In defence of the Christian Faith

A spectre is haunting the worldwide community of faith – the spectre of paganism.

Spearheaded by Prof. Richard Dawkins of Oxford and other materialists, evolutionists, and rationalists, paganism is cutting a swathe through the community of believers, but the church is too preoccupied with such imponderables as women’s ordination and gay marriages to mount a credible defence of Christianity’s core beliefs.  A few years ago, watching the head of a main line church in the UK face up to Richard Dawkins on TV, I cringed with disbelief for the prelate’s palpable lack of faith in his own credo, and his inability to expose the contradictions in Dawkins’ arguments.

What was in issue was the concept of faith. How can modern man, heir to 600 years of scientific “progress” and “enlightenment”, still cling to faith when science had completely undermined the need for it?

The central argument against faith is that science and faith are incompatible and since science has proved itself over the past 600 years, faith should step aside.

Throughout our universities, in individual homes and within the broader community, the Dawkins ideology is gaining ground and the Christian faith is in steady retreat. The barbarians are at the gate but our legions have deserted the ramparts. The learned theologians and the mitred men of the hierarchy have gone mute and seem content with merely doing things as they have been done for hundreds of years, the traditional way, while the edifice keeps crumbling around their ears.

In writing this piece I feel rather like the little Dutch boy who, throughout a cold and stormy winter night, kept his finger stuck through a leak in the village dyke, to hold back the North Sea! As dawn broke, the little boy’s heroism stirred the whole village to come out with shovels and sand bags and shore up the disintegrating bund. May be just a legend, but the power of the metaphor is inescapable.

I am only an octogenarian and I have no pretence to emulating the heroism of the little Dutch boy. Neither am I a theologian, nor a scientist, and have nothing more to commend me than an incandescent faith.

Notwithstanding, I feel called to take this initiative, however feeble, in the hope that even a few among the faithful will bestir themselves and return to the ramparts.

What follows is an attempt to rebut the pagan onslaught and reaffirm the case for the Christian faith.

A mundane faith

Although most human beings are too proud to admit it, and may not even be conscious of the fact, the truth is that every day they exercise a mundane sort of faith at all levels of their lives.

For instance when they step into an airplane most of them know nothing about the principles of aerodynamics and yet they entrust their lives  to the plane with no better reason for doing so, except that millions of others have also done likewise. That is a sort of faith. When I entrust my life to a surgeon’s knife or to the engineering efficiency of a roller coaster, what do I know of the principles of surgery or of the reliability of G force. Nothing! That too is faith of the same sort. When I start my car and drive off entrusting my life to the efficiency of the brakes what do I know of the principles of hydraulics or ABS braking? Virtually nothing!

What these examples illustrate is that it is impossible for us to know everything at first hand and that at some point we have to take things on trust. Placing our trust in persons, in things, in relationships, in activities and in the operation of natural laws is integral to human consciousness. Otherwise each one of us will have to invent the wheel everyday and test out for oneself whether fire really burns.

What any kind of trust requires as a precondition is a modicum of humility and the willingness to surrender one’s ego. That is the beginning of faith, and everyone, even the most skeptical and scientific minded, is bound to practice it every day.

However, that is only a “mundane faith”, and it is not the faith we are talking about here. Rather, we want to talk about spiritual and religious faith which is altogether of a different level of consciousness.

Spiritual and religious faith

The fundamental difference between mundane faith and religious or spiritual faith is that the latter starts off by acknowledging a power higher than any earthly power, an infinitely intelligent, omnipotent and omnipresent power, a power that is all love, and – of our own accord – surrendering to it.

The first characteristic of any religious or spiritual faith is the surrender of the Adamic self, or ego, to that higher Power and accepting its absolute sovereignty over our lives.

The Adamic self, or ego, is the claim of a self-sufficient identity, independent of God. Apostle Paul says that the Adamic self is enmity against God, and since faith surrenders the ego to God, ego resents faith. Therefore, faith and ego are incompatible. They are polar opposites. The bigger the ego, the less space there is for faith, and less space for faith means less space for the Holy Spirit. As ego advances faith recedes and as faith increases ego recedes. The two are incompatible.

