Christians are called to have faith in Jesus Christ.
The Old Testament, however, is big on not putting our faith in anything other than God.
Thus, someone who has faith in Jesus Christ but does not believe that Jesus Christ is God is risking violating a central principle of the Old Testament.
Moreover, faith in Jesus requires submission to Jesus. But Jesus wants his followers to obey the central principles of the Old Testament.
Thus, for someone aware of these observations, it is not possible to have faith in Jesus Christ without believing that he is God. This is a serious problem for accounts of faith that claim that a Christian need not have any doctrinal beliefs.
Alex
ReplyDelete"Christians are called to have faith in Jesus Christ" is a doctrinal belief. Accounts of faith that claim that a Christian need not have any doctrinal beliefs would not hold that Christians are called to have faith in Jesus Christ.
I personally know people who call themselves Christian because they see Jesus as the (morally) best possible example of what a fallible human being can be. They have "faith" in the good things Jesus taught and did, but they acknowledge the he was a fallible human being. The fact that Jesus was an imperfect human being makes him more admirable because it gives them "faith" that an imperfect, fallible human being can, on his own, become such an example of morality.
As far as I know, the best philosophical defenders of beliefless Christian faith still want to say that Christian faith involves outward and emotional behavior of the sort the New Testament calls for.
ReplyDeleteAlex
ReplyDelete"Christian faith involves outward and emotional behavior of the sort the New Testament calls for." Nothing I said contradicts that.
I am a Trinitarian, but I find fault in your post. For example, 2 Chronicles 20:20 says to have faith in God's prophets: "... Have faith in the LORD your God and you will be upheld; have faith in his prophets and you will be successful.'" (NIV)
ReplyDeleteTwo thoughts:
ReplyDelete(1) The advocate of beliefless faith can agree with you that one should *not* place one's faith in Christ without *also* placing one's faith in his divinity. The best account of beliefless faith says something like this: having faith that p involves being willing to live as if p, even when doing so is costly. Now, it is plausible that one should place one's faith in whichever religion one deems to be most plausible (see e.g. Jackson's "Faithfully Taking Pascal's Wager"), and orthodox Christianity is more probably true than heretical versions which deny Christ's divinity. Hence, one should place one's faith in orthodox Christianity, and *not* in versions which deny the deity of Jesus. If this is right, then the beliefless faithful person could say something like this: "I have a low-to-middling credence that God exists, but I am willing to live as if he does, and as if he became incarnate in Jesus Christ. I place my faith in these propositions because they are constitutive parts of the most probably true religion."
(2) Setting aside any specifically philosophical considerations, it seems that the Christian tradition furnishes us with counterexamples to the claim that faith requires belief. Mother Teresa is an obvious example: there are passages in her diaries where one really can't help but suspect that her credence in Christianity had slipped well below .9, and yet she was surely a paradigm of Christian faith (Daniel McKaughan uses the example of St. Teresa in several of his papers).
Re (1): It is clear from the Old Testament that one should not worship anything that is not God, and refraining from such worship is a duty of the highest order. It seems that if it's not the case that you believe that something is God, the moral risk in worshiping it is too great. But we should worship Jesus. Living as if Jesus was God, when one does not believe it, is unacceptably risking idolatry.
ReplyDeleteRe (2): I think faith is a gift of God's grace, a gift that can be hidden, and our perception of our own credences is often inaccurate.