Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 530—“Faith began by being: 1. a simple trust in God; then followed, 2. a simple expansion of that proposition into the assent to the proposition that God is good, and, 3. a simple acceptance of the proposition that Jesus Christ was his Son; then, 4. came in the definition of terms, and each definition of terms involved a new theory; finally, 5. the theories were gathered together into systems, and the martyrs and witnesses of Christ died for their faith, not outside but inside the Christian sphere; and instead of a world of religious belief which resembled the world of actual fact in the sublime unsymmetry of its foliage and the deep harmony of its discords, there prevailed the most fatal assumption of all, that the symmetry of a system is the test of its truth and the proof thereof.” We regard this statement of Hatch as erroneous, in that it attributes to the earliest disciples no larger faith than that of their Jewish brethren. We claim that the earliest faith involved an implicit acknowledgement of Jesus as Savior and Lord, and that this faith of simple obedience and trust became explicit recognition of our Lord's deity and atonement just so soon as persecution and the Holy Spirit disclosed to them the real contents of their own consciousness.
An illustration of the simplicity and saving power of faith is furnished by Principal J. R. Andrews, of New London, Conn., Principal of the Bartlett Grammar School. When the steamer Atlantic was wrecked off Fisher's Island, though Mr. Andrews could not swim, he determined to make a desperate effort to save his life. Binding a life-preserver about him, he stood on the edge of the deck waiting his opportunity, and when he saw a wave moving shoreward, he jumped into the rough breakers and was borne safely to land. He was saved by faith. He accepted the conditions of salvation. Forty perished in a scene where he was saved. In one sense he saved himself; in another sense he depended upon God. It was a combination of personal activity and dependence upon God that resulted in his salvation. If he had not used the life-preserver, he would have perished; if he had not cast himself into the sea, he would have perished. So faith in Christ is reliance upon him for salvation; but it is also our own making of a new start in life and the showing of our trust by action. Tract 357, Am. Tract Society—“What is it to believe on Christ? It is: To feel your need of him; To believe that he is able and willing to save you, and to save you now; and To cast yourself unreservedly upon his mercy, and trust in him alone for salvation.”
In further explanation of the Scripture representations, we remark:
(a) That faith is an act of the affections and will, as truly as it is an act of the intellect.
It has been claimed that faith and unbelief are purely intellectual states, which are necessarily determined by the facts at any given time presented to the mind; and that they are, for this reason, as destitute of moral quality and as far from being matters of obligation, as are our instinctive feelings of pleasure and pain. But this view unwarrantably isolates the intellect, and ignores the fact that, in all moral subjects, the state of the affections and will affects the judgment of the mind with regard to truth. In the intellectual act the whole moral nature expresses itself. Since the tastes determine the opinions, faith is a moral act, and men are responsible for not believing.
John 3:18-20—“He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved”; 5:40—“ye will not come to me, that ye may have life”; 16:8, 9—“And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin ... of sin, because they believe not on me”; Rev. 2:21—“she willed not to repent.” Notice that the Revised Version very frequently substitutes the voluntary and active terms “disobedience” and “disobedient”for the “unbelief” and “unbelieving” of the Authorized Version,—as in Rom. 15:31; Heb. 3:18; 4:6, 11; 11:31. See Park, Discourses, 45, 46.
Savages do not know that they are responsible for their physical appetites, or that there is any right and wrong in matters of sense, until they come under the influence of Christianity. In like manner, even men of science can declare that the intellectual sphere has no part in man's probation, and that we are no more responsible for our opinions and beliefs than we are for the color of our skin. But faith is not a merely intellectual act,—the affections and will give it quality. There is no moral quality in the belief that 2 + 2 = 4, because we can not help that belief. But in believing on Christ there is moral quality, because there is the element of choice. Indeed it may be questioned, whether, in every judgment upon moral things, there is not an act of will.
Hence on John 7:17—“If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself”—F. L. Patton calls attention to the two common errors: (1) that obedience will certify doctrine,—which is untrue, because obedience is the result of faith, not vice versa; (2) that personal experience is the ultimate test of faith,—which is untrue, because the Bible is the only rule of faith, and it is one thing to receive truth through the feelings, but quite another to test truth by the feelings. The text really means, that if any man is willing to do God's will, he shall know whether it be of God; and the two lessons to be drawn are: (1) the gospel needs no additional evidence; (2) the Holy Ghost is the hope of the world. On responsibility for opinions and beliefs, see Mozley, on Blanco White, in Essays Philos. and Historical, 2:142; T. T. Smith, Hulsean Lectures for 1839. Wilfrid Ward, The Wish to Believe, quotes Shakespeare: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought”; and Thomas Arnold: “They dared not lightly believe what they so much wished to be true.”
Pascal: “Faith is an act of the will.” Emerson, Essay on Worship: “A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples. Man's religious faith is the expression of what he is.”Bain: “In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature, otherwise called the will.” Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 257—“Faith is the creative human answer to the creative divine offer. It is not the passive acceptance of a divine favor.... By faith man, laying hold of the personality of God in Christ, becomes a true person. And by the same faith he becomes, under God, a creator and founder of true society.” Inge, Christian Mysticism, 52—“Faith begins with an experiment and ends with an experience. But even the power to make the experiment is given from above. Eternal life is not γνῶσις, but the state of acquiring knowledge—ἴνα γιγνώσκωσιν. It is significant that John, who is so fond of the verb ‘to know,’ never uses the substantive γνῶσις.” Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 148—“ ‘I will not obey, because I do not yet know’? But this is making the intellectual side the only side of faith, whereas the most important side is the will-side. Let a man follow what he does believe, and he shall be led on to larger faith. Faith is the reception of the personal influence of a living Lord, and a corresponding action.”
William James, Will to Believe, 61—“This life is worth living, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.... Often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.... If your heart [pg 842]does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.... Freedom to believe covers only living options which the intellect cannot by itself resolve.... We are not to put a stopper on our heart, and meantime act as if religion were not true”; Psychology, 2:282, 321—“Belief is consent, willingness, turning of our disposition. It is the mental state or function of cognizing reality. We never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing. We give higher reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to with a will.... We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. Those to whom God and duty are mere names, can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day.”