Christianity—right? Or is it? I would argue that like rot in an apple, much of the malaise in contemporary Christianity stems from a rotten core. The gospel, salvation, and the Christian life have little to do with “faith” or “belief” as generally defined or understood, and this is the decay in the interior—so much so that it would be best if these words were abandoned with regard to discussions of salvation among Christians. The Greek word pistis, generally rendered “faith” or “belief,” as it pertains to Christian salvation, quite simply has little correlation with “faith” and “belief” as these words are generally understood and used in contemporary Christian culture, and much to do with allegiance. At the center of Christianity, properly understood, is not the human response of faith or belief but rather the old-fashioned term fidelity. As I have taught this material in the university classroom, I have found that the best first step is to clear away popular misconceptions. So each subsection in what follows seeks to explain what faith is not.
Not the Opposite of Evidence Assessment
Several years ago some zealous young missionaries happened to knock on the door of my sister’s apartment where I was visiting. These two young women, the radiance of their faces only surpassed by the gleam of their tracts, were eager to do God’s work. As they began to tell us the reason for their mission and the source of their joy, I asked a few probing questions about a sacred text known as The Book of Abraham.
The Book of Abraham is a text that Joseph Smith Jr., the leading figure of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) tradition, claimed to have discovered when a traveling mummy exhibit came through Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith was living at the time. Smith asserted that the manuscript was an ancient document called The Book of Abraham, and, after purchasing it, Smith eventually offered his own interpretative translation. Smith claimed it told the story of Abraham’s departure from Chaldea, and that it included nonbiblical traditions, such as Abraham’s being bound to an altar to be sacrificed by a pagan priest. According to Smith, it also contained speculation about Kolob, a creation alleged to be near to God’s celestial residence. Both the pictographs and Smith’s translations are easily available online.
But there are large discrepancies between Smith’s claims and subsequent scholarly findings. For example, Smith takes the first image as a representation of a pagan priest seeking to sacrifice Abraham on an altar, translating: “And it came to pass that the priests laid violence upon me [Abraham], that they might slay me also, as they did those virgins upon this altar; and that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record.” So Smith asserts that an image in the manuscript and the words associated with the image describe a pagan attempt to sacrifice Abraham. But scholars of the ancient world have determined The Book of Abraham to be from a class of Egyptian funerary documents known from elsewhere as “Books of Breathings,” and that this particular document was “copied for a Theban priest named Hor.” As to the alleged near-sacrifice of Abraham, it is actually a representation of “the resurrection of the Osiris Hor on the customary lion-headed funerary couch.” Meanwhile, an authoritative translation of the words associated with the image reads: “[Osiris, the god’s father], prophet of Amon-Re, King of the Gods, prophet of Min who slaughters his enemies, prophet of Khonsu” (and so forth). So there is significant publicly available evidence that Smith’s The Book of Abraham has nothing to do with Abraham at all if ordinary methods of scholarship and translation are applied.
These young women were unflappable when presented with these evidence-based questions, simply stating, “We believe that we can only know the truth by faith,” and inviting us all to consider through prayer whether or not we might have a warm sensation in our hearts as we considered the truth of their presentation.
I tell this story not to nitpick the Mormon tradition (which is complex and intellectually diverse) but rather because I think this story captures well a fundamental misperception about the nature of faith for many in our contemporary culture. Faith is for many of us, much as it was for these exuberant and well-intentioned missionaries, the opposite of evidence-based assessment of truth. A truth claim had been made—“Mormonism is the one fully true story” (including the role of The Book of Abraham in the Mormon worldview since this is an authoritative text as part of The Pearl of Great Price)—but the assessment of the truth value of that claim was deemed by these young women to be a matter of faith or belief totally apart from publicly available evidence that might be pertinent to the value of the truth claim. Faith or belief was being put forward as the opposite of reasoned judgment in consideration of the evidence. Indeed such evidence was deemed immaterial in advance! Faith was reckoned not just an alternative but a superior way of knowing what is true and what is false. Judgment could be rendered on the basis of inward feelings alone. For these women, and they are not alone in our culture, faith is defined as something one simply must privately and personally affirm regardless of whatever contrary public evidence exists. In short, for many today faith is defined as the opposite of evidence-based truth. This is neither a biblical nor a Christian understanding of faith.