That is why ego-driven lives will not submit to the sovereignty of a Higher Power, and that is why materialists, naturalists, rationalists, and such like, can never accept the concept of faith. Their lives are energized by ego and naturally, they are under its servitude and ego will always resist surrendering to God.

However, religiosity, or a sustained immersion in religious activities, also provide a plausible cover for manic egos, and even where there seems to be a surrender to God, the underlying aim is more to co-opt Him to do ego’s will than to submit to His will.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image and likeness, to live in communion with Him and to glorify Him, here on earth. To glorify Him means to be an adopted son or daughter of His, on earth. However, acting willfully, humankind broke that communion. Whether we consider the story of the Garden of Eden as allegory, metaphor or as literally true, at some point, ego was born and humanity’s communion with God was broken.

Ego is the fallen Adam, and far from being the image and likeness of God, it is the image and likeness of Satan – self-centered, unbending, competitive, aggressive, arrogant, acquisitive, greedy, insecure, unforgiving, embittered, and ever ready to resort to violence and go to war.

Admittedly, all that I have written above presupposes that there is a Higher Power whom we call God. It is in the very nature of secular minds that they start from the premise that there is no reality beyond the material. Their minds are already made up, and for them rejecting a Higher Power is a matter of ideology rather than a rational conclusion.

I must confess that it will be impossible to prove to such minds that they are wrong. However, if an unbiased mind will look closely at the two brief sections lower down in this reflection, the first on Faith and Science and the other on Faith and the Theory of Evolution, it should be evident that even the scientific method starts off in “faith” and that the theory of evolution itself must postulate a power from outside, a deus ex machina, to validate itself. Without faith to energize it, the scientific enterprise will not even get off the ground and without postulating a power from outside to get the evolutionary process going, the theory of evolution collapses.

The faith of theistic religions

All theistic religions are based on faith. The faith they enjoin is that God is sovereign and has a prior claim on the lives of believers.

Enumerating chronologically, all four theistic religions of the world – Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – insist that without faith, the God they believe in, cannot be known.

However, there is a fundamental difference between the faith required in Christianity and the faith demanded by the other theistic religions and the discussion of that issue will be the centrepiece of this article.

Before I start discussing the nature of Christian faith, for now, I want to look at the faith that is implicit in science and in evolutionary theory.

Faith and science

The first premise of the “scientific method” is that only the world revealed to us by the five senses is real. That is to say, that only the empirical world is true.

It should be noted that this proposition itself is not a scientific proposition but an a priori declaration, on the same level as the proposition “God exists”, except that it claims implicitly that because He cannot be apprehended by the five senses, God does not exist!

The second premise of the “scientific method” is that there is a causally connected objective world out there, which man can explore, experiment with, and reduce to laws.

This is the scientific world-view, also called the Newtonian world view, handed down to us from the 17/18thth centuries. However, commencing around the early 20th century, a school of physicists, popularly known as quantum physicists, have been telling us that only .5% of that world can be known through the scientific method and that the balance 99.5% will remain beyond the reach of science.

These physicists go further. They have also proved that in the very of act of knowing the “objective world”, the human mind alters it, so that science can never find out what the so-called objective world really is.

Since 99.5% of reality remains closed to science, the arrogant claim of 19th century scientists – that there are no closed doors for science – has been abandoned, at least among the more enlightened scientists.

One may therefore surmise that the 99.5% of reality unknowable to science could well be the arena of faith. However, for fear of losing prestige among their peers, scientists will never even mention the word “faith”.

The third premise of the scientific method is that the world consists of hard objects that interact in space and time. Einstein has proved that the so-called hard objects of the world are only frozen bundles of energy, like swirls of water floating on a fast-flowing river, and furthermore, that space and time are not what the popular mind take them to be.

Therefore it is apparent that the whole field of traditional science, known to us as the Newtonian Model, which was the foundation of materialism, no longer exists and that, increasingly, scientists are using words like “consciousness” and “spirit” to explain ultimate things.

However, scientists like Richard Dawkins carry on as if the discoveries of the 20th century “new physics” do not exist.

The fourth premise of all scientific investigation is called the Principle of Uniformity.

This principle states that material reality is governed by laws that can be investigated and laid bare, and that once they are laid bare, they will work consistently and uniformly everywhere on earth.

