_FAITH AN ASSURANCE AND A PROOF._
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of
things not seen. For therein the elders had witness borne to them.
By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word
of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which
do appear."--HEB. xi. 1-3 (R.V.).
It is often said that one of the greatest difficulties in the Epistle to
the Hebrews is to discover any real connection of ideas between the
author's general purpose in the previous discussion and the splendid
record of faith in the eleventh chapter. The rhetorical connection is
easy to trace. His utterances throughout have been incentives to
confidence. "Let us hold fast our confession." "Let us draw near with
boldness unto the throne of grace." "Show diligence unto the full
assurance of hope." "Cast not away your boldness." Any of these
exhortations would sufficiently describe the Apostle's practical aim
from the beginning of the Epistle. But he has just cited the words of
Habakkuk, and the prophet speaks of faith. How, then, does the prophet's
declaration that the righteous man of God will escape death by his faith
bear on the Apostle's arguments or help his strong appeals? The first
verse of the eleventh chapter is the reply. Faith _is_ assurance, with
emphasis on the verb.
But this is only a rhetorical connection, or at best a justification of
the use the author has made of the prophet's words. Indeed, he has
already in several places identified confidence with faith, and the
opposite of confidence with unbelief. "Take heed lest there be in any
one of you an evil heart of unbelief; ... for we are become partakers of
Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the
end."[246] "They could not enter in because of unbelief; ... let us
therefore give diligence to enter into that rest, that no man fall after
the same example of disobedience."[247] "Be not sluggish, but imitators
of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises."[248]
"Having therefore boldness to enter into the holy place, ... let us draw
near with a true heart in fulness of faith."[249]
Why, therefore, does the author formally state that faith is confidence?
The difficulty is a real one. We must suppose that, when this Epistle
was written, the word "faith" was already a well-known and almost
technical term among Christians. We infer as much as this also from St.
James's careful and stringent correction of abuses in the application of
the word. It is unnecessary to say who was the first to perceive the
vital importance of faith in the life and theology of Christianity. But
in the preaching of St. Paul faith is trust in a personal Saviour, and
trust is the condition and instrument of salvation. Faith, thus
represented, is the opposite of works. Such a doctrine was liable to
abuse, and has been abused to the utter subversion of morality on the
one hand and to the extinction of all unselfish greatness of soul on the
other. Not, most certainly, that St. Paul himself was one-sided in
teaching or in character. To him Christ is a heavenly ideal: "The Lord
is the Spirit;" and to him the believer is the spiritual man, who has
the moral intellect of Christ.[250] But it must be confessed--and the
history of the Church abundantly proves the truth of the statement--that
the good news of eternal salvation on the sole condition of trust in
Christ is one of the easiest of all true doctrines to be fatally abused.
The Epistle of St. James and the Epistle to the Hebrews seem to have
been written to meet this danger. The former represents faith as the
inner life of the spirit, the fountain of all active goodness. "Faith,
if it have not works, is dead in itself. Yea, a man will say, Thou hast
faith, and I have works; show me thy faith apart from thy works, and I
by my works will show thee my faith."[251] St. James contends against
the earliest phases of Antinomianism. He reconciles faith and morality,
and maintains that the highest morality springs out of faith. The writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews contends against legalism,--the proud,
self-satisfied, indifferent, hard, slothful, contemptuous, cynical
spirit, which is quite as truly and as often an abuse of the doctrine of
salvation through faith. It is the terrible plague of those Churches
which have never risen above individualism. When men are told that the
whole of religion consists in securing the soul's eternal safety, and
that this salvation is made sure once for all by a moment's trust in
Christ, their after-life will harden into a worldliness, not gross and
sensual, but pitiless and deadening. They will put on the garb of
religious decorum; but the inner life will be eaten by the canker of
covetousness and self-righteous pride. These are the men described in
the sixth chapter of our Epistle, who have, after a fashion, repented
and believed, but whose religion has no recuperative power, let alone
the growth and richness of deep vitality.
