This is the Sunday we read the beautiful and well-known post-Easter text from John 20:19-31, the account of “doubting Thomas” encountering the risen Jesus. Yet I am going to focus on the epistle lesson this year, I Peter 1:3-9, which also speaks of faith, but in a more celebratory and fulfilled way. Part of my purpose is to kick-off a three part series of sermons on faith, which is itself a part of a longer series on the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love.
Both the Gospel of John and I Peter texts display a dual quality of faith that is sometimes overlooked and sometimes deliberately denied or discounted. Biblical faith includes both an orientation to some proposition or propositions and an orientation toward a person. All sorts of mistakes and misunderstandings about faith occur when these two facets of it are pulled apart.
When the epistemological attitude known as faith is severed from its connection with a person, it becomes simply, in a phrase that traces back to a famous/infamous essay by W. K. Clifford, “belief without evidence,” or belief with sufficient evidence, or even, if you take Tertullian a certain way (possibly incorrectly), belief because it is absurd. Mark Twain famously put this notion into the mouth of a schoolboy, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
So philosophers and theologians take great pains to remind us that we do in fact hold many beliefs without evidence, from Kant’s synthetic a priori truths to Alvin Plantinga’s “basic beliefs.” There seems to be, then, no great hurdle to regarding truths of the Christian faith as likewise candidates for epistemic commitment without reasons or proof. And thinkers like Plantinga do have a point in regard to our epistemic habits.
Yet there seems to be more to the kind of faith for which Jesus commends Thomas and to which Peter commends his readers than simply one more instance of beliefs to which we are entitled without marshaling good evidence. This has led some philosophers recently, like my friends Jon Kvanvig, Dan Howard-Snyder, and Dan McKaughn, all part of an endeavor dubbed “The Faith Project,” to work seriously at a philosophical understanding of faith which downplays or eliminates any propositional or intellectual component.
The attractiveness of the direction of “The Faith Project” is that it accounts for the fact that several instances of both biblical faith and faith as observed in contemporary life actually seem to have very little propositional content. One thinks of the thief on the cross or the “I believe; help my unbelief!” of the father of the boy with a demon in Mark 9. What seems to much more constitute faith in these cases is the individual’s attitude of trust toward Jesus rather than any well-formulated beliefs, even about Jesus.
Nonetheless, as Josef Pieper argues, faith is irreducibly both, “to believe something and to believe someone… the reason for believing ‘something’ is that one believes ‘someone.'” So that’s my starting point for discussing faith in the next three sermons. You can see it in this Sunday’s texts. Thomas believes something, “He is risen,” when he actually encounters the living Jesus. Likewise Peter’s audience in Asia Minor is commended for their precious faith because of their orientation toward Jesus Christ who will bring them their salvation. Faith is not either/or, propositions or personal relationship. It only makes sense as deep conviction of truth based on a living and dynamic connection with a divine person.