However, that premise itself can never be proved and remains an article of faith to be postulated. If they did not adopt that principle on faith, scientists would not launch out on their experiments and investigations. Philosophers call that premise a priori, which means prior to experience.

When a scientist launches out on a research project, he is driven by a deep conviction that at the end of his research he will uncover a law that is yet unknown to the world. That is faith! Without that faith to drive the scientist, all scientific inquiry will cease.

Consider the Higgs Boson. Before Professor Higgs had material evidence that a more fundamental particle than the ones known to science up to 2012 (i.e. the so-called the “God particle” or the ultimate building block of the universe) actually existed, he had believed that such a particle must exist. He believed that there must be another more fundamental particle that could account for why electrons, protons and gluons had mass and weight. From there, persisting in faith, and working only through mathematical calculations, Higgs proved a priori, (that means, without material evidence) that there must indeed be such a particle. However, to prove his claim through material evidence Higgs had to wait another forty-five years for the Hadron Collider to do it for him!

Though not grounded in religion, it was faith that drove Higgs to work first through mathematics to uncover the Higgs Boson, and it was faith that kept him waiting for over forty-five years for the material evidence to turn up.

What I have said above is not intended to rubbish science. Not at all! That would be quite stupid. I freely concede that over the past 600 years the scientific method has contributed more to pushing back the frontiers of ignorance and superstition than religion or philosophy had done in the preceding 1500 years. However, what I am saying is that beyond the reach of the scientific method there is 99.5% of reality that has yet to be explored and that science must abandon the claim that reality is confined only to the evidence of the five senses.

Faith and the theory of evolution

Let’s consider the theory of evolution, which claims to make faith in a Creator superfluous.

Evolution theory’s central claim is that all complex forms of life have “evolved” through countless random mutations, over billions and billions of years, from the single cell microbe that had been sloshing around in the primeval slime.

Firstly, although it was “life” in the cell that drove it onwards in a relentless struggle to survive against overwhelming odds, neither Darwin nor any other apologist for evolution theory has claimed that “life” itself, had evolved from the slime. Unless the theory can explain, through empirical evidence, how on day (1) the cell had no life, but on day (2) the cell had suddenly acquired life, the theory’s claim to be a scientific hypothesis collapses even before it has come under “starter’s orders”, so to say!

Secondly, the theory does not explain scientifically how that single-cell microbe arrived in the primeval slime. Darwin only claimed that, having arrived in the slime, it “evolved”. If evolution theory is to be valid and consistent, it must prove from empirical evidence that the single-cell microbe itself had evolved from an even more primitive life form, but the theory does not tell us what that earliest life form was.

Or, the theory must postulate that some benevolent agent from outside (a deus ex machina) had placed the single-cell microbe in the primeval slime, endowed with the intelligence to survive overwhelming odds, and evolve, but it does not say who or what that benevolent agent from outside was.

Therefore the whole edifice of evolutionary theory seems to rest on speculation rather than on an empirically established fact.

Thirdly, let us assume that somehow and from somewhere the single cell acquired life, arrived in the slime, and started evolving. But, why did it start evolving and not devolving?

According to Newton’s Second Law, entropy or the process of disintegration and decay should have set in the moment the cell arrived in the slime, unless the same benevolent agent from outside intervened again and helped that single cell microbe to break the entropy barrier and evolve. Who or what was that benevolent external agent that kept intervening again and again, pushing the cell upwards?

Fourthly, let us assume that somehow that primeval cell started evolving, and kept evolving, into more and more complex forms through random mutations, over billions and billions of years.

Fossil remains attest to the claim that long before human life emerged on this planet, millions of other species had indeed walked the earth and gone extinct. However, all that the fossils record proves is that different species sharing some common characteristics had followed each other over millions of years, and not that any of those species had “evolved” from any previous species.

The evidence only proves a succession of species, and not an evolution of species, and much less The Origin of Species! The latter is a supposition based on speculation or ideology.

The evidence can as well be explained through the hypothesis of a creator; that is, that from to time, a non-material agent from outside the material system, had created different species of more and more complex designs.