In its more egregious forms, such as in the story of the missionaries just recounted, it is perhaps easy to see that this definition of faith is both naive and dangerous because the error is so overt. However, this private, experiential, anti-evidential notion of faith (often called fideism in scholarly circles) is not unique to groups such as the Mormons. It also sneaks into the mainstream church in more subtle modes. For instance, we find belief or faith being defined in this basic manner when an inquirer asks a tough question about evolution and creation (on the basis of data available in the public arena) and receives a curt anti-evolutionary response simplistically affirming, “The Bible says it, and I personally have found the Bible to be true, so I believe it,” a response that does not attempt to deal seriously with all the available data (including complexities in the Bible itself). Regardless of precisely how one comes down on the complex creation or evolution (or both!) debate, we should all agree that the “faith” God requires of us has nothing to do with ignoring relevant evidence that is easily available when adjudicating truth claims. And is it not largely due to this abusive use of “faith” and “belief” that so many, past and present, are quick to dismiss Christianity and religion in general, seeing it as purely “faith” based, while taking “faith” to mean the opposite of evidence-based truth? True Christian faith is not fideism.
Not a Leap in the Dark
As Christians, we are frequently encouraged to step out in faith, to do something bold for God or for Jesus that intentionally pushes us outside our comfort zone: to travel halfway around the world, to build an orphanage in a third-world country, to contribute money to a kingdom-growing project beyond what we think our finances can bear, or to befriend the socially disadvantaged. All of these things are undoubtedly worthwhile endeavors—but is this at the heart of faith? And is the reason for doing them really that we should “step out”? Is it true that we should—like the hero in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (in a movie clip that is sometimes shown at churches to encourage such action)—take a step off of a ledge into a dark chasm, obediently following arcane instructions, even when no obvious path to safety can be achieved by making the leap? To be a true Christian, so it is asserted, or at least to foster maturity in the faith, we must plunge into the darkness, launching into what appears to be utter nothingness, knowing that the unfailing God will catch us. This, so it is claimed, is not an irrational leap, because we know that God will indeed safely cradle us.
It is not just popular Christianity that would encourage this type of faith. The Danish existential philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, reacting with strong aversion to the predominant but all-too-easy Christian culture in which he found himself (what he calls Christendom), waxes eloquent when he considers Abraham. For Kierkegaard, Abraham is the greatest example of faith in the Bible—a paragon of faith—because of his unquestioning obedience to God’s command with regard to Isaac. In Genesis 22, Abraham is commanded to do the unthinkable, to offer his son as a sacrifice to God. And not just his son, but his beloved son Isaac, who, after years of infertility and frustration, was given in fulfillment of God’s promise. Contrary to natural paternal instinct and all basic laws of moral decency, Abraham must kill his own son on the altar. For Kierkegaard, Abraham in his unquestioning obedience is a knight of faith, willing to do what is irrational, what is in fact by mere human standards immoral, in obedience to the divine commandment. In Genesis 22 it is clear that Abraham never wavers; he is single-mindedly committed to executing the divine will until the angel calls out, restraining Abraham’s hand even as he is about to plunge the knife. Kierkegaard summons us to act with the same faith as Abraham, to abandon ourselves recklessly to the necessary leap in the dark, because it is only in midflight that we truly encounter God.
This stepping-out-from-security definition captures an essential component of biblical faith but simultaneously introduces a dangerous half-truth when it is coupled with an irrational leap-in-the-dark notion. The truth portion of this half-truth is best illustrated by examining the most straightforward definition of faith given in the Bible. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews defines pistis, saying, “Now faith [pistis] is the underlying substance [hypostasis] toward which hope is directed, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). The point of this definition—as is made clear by examples in the rest of Hebrews 11—is that by means of pistis, the true people of God are willing to act decisively in the visible world not for reasons that are immediately apparent but because an unseen yet even more genuine underlying substance (hypostasis), God’s reality, compels the action. This willingness to act on the deeper, truer, but nonetheless hidden reality is “faith” for the author of Hebrews. And we should eagerly agree that true knowledge of God and saving “faith” are often bound up with such a notion. For example, Noah was saved when he acted on things not yet seen, responding to the command of God to build an ark, even in the absence of tangible, this-present-world evidence (Heb 11:7)—all of which is instructive for our salvation (1 Pet 3:20–21; 2 Pet 2:5).