Our author addresses men whose spiritual life was thus imperilled. Their
condition is not that of the heathen world in its agony of despair. He
does not call his readers, in the words of St. Paul to the jailer at
Philippi, to trust themselves into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ,
that they may be saved. Yet he too insists on faith. He is anxious to
show them that he is not preaching another gospel, but unfolding the
meaning of the same conception of faith, which is the central principle
of the Gospel revealed at the first by Christ to their fathers, and
applied to the wants of the heathen by the Apostle of the Gentiles.
If so, it goes without saying that the writer does not intend to give a
scholastic definition of faith. The New Testament is not the book in
which to seek formal definitions. For his present purpose we require
only to know that, whatever else faith includes, confidence in reference
to the objects of our hope must find a place in it. Faith bridges over
the chasm between hope and the things hoped for. It saves us from
building castles in the air or living in a fool's paradise. The phantoms
of worldliness and the phantoms of religion (for they too exist) will
not deceive us. In the course of his discussion in the Epistle the
author has used three different words to set forth various sides of the
same feeling of confidence. One refers to the freedom and boldness with
which the confidence felt manifests its presence in words and
action.[252] Another signifies the fulness of conviction with which the
mind when confident is saturated.[253] The third word, which we have in
the present passage, describes confidence as a reality, resting on an
unshaken foundation, and contrasted with illusions.[254] He has urged
Christians to boldness of action and fulness of conviction. Now he adds
that faith is that boldness and that wealth of certitude in so far as
they rest upon reality and truth.
We can now in some measure estimate the value of the Apostle's
description of faith as an assurance concerning things hoped for, and
apply it to give force to the exhortations of the Epistle. The evil
heart of unbelief is the moral corruption of the man whose soul is
steeped in sensual imaginations and never realises the things of the
Spirit. They who came out of Egypt by Moses could not enter into rest
because they did not descry, beyond the earthly Canaan, the rest of the
spirit in God. Others inherit the promises, because on earth they lifted
their hearts to the heavenly country. In short, the Apostle now tells
his readers that the true source of Christian constancy and boldness is
the realisation of the unseen world.
But faith is this assurance concerning things hoped for because it is a
proof[255] of their existence, and of the existence of the unseen
generally. The latter part of the verse is the broad foundation on which
faith rests in all the rich variety of its meanings and practical
applications. Here St. Paul, St. James, and the writer of the Epistle to
the Hebrews meet in the unity of their conception. Whether men trust
unto salvation, or develop their inner spiritual life, or enter into
communion with God and lift the weapon of unflinching boldness in the
Christian warfare, trust, character, confidence, all three derive their
being and vitality from faith, as it demonstrates the existence of the
unseen.
The Apostle's language is a seeming contradiction. Proof is usually
supposed to dispense with faith and compel us to accept the inference
drawn. He intentionally describes faith as occupying in reference to
spiritual realities the place of demonstration. Faith in the unseen is
itself a proof that the unseen world exists. It is so in two ways.
_First_, we trust our own moral instincts. Malebranche observes that our
passions justify themselves. How much more is this true of intellect and
conscience! In like manner, some men have firm confidence in a world of
spiritual realities, which eye has not seen. This confidence is itself a
proof to them. How do I know that I know? It is a philosopher's enigma.
For us it may be sufficient to say that to know and to know that we know
are one and the same act. How do we justify our faith in the unseen? The
answer is similar. It is the same thing to trust and to trust our trust.
Scepticism wins a cheap victory when it arraigns faith as a culprit
caught in the very act of stealing the forbidden fruit of paradise. But
when, like a guilty thing, faith blushes for its want of logic, its
only refuge is to look in the face of the unseen Father. He who has most
faith in his own spiritual instincts will have the strongest faith in
God. To trust God is to trust ourselves. To doubt ourselves is to doubt
God. We must add that there is a sense in which trust in God means
distrust of self.