Let us assume that through some cosmic cataclysm the present world order is buried under layers of earth. Let us also assume that hundreds of thousands of years in the future, some archaeologists from a regenerated human race have started digging through those layers of earth and have uncovered a museum of motor cars in which the Ford motor company had preserved all the models manufactured by them since 1900. Through rigorous research they find that each model exhibited some technological improvement over the previous model.

Looking for an explanation for the changing technological innovations of each successive model the scientists have two hypotheses to choose from. One hypothesis is that the improved technology in each successive model was proof that the Ford car had “evolved” from the “T Model” of 1900, to the latest Ford model of 2012, all by itself!

The other hypothesis is that some intelligent designers employed by the Ford Company had been responsible for the technological improvements in each successive model.

Which of these two hypotheses would more intelligently explain the facts? Surely, the more scientific hypothesis would be the latter, wouldn’t it?

Fifthly, the evolutionists will have us believe that each species evolved from an earlier species over billions of years, through chance mutations, and driven by the principle of the survival of the fittest. What was the scientific investigation that recorded this process of random mutations or “natural selection” over billions of years? Where is the scientific evidence that the primeval cell evolved in defiance of the law of entropy? Doesn’t that claim defy even the most elementary scientific criteria for testing a hypothesis? In the absence of scientific evidence, isn’t that claim a piece of speculation reflecting ideology rather than science? Is it not true that the layers and layers of fossilised remains can as well be accounted for by extrapolating another explanation which we may call the “creationism”?

I won’t use the word “hypothesis” to describe “creationism” because admittedly it cannot conform to the strict criteria scientists prescribe for testing empirical hypotheses. Well! Neither does evolution theory. They are both based on ideology or faith.

Scientific inquiry requires as “absolute musts” that a hypothesis must not only be testable through time, but that the hypothesis must also be replicable. Does the theory of evolution conform to either of these simple scientific requirements?

If not, in what sense is the theory of evolution scientific?

One must conclude that the belief in evolution is as much an act of faith as the belief is an intelligent creator, except that the latter is more rational!

Religious faith

Let me now turn to the central theme of this chapter – the nature of religious faith. It is easier to say what religious faith is not, than to define what it precisely is!

Religious faith is not an emotion, and it is certainly not hysteria, although a deep and profound faith can sometimes produce strong emotions as “effects”. Singing, dancing, rolling on the ground, laughing uncontrollably, being happy-clappy, sometimes referred to as the Toronto Manifestations, can indeed be effects of a deep faith, but they can also be manifestations of neurotic or even of psychotic states. One cannot tell easily!

Then, what is a true religious faith?

True religious faith begins with the recognition that there is a God who is Sovereign, Infinite, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and Omniscient. True religious faith also acknowledges unreservedly that man is a finite and dependent creature. Not least, true religious faith recognises God as the fountain of Love, Joy, Peace and Forgiveness.

True faith is a level of spirituality which reconciles us to God (justification by faith – Rom. 5:1) and progressively transforms us into the image and likeness of the Son (sanctification –Rom. 6:22), and unshackles us from Satan’s world (deliverance – Col.1:13). Once we touch that level of spirituality, we also begin to experience a new freedom: “If Jesus sets you free you are free indeed” (John 8:36).

Not least, at that level of spirituality our Adamic egos are crucified and replaced by the Spirit of the Risen Christ, so that it is no longer “i” (the Adamic Ego) that is living, but the Christ (Gal. 2:20) and thereafter the Holy Spirit takes over and demonstrates the Christ through us.

Those who have reached that level of spirituality have severed their links to their earthly ancestry and have been born anew of the Spirit of Christ. Such persons no longer live to boost their egos but, through the power of the Holy Spirit, demonstrate the life of the Christ, on earth, here and now, through their daily lives.

Rather than produce strong emotions, true Spirit-based faith will unfailingly produce as its fruit an overwhelming Love, not the possessive or clingy love of our common experience, but the love that gives to the utmost, the love that loves not just family and friends only, but enemies as well, and even those who despise us. A Spirit-based love forgives endlessly and holds the other cheek, not once, not twice, but interminably.

Equally, a Spirit-driven faith will produce a Joy that keeps bubbling up like a fountain, regardless of circumstances, and a Peace, such as the world can neither give, nor understand.