Yet—and now for the way in which this leap-in-the-dark idea is a dangerous half-truth—it must be remembered that neither Noah nor Abraham launched out into the void, but rather each responded to God’s command. They acted in response to the call of a promise-fulfilling God with whom they had experience. Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac by the God who had miraculously provided Isaac—a God who had proven to be trustworthy to Abraham through a lengthy life journey together. One might even dare to say that in so acting Noah and Abraham above all showed allegiance to God as the sovereign and powerful Lord who speaks all human affairs into existence, but more on this later.
The key point is that true pistis is not an irrational launching into the void but a reasonable, action-oriented response grounded in the conviction that God’s invisible underlying realities are more certain than any apparent realities. Stepping out in faith is not intrinsically good in and of itself, as if God is inherently more pleased with daring motorcycle riders than with automobile passengers who cautiously triple-check their seatbelt buckles; it is only good when it is an obedient response to God’s exercised sovereignty. We are not to leap out in the dark at a whim, or simply to prove to ourselves, God, or others that we “have faith.” But the promise-keeping God might indeed call us to act on invisible realities of his heavenly kingdom.
If the call is genuine, we may indeed be bruised by the leap. Yet if it is genuine, in gathering the bruises from the hard landing, we can be certain that we will come to look more like the wounded Son, which is the final goal of redeemed humanity. If the call to leap is not genuine but an idolatrous response to a false god of our own making, we may jump into the emptiness only to find ourselves unable to gain secure footing or to reverse course. True pistis is not an irrational leap in the dark but a carefully discerned response to God’s reign through Jesus over his kingdom and that kingdom’s frequently hidden growth.
Not the Opposite of Works
I grew up in a fundamentalist, King-James-Version-only Bible church in Northern California. In this brand of Christianity the Bible sometimes has a way of taking on a certain luminous quality. The Bible was certainly not worshiped, but some of the hymnody perhaps unwittingly encouraged a covert bibliolatry. For instance, each and every Sunday, prior to the Sunday school service, the leader would hold up a worn leather Bible, and the congregation would enthusiastically belt out, “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me! I’ll stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” If no one bowed face-down on the dusty carpet in homage to the book, a few knees might have ever so slightly buckled.
My pastor at that time was (and still is) a kindhearted man, deeply devoted to God, Jesus, the church, the unsaved, his family, and the Bible—perhaps not in that precise order. When I reflect on his role in my life, I can only speak with gratitude. Although my mother had introduced me to Jesus and the Christian life when I was a young child, during my teenage years my pastor’s formal teaching awakened something new—a brighter light, a moral rigor, a passion for God’s ways, and above all else a reverence for Scripture. I am profoundly grateful for his role in my life.
Yet in retrospect the preached message I heard weekly growing up was subtly confused. No matter what passage of Scripture was being exposited, regardless of the liturgical season (my church was not exactly into following the ecclesial calendar), despite whatever contemporary political or societal affairs might be pressing, virtually every sermon had the same conclusion— a presentation of “the gospel” and an invitation “to accept Jesus into your heart.” Now, do not misunderstand: I think the gospel should be preached and invitations to follow Jesus need to be extended—urgently so. However, invariably the good news was presented in its classic “Romans Road” form and accompanied by a stern warning. That is, the gospel was given as follows:
- we are all perniciously bent on trying to earn our salvation by doing good deeds;
- yet all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God—and that includes you;
- but the good news is that Jesus died for your sins;
- so if you will just believe this and pray along with me, then the free gift of eternal life is yours today.
And now the warning: the only thing that you must not under any circumstances do is believe that you can earn your salvation through good works, for this was the mistake of many Jews in Paul’s day and is still the error of Catholics today.
