The modern person has a variety of conceptions of what “faith” entails; this includes the modern Christian person as well. It is common, among large swaths of evangelical Christianity, to hear people refer to saving faith as something that is seemingly inherent to the person; as if it’s a self-generative ‘thing.’ But this is not what biblical faith entails. John Calvin emphasized ‘faith as knowledge of God’; Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth think faith from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, as a reality that co-inheres between the Father and Son by the Holy Spirit—as a notion of intimate trust that characterizes the eternal bond of the triune life. The point: contrary to modern conceptions of faith, biblical faith is a reality that is extra nos (outside of us). It is not something that we have inherent to ourselves. Instead, faith is a reality that is gifted to us and for us in the ‘faith of Christ’ (pistis Christou). In other words, a right and biblical understanding of faith entails the idea that humanity is not born with it as an inherent capacity. Faith, in the biblical understanding, is a supranatural miraculous reality that only God has capacity to bring for us in His believing and trusting for us in His humanity in Christ. If we don’t think this way, we end up conniving an independent factor or concept or ontology of faith that is somehow abstract and non-contingent upon God; a tertium quid, that ultimately would be in a competitive relationship with God vis-à-vis human agency.

Helmut Thielicke agrees, and says it this way:

Faith too is susceptible of interpretation in terms of immanent categories, such as those of psychology for example. With the help of secular history men have been able to reduce the figure of Jesus of Nazareth to the level of general religious history. In the same secular way, with the help of psychology it is possible to reduce faith to the level of the spiritual processes inside a man. It is characteristic of those who thus view Christian faith as only a subjective, psychological matter that they employ many expressions which receive their stamp from secularization. For example, the [sic] typically employ the term “credulity” in order to suggest that faith does not primarily refer to and receive its character from its object, but is simply one of the many products of man’s creative subjectivity. Credulity as a property or disposition [habitus] of subjectivity is primary. Instead of being determined by its object, credulity itself determines on its own the object to which it wishes to refer, e.g., a certain world view of a particular religious confession.

It was Schleiermacher who in his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers developed in a classic way this notion of a creative credulity which fashions is own object. He held that those things which religion cherishes in the way of objective elements, and in which religion has set down a record of itself, e.g., as “Word” (in such things as holy scriptures, dogmas, or doctrines), are not things which encounter human subjectivity from without or from above, addressing and claiming it. On the contrary, it is this subjectivity itself which is the source of all these things. Religious feeling, because it is so powerful, produces a need to communicate: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). This means, however, that there is a need for verbal expression, since this is the medium of communication. It is thus that the “music” of the heart is transposed into verbal form; it is—to use the famous phrase of Rudolf Otto—“schematized” by the Word. Dogma and doctrine are thus nothing but ossified religious feeling. It is of course possible that the record of this feeling may have a stimulating effect on the subjectivity of others, especially when what is recorded is such classical music as that of prophetic charismatics. But even here what is involved is solely and exclusively the outward-streaming subjectivity, the habitus of credulity.[1]

If the reader is familiar with Thomas Torrance’s concept of kata physin (according to the thing’s nature); Thielicke’s thinking on faith as an extramental reality will make sense. Torrance’s thinking, from the influence that science had on his theological endeavor, maintained that the object under consideration ought to be allowed to determine its own categories and emphases. We see this same sort of thinking in what Thielicke is telling us about faith; i.e. that faith ought to be thought from its reality as that is given to us in Godself in the humanity of Jesus Christ. That is, there isn’t an abstract psychology of faith towards God that can be thought apart from its givenness in Jesus Christ. This is the nexus, the [hypostatic] union between God and humanity/humanity and God wherein the ‘pipeline’ of faith as a relational correspondence between God and humanity, as that is first actualized in the faith of Christ for us, comes to fruition. There is a psychology to faith, but it isn’t, as Thielicke underscores vis-à-vis Schleiermacher, an immanence that is determined by an innate human capacity; instead, and again, it is a relational reality that inheres for us as that first inheres in the existential reality of the Father-Son bond in the Pneumatic Triune life. And we might want to avoid the language of ‘psychology’ altogether, insofar as that is derived from below rather than above.

In conclusion, this ought to confront the common and secular ways Christians, many Christians, think of ‘faith.’ It is prevalent, currently, in a certain theological movement currently underway on YouTube. Its purveyor, unfortunately, is making in-roads with many, and he is teaching them to think about soteriological issues in non-confessional and non-Dogmatic ways. Indeed, his conception of faith mirrors something like what Thielicke describes with reference to Schleiermacher; but it is even less “theological,” and more secular yet, than that.

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Volume 1: Foundations, edited by William H. Lazarus (Philadelphia: Fortess Press, 1966), 15-16.