A Spirit-based faith reintegrates and restores fragmented personalities and imparts to them a wholeness that therapies of the world can never give.

The ultimate test of a Spirit-based faith is a radical transformation of personality, not to be put on show just during a Sunday service, but to permeate the rest of the person’s life.

We have it on the authority of Jesus Christ that faith, even as small as a mustard seed, can move mountains. Obviously, Jesus was speaking metaphorically but He wasn’t lying either. What he was saying was that, in truth, a Spirit-based faith is the most powerful energy in the universe.

That was the level of faith that prompted Noah to build his Ark several miles away from the shore line, without a rudder to guide it, or masts for raising sails, and over a period of 120 years! That was also the level of faith that Moses demonstrated at the Red Sea when he turned round on his rebellious followers and shouted, “Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord”, and in response the Red Sea parted. That was the faith that the three Hebrew boys, Meshach, Shadrak and Abednego, had as they went into King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace and emerged from it without even the smell of smoke upon them. That was the faith that Daniel demonstrated when he walked into lions’ den, not just hoping that the lions’ jaws will not close on him, but in absolute faith that they will not.

That was also the faith that sustained the great missionary efforts of the 18th and 19th centuries, that carried the Gospel to the four comers of the world, and still do, risking persecution, assassinations, and all manners of privations and atrocities that a pagan/Satanic world mobilises against them.

However, that level of faith cannot be attained by sudden flight, or through a strong resolve, and not even through piety or through virtue or by doing good works. That level of faith cannot be reached by studying theology or by reading books or by listening to sermons. No! Not likely! That level of faith is a GIFT from the Holy Spirit. It is an outpouring of GRACE from on high, in response to a genuine spiritual thirsting. It comes only after we have been broken on the anvil of life and have been driven to our knees in penitence and tears.

Religious faith is another faculty for knowing reality

God’s creation has an infinity of characteristics, but He has endowed us with faculties for knowing only five of them, namely, the faculty of sight to apprehend His creation through visual images, a faculty of hearing to apprehend His creation through sound, the faculty of touch to apprehend His creation as texture, the faculty of smell to appreciate His creation through fragrances and the faculty of taste to apprehend His creation as sweet, salty or bitter.

However, it will be sheer arrogance for us to think that God’s infinite creation consists only of visual images, sounds, smells, texture and tastes, and that His reality has been fully grasped when we have apprehended it through these five characteristics alone! It will be rather like a man who is born without the faculties of hearing and sight, claiming that there is nothing more to the world than taste, smell and texture, because those are the only senses available to him, and that there is nothing called harmony or beauty because he lacks the faculties of hearing and seeing for apprehending them.

Each faculty has its prescribed field of operation and to apply them outside their prescribed domain can only draw blank reports and confusion. If someone were to use his eyes to appreciate the Ninth Symphony, or his ears to appreciate the Mona Lisa, or his tongue to smell the fragrance of a rose, he is bound to say that there is no such thing as harmony, or beauty or fragrance.

Quantum physicists have also confirmed that, even using the most modern technologies our five senses can know only .5% of the universe and that the balance 99.5% cannot be apprehended even by science.

However, God has also endowed us with a sixth faculty, the faculty of faith, to enable us to know His creation at a deeper level and along another dimension.

Quantum physicists tell us that contrary to the common sense view that the world is characterised only by the eight dimensions of, length, breadth and height and sound, sight, smell, taste, and texture, it is actually characterised by eleven dimensions, three of which cannot be apprehended either through the five senses, or by the rational mind or through technology.

Over the centuries, founders of religions, great spiritual masters, mystics, and ordinary men and women of faith, have laid hold of some of those three dimensions that are not accessible to the five senses, and have been completely transformed thereby.

Not only that, but using the spiritual energy imbibed through faith, they have also gone on to transform whole communities and societies around them, beyond recognition.

While all human beings are endowed with the faculty of faith, most people never exercise it, and even those who do, are content merely to play on the surf rather than put out into the deep. They are the ones who merely mark their attendance in church, or merely conform to liturgy and ritual. They are condemned forever to paddle around in spiritual shallows.