Within this version of the gospel, which involves several dangerous distortions, good works end up playing the confusing dual role of friend and foe. Good works are “friend” because they are believed to flow from the more primal response of belief and are evidence of genuine faith. In this way, it is still possible for those who adhere to this system to affirm James 2:26, “faith without deeds is dead,” because good works are felt to emerge spontaneously from the wellspring of faith. Yet good works are “foe” because they can all too easily lure us, seduce us, become our false security blanket, causing us to rely on ourselves for our own salvation—and then, so it is presumed, we stumble (cf. Rom 9:30–33). We must instead ever and always just trust, avoiding the seduction of seeking to earn God’s favor through moral or religious performance.
In this way faith and works are pitted against one another as opposite paths to salvation, one that is successful (faith) and one that fails (works). Later I will explain more fully how treating faith and good deeds as opposite and mutually exclusive paths to salvation distorts the gospel. Here I merely want to point out that the faith/works divide taught in churches like the one in which I was raised relies on assumed meanings of “faith” (pistis) and “works” (erga) that may not be linguistically or contextually sound. If, for instance, we were to discover that Paul is concerned not primarily with “good works” in general but rather with “works of law”—that is, works demanded by the law of Moses—then what difference might that make? Furthermore, if we were to determine that in appropriate salvation-oriented contexts in the New Testament pistis most likely means faithfulness, or fidelity, or allegiance, then might not pistis by its very definition include concrete acts that are inseparable from allegiance? In other words, we might come to discover that faith and works are not mutually exclusive after all.
Not an “It’s All Good” Attitude
You just lost your job. Rent is overdue. Utility bills are piling up. Your roommate just told you that she is moving out next month. Then you receive the notice that your tuition payment for next semester is due in three weeks. Enter your well-intentioned Christian friend, who offers the following words of consolation: “Everything is going to be all right—you just need to have faith,” or “God brings about these sorts of events to test our faith—just believe in God and he will deliver you from this trial.”
Now in the most general theological terms, this might in fact be sound advice. Although not everything that happens in life reflects God’s desired will (most obviously our own sin or the sin of others is not what God would wish to occur), all that happens is allowed within God’s permissive will. And we also know that whatever God permits, even if evil is allowed to temporarily flourish, it can be turned to good by God for us and for others. This is beautifully illustrated by the story of Joseph, who even after being sold into slavery by his brothers, suffering false accusation, imprisonment, and exile, is still able in the end to say to his brothers, “Although you meant evil against me, God meant it for good, in order that, as it is today, many people should be kept alive” (Gen 50:20). So in the final analysis we truly can affirm with the apostle Paul that “all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called in accordance with his purpose” (Rom 8:28).
The risk here is that if you, while staring disconsolately at your bank statement, were to accept your friend’s advice (“Everything is going to be all right—you just need to have faith”) in an unqualified fashion, then you might accept an inadequate definition of faith. You might begin to think of faith as equivalent to “maintaining a positive mindset.” As if the hippy tie-dye generation kind of faith—just chill out and relax, because everything is going to be fine—is somehow what is needed in this stressful situation. You might be tempted to think that real Christian faith demands unfettered optimism. No matter what, you must relax and stay positive, so you should deny your real feelings, slap a plastic doll grin on your face, and try to keep up appearances of all-rightness. But this optimism is a bit self-delusional (if not neurotic). If everything does not turn out all right and the self-delusion collapses, you might think that you have somehow lost your Christian faith. “After all,” you might say, “if I had genuine faith, I would not feel so discouraged.”
A few minutes of reflection will probably reveal the inadequacy of a “positive mindset” definition of faith. Faith-as-optimism is an almost entirely vacuous idea, because in the final analysis no concrete object of faith is in view at all. It is faith merely for faith’s sake. The truth is that genuine biblical faith is not a conjured optimism, a pull-a-rabbit-out-of-the-hat, magical feel-goodism, nor is it aimlessly directed at some vague cosmic hope that affirms good karma will somehow prevail in the end. Let me give an example to help illustrate.
As a salute and celebration of the great American auto industry, let’s say I currently drive a 1972 Chevy Nova. Not only does its very name suggest that it won’t reliably run (No va means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish), but my own practical experience is that due to its age and lack of maintenance, my car will only start once out of every ten times I jump into it and turn the key. Now, I have a hugely important interview early tomorrow morning. Do I say to myself, “I simply have faith that my Nova will start tomorrow!” and do nothing but blindly hope, or do I make a backup plan? If this interview is truly central to my life goals, I am not going to chance it. Why? Because even if I wanted to channel a deep inner reservoir of “faith,” I would not really be able to do it. I would know in my heart of hearts that my car is an untrustworthy junker.
