This quote made me think:
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=276390)
Why is faith so important in Christianity and why God needs to test it?
my WAG is that faith is the only way to make people believe in something that isn’t there. Hence it’s quite important.
Or if, for the sake of argument God does exist. Faith is loyalty.
Well, if you look at the biblical stories of the Israelites, their faith was basically just “trust”–they trusted that God would help them out, and, if they waited long enough, He did. If they couldn’t wait, and started worshipping some calf … bad stuff.
The difference between those stories and now, is that God made his influence unmistakably falt to his people in due time. Faith --> Reward. Now (although nearly every devout Theist will argue otherwise), God’s influence is never unmistakably seen. No pillars of smoke, etc. So the lag between Faith --> Reward is immeasurably huge. It likely will never be seen in one’s lifetime.
Yeah, but in terms of the actual existence of God, they got solid evidence at least from time to time. And I’m not talking about visions to one guy, either, but of things so vast that they were witnessed by big chunks of His followers. He occupied a tent which ran in front of the Israelites for part of their exodus, He reached out from the sky to write Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, etc.
I wonder – how often did God make personal appearances to His followers? He showed Himself personally to Adam and Eve and to Noah (who, with his family, comprised 100% of the earth’s population at the time), to Abraham – that’s only one guy and his family, but surely someone must at least have seen the remains of Sodom and Gamorrah, yes?, to the Israelites during the exodus, etc. If one is a Christian, one of course further believes that He made a personal appearance 2000 years ago in a way that was readily apparent to just about everybody in the area. Is there a semi-predictable timetable so that no one is more than X generations away from someone who personally saw God? And if so, are we due?
I think we have to define what we mean by “faith.” Faith in ancient Judaism was not so much an adherence to specific belief but was characterized more as a loyalty to a specific God and law. When the OT prophets call Israel or its people “faithless,” it is not accusing them of not believing in God but of not being loyal to him and his laws.
In Judaism now, like most other religions, specific belief is not the controlling criterion for “salvation” or reward. It’s nice, it helps, but it’s really what you do and what kind of person you are that matters. Specific belief as the sine non qua for salvation (at least as far as major religions go) is pretty much confined to certain segments of Christianity (but by no means all of Christianity).
I think that the sotoriological paradigm of salvation through faith in Jesus stems from the conception of the crucifixion as necessarily being a salvic event. During the time of the Temple cult in Jerusalem, sins were forgiven by sacrificing a lamb at Passover. Early Christians needed an explanation for the crucifixion and the conception of Jesus as a cosmic Paschal surrogate, the ultimate “Lamb of God,” became the fulcrum of Christian faith. It was necessary to “accept” this faith in order to be saved (and obviously, it was necesary to believe it in order to accept it).
For many Christians, if salvation can be had without believing or accepting this sacrifice, then the crucifixion becomes meaningless. If the crucifixion was menaingless, then that raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the identity and purpose of Jesus.
Although, it goes without saying that some Christians interpret this very narrowly, many of them don’t. “Faith in Christ,” doesn’t have to be interpreted as a literal belief in the crucifixion. More general criteria can be used such as defining a sincere attempt to know the truth or an “incorrect” belief which is informed by good and earnest intentions. Some more abstract devices can be employed as well, such as defining Jesus as identical to “Love,” and a surrender to Love as being equivalent to faith in Christ.
I also think that Christianity places an emphasis on salvation being dependent on a cognitive transformation in which the individual must realize that he is a “sinner” and must atone. In this case, faith can be seen as a mechanism for self-realization, a bullet for the ego and an informing schema for personal behavior and identity.
Those who oversimplify it to nothing more than a literal belief in a supernatural event are completely missing the point…and that goes for atheists as much as fundies.
God had a tent? How bizarre. Would it be too much trouble to provide the verse that describes this? I don’t doubt you, I’m just curious about it.
Look at Exodus, chapters 36-38. The Israelites constructed a portable tabernacle (which was a tent) to house the Ark of the Covenant. Exodus also says that God literally rode around in the tent.
Well, it wasn’t really His tent in the sense that he went to WalMart and bought it, it was prepared for him by Moses and the Israelites. You can find it in Exodus 40, particularly starting with passages 36-8, "[sup]36[/sup] In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, they would set out; [sup]37[/sup] but if the cloud did not lift, they did not set out-until the day it lifted. [sup]38[/sup] So the cloud of the LORD was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels. "
I am, of course, no Theologian. So I’m certainly open to correction. But my read is that He did indeed have a tent which He personally occupied in full witness of the Israelites. So for those guys, the answer to “How do you know God exists” was as simple as “Dude. He’s right there in the tent. You might as well be asking how do I know I exist.”
Thanks.
I just have to say, that’s one helluva sentence.
I could nitpick Diogenes’s analysis, but in the main it seems like perhaps the best short writing that could be done on the subject.
Christianity traditionally focused on the Atonement. This is perhaps a goofball concept to most non-Christians, but is worth looking at in historical context.
First, men sin – for evidence, just go to the Pit and open any thread at random. Extend this: all men, including you and me, sin – no matter how hard we try, we end up screwing up.
Now, under Judaism, one was able to be forgiven of one’s sins by sincere repentance and the offering of a sacrifice. (I’ll let Chaim or Zev speak to this in more detail, but allow it as a good generalization.)
Jesus was, said the early Christians, truly God and truly man – the Son of God and the human being Jesus being one and the same person, with the two natures joined in hypostatic union. As such, He was the perfect sacrifice to atone for all sin, and He offered Himself to be so sacrificed as the ultimate sin offering, once and for all, for all mankind.
This invoked God’s grace – the lovingkindness that a loving God had always felt towards mankind but which His perfect justice would not permit without that once-and-for-all sacrifice. (Remember that from His perspective, the Atonement is a part of the picture from the beginning – it’s merely from our own temporally-bound one that it follows after the Jewish repent-and-sacrifice symbology.)
Paul is pretty clear on this: “By grace are ye saved…” he repeats in several letters, usually in connection with a discussion of the Atonement. And he goes on “…through faith” – meaning that by putting one’s trust in God and His program of having Jesus die to atone for the sins of all, one can access that grace. “…And that not of yourself; it is a gift of God, lest any man should boast.”
So the key point is trusting in God – believing in Him and in His goodness.
Now, the fun part begins – because immediately somebody’s going to ask the question, “Well, what if you have a mistaken conception of who God is – does faith in Him count if you don’t understand who He is?” So you get into creedal definitions of who He is, and then systematic theologies explaining how this whole gamut of concepts fits together.
But the key point is that the whole thing is a gift of His grace. And you accept that gift by trusting Him – by having faith in Him. The rest is detail.