On the other hand, men and women of great faith leave the security of the spiritual shore line, put out into the deep and venture beyond the horizon. They are the ones who discover hitherto unknown spiritual territories. They are the ones to whom Spirit reveals the deeper things of God. They are the ones who risk all, just to take the Gospel to the world.

Religious faith is an extension of our ordinary faculties

Just as an electron microscope extends our capacity to peer into cellular life, or a telescope extends our capacity to gaze into spiral galaxies, faith extends our ordinary faculties for knowing the things of God.

However, the problem has always been that when those who peer through microscopes and gaze through telescopes announce their discoveries to the world they are not only disbelieved but, in some instances, they have even been executed.

The experience of men and women of faith has been similar. When they relate to the world what they have seen and heard, revelations that the world neither sees nor hears nor understands, they are laughed at, abused, called delusional and banished into the wilderness, or crucified. Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha and of course the instances of John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth and Apostle Paul come quickly to mind.

Faith goes where the five senses, and where even reason cannot go. Faith lays hold of truths that are invisible and inaudible and manifests them on earth in a material form. Such were all the miracles that Jesus performed.

Apostle Paul confirmed this fundamental truth when he said, “Eye has not seen, nor the ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor. 2:9).

In other words using only our five senses we can never come to know what God has laid up for us.

Paul also defined “faith” as “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.(Hebrews 11:1).

Faith is therefore a “substance” and a substance is something out of which other things are made or are derived. In that sense faith is a primal creative energy which brings into view things presently not seen.

That is why Apostle Paul says, “God … calls those things which be not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17).

Faith is universal

What I have shown in this chapter is that faith is a universal reality and that it is one of the faculties every person is born with, except that out of arrogance human beings deny it, even while exercising it. Faith is at the heart of all religions, including Buddhism, as well as the heart of science and even at the heart of science’s cherished Theory of Evolution.

Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam claim categorically that God can be accessed only through faith. In truth, the faith practised by the Hindus, the Jews and the Moslems is far more fervent, intense and sustained than the faith practised by Christians!

However, there is something in Christian faith that uniquely distinguishes it from the faith of other theistic religions.

What is unique about Christian faith?

There is an important divide between the faith of Christianity and the faith of Hinduism, Judaism and Islam.

Christian faith comprises six unique components. These six components do not exist separately like marbles in a jar, but constitute a spiritual unity.

1. Faith in Jesus Christ, the person, is the only way to access God.

2. Faith in the Holy Spirit who is the giver of life and who alone can lead us into all truth.

3. Faith in the power of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, embodied and ritualised in the sacrament of baptism and the sacrament of the Eucharist, is the only way, to pay off our sins, to put away the sinner (the fallen Adam in us), to be reconciled to God, and to experience a new birth in the Spirit.

4. Faith in the Word of God.

5. Faith in the Blood of Jesus

6. Faith in tradition.

Let us look at these six characteristics in some depth

1. Faith in Jesus Christ the person

The first thing that sets Christian faith apart from other theistic religions is the conviction that God cannot be accessed through any means, except through faith in Jesus Christ and that there can be no salvation through any other discipline.

Even more than the miracles Jesus performed during his three-year ministry, and even more than the prophecies made about Him in the Old Testament, the main foundation for the conviction that Jesus is the only access to God, are the irrefutable claims that Jesus made about Himself.

Here I draw on a line of reasoning first put forward by the great Christian thinker and author of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis.

During His three-year ministry, Jesus made some preposterous claims about himself. Confronted by those claims we have only two options, either to reject His claims and declare Him to be a liar, an impostor and a megalomaniac or to accept His claims and worship Him!

Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life and nobody comes to the Father except through me” (Mark 5:34-35; John 4:6). That was the cornerstone of His claim to be the Messiah.

Jesus went on to make several more astounding claims of the same order:

He claimed, “I am the living water” (John 4:14), “I am the true bread” (John 6:58), “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), “I am the door” (Jhn.10.9), “I am the Good Shepherd” (John 10:11), and  “I am the Resurrection” (John 11.25).

Jesus also made the outrageous claim, “I and my Father are one” (John 10.30). It was this claim that exposed Him to the charge of blasphemy and led him to the Cross.

