The Greek words which designate belief or faith are used in the Old Testament chiefly in the sense of trust, and primarily trust in a person. They expressed confidence in his goodness, his veracity, his uprightness. They are as much moral as intellectual. They implied an estimate of character. Their use in application to God was not different from their use in application to men. Abraham trusted God. The Israelites also trusted God when they saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. In the first instance there was just so much of intellectual assent involved in belief, that to believe God involved an assent to the proposition that God exists. But this element was latent and implied rather than conscious and expressed. It is not difficult to see how, when this proposition came to be conscious and expressed, it should lead to other propositions. The analysis of belief led to the construction of other propositions besides the bare original proposition that God is. Why do I trust God? The answer was: Because He is wise, or good, or just. The propositions followed: I believe that God is wise, that He is good, that He is just. Belief in God came to mean the assent to certain propositions about God.[668]
In Greek philosophy the words were used rather of intellectual conviction than of moral trust, and of the higher rather than of the lower forms of conviction. Aristotle distinguishes faith from impression—for a man, he says, may have an impression and not be sure of it. He uses it both of the convictions that come through the senses and of those that come through reason.
There is in Philo a special application of this philosophical use, which led to even more important results. He blends the sense in which it is found in the Old Testament with that which is found in Greek philosophy. The mass of men, he says, trust their senses or their reason. The good man trusts God. Just as the mass of men believe that their senses and their reason do not deceive them, so the latter believes that God does not deceive him. To trust God was to trust His veracity. But the occasions on which God spoke directly to a man were rare, and what He said when He so spoke commanded an unquestioning acceptance. He more commonly spoke to men through the agency of messengers. His angels spoke to men, sometimes in visions of the night, sometimes in open manifestation by day. His prophets spoke to men. To believe God, implied a belief in what He said indirectly as well as directly. It implied the acceptance of what His prophets said, that is to say, of what they were recorded to have said in the Holy Writings. Belief in this sense is not a vague and mystical sentiment, the hazy state of mind which precedes knowledge, but the highest form of conviction. It transcends reason in certainty. It is the full assurance that certain things are so, because God has said that they are so.[669]
In this connection we may note the way in which the Christian communities were helped by the current reaction against pure speculation—the longing for certainty. The mass of men were sick of theories. They wanted certainty. The current teaching of the Christian teachers gave them certainty. It appealed to definite facts of which their predecessors were eye-witnesses. Its simple tradition of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a necessary basis for the satisfaction of men’s needs. Philosophy and poetry might be built upon that tradition; but if the tradition were shown to be only cloudland, Christian philosophy was no more than Stoicism.
We have thus to see how, under the new conditions, faith passed beyond the moral stage, or simple trust in a person, to the metaphysical stage, or belief in certain propositions or technical definitions concerning Him, His nature, relations and actions. In this latter we may distinguish two correlated and interdependent phases or forms of belief, the one more intellectual and logical, the other more historical and concrete, namely, (1) the conviction that God being of a certain nature has certain attributes; (2) the conviction that, God being true, the statements which He makes through His prophets and ministers are also true.[670] The one of these forms of belief was elaborated into what we know as the Creed; the other, into the Canon of the New Testament.
We shall first deal with these phases or forms of belief, and then with the process by which the metaphysical definitions became authoritative.
1. In the first instance the intellectual element of belief was subordinated to the ethical purpose of the religion. Belief was not insisted upon in itself and for itself, but as the ground of moral reformation. The main content of the belief was “that men are punished for their sins and honoured for their good deeds:”[671] the ground of this conviction was the underlying belief that God is, and that He rewards and punishes. The feature which differentiated Christianity from philosophy was, that this belief as to the nature of God had been made certain by a revelation. The purpose of the revelation was salvation—regeneration and amendment of life. By degrees stress came to be laid on this underlying element. The revelation had not only made some propositions certain which hitherto had been only speculative, it had also added new propositions, assertions of its distinctive or differentiating belief. But it is uncertain, except within the narrowest limits, what those assertions were. There are several phrases in the New Testament and in sub-apostolic writings which read like references to some elementary statements or rule.[672] But none of them contain or express a recognized standard. Yet the standard may be gathered partly from the formula of admission into the Christian community, partly from the formulæ in which praise was ascribed to God. The most important of these, in view of its subsequent history, is the former. But the formula is itself uncertain; it existed at least in two main forms. There is evidence to show that the injunction to baptize in the name of the three Persons of the Trinity, which is found in the last chapter of St. Matthew, was observed.[673] It is the formula in the Teaching of the Apostles.[674] But there is also evidence, side by side with this evidence as to the use of the Trinitarian formula, of baptism into the name of Christ, or into the death of Christ.[675]
The next element in the uncertainty which exists is as to how far the formula, either in the one case or the other, was conceived to involve the assent to any other propositions except those of the existence of the divine Persons or Person mentioned in the formula. Even this assent was implied rather than explicit. It is in the Apologists that the transition from the implicit was made. The teaching of Jesus Christ became to them important, especially in Justin Martyr.[676] The step by which it became explicit is of great importance, but we have no means of knowing when or how it was made.[677] It is conceivable that it was first made homiletically, in the course of exhortation to Christian duty.[678] When the intellectual contents of the formula did become explicit, the formula became a test. Concurrently with its use as a standard or test of belief, was probably the incorporation in it of so much of Christian teaching as referred to the facts of the life of Jesus Christ. But the facts were capable of different interpretations, and different propositions might be based upon them. In the first instance, speculation was free. Different facts had a different significance. The same facts of the life were interpreted in different ways. There was an agreement as to the main principle that the Christian societies were societies for the amendment of life. It is an almost ideal picture which the heathen Celsus draws of the Christians differing widely as to their speculations, and yet all agreeing to say, “The world is crucified to me, and I unto the world.”[679] The influence of Greek thought, partly by the allegorizing of history, partly by the construction of great superstructures of speculation upon slender bases, made the original standard too elastic to serve as the basis and bond of Christian society. When theories were added to fact, different theories were added. It is at this point that the fact became of special importance that the Gospel had been preached by certain persons, and that its content was the content of that preaching. It was not a philosophy which successive generations might modify. It went back to the definite teaching of a historical person. It was of importance to be sure what that teaching was. It was agreed to recognize apostolic teaching as the authoritative vehicle and interpretation of Christ’s. All parties appealed to it.[680] But there had been more than one apostle. The teaching was consequently that, not of one person, but of many.