_Second_, faith fastens directly on God Himself. We believe in God
because we impose implicit confidence in our own moral nature. With
equal truth we may also say that we believe all else because we believe
in God. Faith in God Himself immediately and personally is the proof
that the promises are true, that our life on earth is linked to a life
above, that patient well-doing will have its reward, that no good deed
can be in vain, and ten thousand other thoughts and hopes that sustain
the drooping spirit in hours of conflict. It may well happen that some
of these truths are legitimate inferences from premises, or it may be
that a calculation of probabilities is in favour of their truth. But
faith trusts itself upon them because they are worthy of God. Sometimes
the silence of God is enough, if an aspiration of the soul is felt to be
such that it became Him to implant it and will be glorious in Him to
reward the heaven-sent desire.
An instance of faith as a proof of the unseen is given by our author in
the third verse. We may paraphrase it thus: "By faith we know that the
ages have been constructed by the word of God, and that even to this
point of assurance: that the visible universe as a whole came not into
being out of things that do appear."
The author began in the previous verse to unroll his magnificent record
of the elders. But from the beginning men found themselves in the
presence of a mystery of the past before they received any promise as to
the future. It is the mystery of creation. It has pressed heavily on men
in all ages. The Apostle himself has felt its power, and speaks of it as
a question which his readers and himself have faced. How do we know that
the development of the ages had a beginning? If it had a beginning, how
did it begin? The Apostle replies that we know it by faith. The
revelation which we have received from God addresses itself to our moral
perception and our confidence in God's moral nature. We have been taught
that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and that
"God said, Let there be light."[256] Faith demands this revelation. Is
faith trust? That trust in God is our proof that the framework of the
world was put together by His creative wisdom and power. Is faith the
inner life of righteousness? Morality requires that our own
consciousness of personality and freedom should be derived from a Divine
personality as the Originator of all things. Is faith communion with
God? Those who pray know that prayer is an absolute necessity of their
spiritual nature, and prayer lifts its voice to a living Father. Faith
demonstrates to him who has it, though not to others, that the universe
has come to its present form, not by an eternal evolution of matter, but
by the action of God's creative energy.
The somewhat peculiar form of the clause seems certainly to suggest that
the Apostle ascribes the origin of the universe, not only to a personal
Creator, but to that personal Creator acting through the ideas of His
own mind. "The visible came into being, not out of things that appear."
We catch ourselves waiting till he finishes the sentence with the words,
"but out of things that do not appear." Most expositors fight shy of the
inference and explain it away by alleging that the negative has been
misplaced.[257] But is it not true that the universe is the
manifestation of thought in the unity of the Divine purpose? This is the
very notion required to complete the Apostle's statement concerning
faith as a proof. If faith demonstrates, it acts on principles. If God
is personal, those principles are ideas, thoughts, purposes, of the
Divine mind.
So long, therefore, as our spiritual nature can trust, can unfold a
morality, can pray, the simple soul need not much bewail its want of
logic and its loss of arguments. If the famous ontological argument for
the being of God has been refuted, we shall not, on that account,
tremble for the ark. We shall not lament though the argument from the
watch has proved treacherous. Our God is not a mere infinite
mechanician. Indeed, such a phrase is a contradiction in terms. A
mechanician must be finite. He contrives, and as the result produces,
not what is absolutely best, but what is the best possible under the
circumstances and with the materials at his disposal. But if we have
lost the mechanician, we have not lost the God that thinks. We have
gained the perfectly righteous and perfectly good. His thoughts have
manifested themselves in nature, in human freedom, in the incarnation of
His Son, in the redemption of sinners. But the intellect that knows
these things is the good heart of faith.
FOOTNOTES:
[246] Chap. iii. 12.
[247] Chaps. iii. 19; iv. 11.
[248] Chap. vi. 12.
[249] Chap. x. 19.
[250] 2 Cor. iii. 17; 1 Cor. ii. 16.
[251] James ii. 17, 18.
[252] =parrêsia=.
[253] =plêrophoria=.
[254] =hypostasis=.
[255] =elenchos=.
[256] Gen. i. 1, 3.
[257] As if =mê ek phainomenôn= were for =ek mê phainomenôn=.