In other words, true faith cannot be spontaneously generated on the basis of wishful thinking, for it is rooted in a concrete object toward which it is directed. If the object upon which I am asked to rely (in this example, my Nova) has repeatedly proven to be untrustworthy, then unless I am adept at extreme and willful self-delusion, it will literally be impossible to really trust it, even should I desperately wish to trust it. The point is that real biblical faith is not a general positive mindset or a blind optimism but is directed toward a defined object—and it is the trustworthiness of the object that sources and fixes faith’s genuineness. So if we want to grow in faith, we should study and contemplate God’s extraordinary reliability.
Not Reducible to Intellectual Assent
One of the greatest strengths of the Christian tradition is the depth and rigor of its intellectual heritage. Anyone who thinks that Christianity is nothing more than a naive tale suitable only for simpletons should spend a few hours reading ancient worthies such as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, or more recent thinkers such as Karl Barth, Alvin Plantinga, and N.T. Wright. Perhaps partly because this rich intellectual heritage is so compelling, some Christians, both ancient and modern, have felt that salvation depends solely upon knowing the right things, believing certain doctrines to be true.
In the period of the early church, some deviant groups came to believe that they were saved primarily through the acquisition of knowledge. These diverse groups are usually collectively called the Gnostics. Despite considerable variety in what they believed, they shared the conviction that salvation was contingent on the acquisition of esoteric knowledge. In short, without obtaining the requisite secret information, upon death they might not be able to escape from the enslaving material order (usually understood to be crafted by the god of the Old Testament, whom they regarded as an inferior deity) and to return to the spiritual fullness from which they originated—that is, to the most high God, the God of the New Testament as revealed by Jesus. So these Gnostics tended to believe falsely that the god of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New. The Gnostics thought that the latent spark of divinity inside you needed to be fanned into a white-hot flame through the acquisition of secret knowledge, all of which would allow you to pass through the various heavenly spheres as you returned to the fullness. You might even need to have memorized certain passwords so that angels guarding the gateways to the various heavenly spheres would allow you to pass through to the next level in your movement away from the material order and toward the fullness. For the Gnostics, secret knowledge was what was ultimately most necessary for salvation.
In more recent times the so-called free-grace movement approaches this notion of salvation by knowledge. This system asserts that all God requires of a person for eternal salvation is to hold a specific minimalistic belief as factual—that Jesus died for my sins. And the weight of emphasis here is on personal, intellectual assent (“I agree”) to the truthfulness (“reality”) of a proposition (“that Jesus died for my sins”). In short, if you mentally agree that Jesus died for your sins, then nothing else is required for your salvation—you are on your way to heaven. The problem here is a deficient definition of faith (and for that matter of salvation). Advocates of free-grace salvation have correctly recognized the primacy of God’s grace and the necessity of holding certain doctrines as “true” or “real,” but by effectively reducing faith to intellectual assent, they have introduced a dangerous error.
Nobody, even in the free-grace movement, wants to claim that the demons in Mark’s Gospel—who know Jesus’s divine origins and who utter, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:24) and “You are the Son of God” (3:11)—are in actuality saved because of their true knowledge of Jesus. Free-gracers are quick to disavow such a conclusion. All would agree with the Letter of James, which affirms that such “facts” are not enough: “You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe and shudder” (James 2:19). Nonetheless, problematically, at least some in the free-grace movement want to make salvation depend on nothing but a slight variation of the Son-of-God fact, an affirmation that Jesus died for my sins.
It is correct that we must hold certain intellectual truths as real or factual, including Jesus’s saving work, but this is not all God requires. As we seek to recover the Bible’s teachings about faith, works, and the gospel, we explore further in Salvation by Allegiance Alone what essential “facts” do need to be intellectually affirmed as a necessary condition for salvation along with allegiance to Jesus as king.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic, 2017). All rights reserved.