Nothing can be as authoritative, final, and uncompromising as these claims and it is no wonder that no other founder of a world religion dared to make them.

If these claims were not true, they would set Jesus apart as a demented megalomaniac, a pathological liar and an impostor, rather than as a founder of a world religion.

On the other hand, if Jesus was indeed a megalomaniac, a pathological liar and an impostor, we have to explain how such a man could not merely have founded a world religion, but could have impacted on world history in a way that no other religious leader or any military or political leader had done, before or after.

There have been hundreds of world-class megalomaniacs who have claimed divinity and omnipotence – among them: Egyptian pharaohs, Assyrian and Persian emperors, Alexander the Great, Roman emperors, Charlemagne, Louis X1V of France, Genghis Khan, Emperor Chin of China (who built the Great Wall) and not least Idi Amin in or own times. But who amongst them survive today except in school text books (if that!) and who amongst these mighty men impacted on history as did the humble carpenter from Nazareth, whose regalia was a crown of thorns, and a blood-stained loin cloth? How was that possible? Surely, rationalists, materialists, and such like owe us an honest answer!

If a domestic worker claimed to be the Queen of England she would simply be derided. On the other hand if Elizabeth of Windsor claimed to be the Queen of England the whole world is bound to acknowledge her as such, because it is true.

So it is with Jesus of Nazareth! We accept all those seemingly preposterous claims he made for himself because they are true, and to accept them as true is the rational thing to do.

The conclusion based both on evidence and on rationality is that Jesus could not have been a pathological liar or a demented maniac. In which case, we must fall down before Him and worship Him!

Therefore, faith in Jesus Christ, based solely on the claims He made about Himself, even without the evidence of his miracles to back up His claims, is the basis of the Christian faith.

2. Faith in the Holy Spirit.

It is the Holy Spirit who reveals the Christ to us and leads us into all Truth. It is the Holy Spirit who keeps nudging us towards the Father and the Son and keeps up a relentless pressure until we finally bow our knees and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates the Word of God and brings it to life. Without the Holy Spirit the “letter killeth”. It is Holy Spirit who transforms us progressively into the image and likeness of the Son and produces in us the fruits of love, joy, peace, etc, and equally, it is the Holy Spirit who bestows on us His gifts of wisdom, knowledge and faith. We cannot have faith in Jesus until the Holy Spirit imparts it to us.

3. Faith in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus

The third thing that sets Christian faith apart from other theistic religions is the conviction that when Jesus was crucified He paid off the sins of all humanity and, equally, that the fallen Adam, or the sinner in us, died with Him and that when He was resurrected He launched a “new creation” and a brand new humanity.

In Christian belief, virtue, piety, goodness and all that, while being in and of themselves much to be praised, cannot secure humanity’s redemption.

Only the Death and Resurrection of Jesus will suffice.

Redemption, salvation, deliverance, all of which mean the same thing, can only come through faith that the Death and Resurrection of Jesus will secure them for us. We must accept in faith that when Jesus died on the Cross He was taking upon himself all of humanity’s sins. We must also accept in faith that when Jesus died on the Cross the sinner (i.e. the fallen man/woman) also died with Him and that when He was resurrected, the “new man”, or the Second Adam was also born with Him.

It is clear that faith is fundamental to our appropriation of the benefits of the Death and Resurrection. Without faith for understanding it, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus is reduced to a piece of wanton criminality and an exhibition of Roman and Jewish terrorism.

Because man’s rational mind cannot by itself comprehend how faith in the Death and Resurrection can deliver us, the Lord Himself instituted the sacrament of baptism and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, also called the Eucharist. These two sacraments embody these fundamental truths in a material form but for us to benefit from them, we must have a prior faith. Without a prior faith, baptism and the Eucharist are hollow rituals.

Therefore faith is fundamental.

A profound Christian truth is threaded through all of apostle Paul’s epistles and that is that we can be justified (i.e. reconciled to God) only through faith in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. (Rom. 3:28; 4:4-5:5 and Gal. 2:16) and not through good works, or through piety or through virtue.

However, the epistles also affirm that all those who have been thus redeemed will also engage in “good works”, and be pious and virtuous, in demonstration of their new life.

“Good works”, “piety” and “virtue” are not the cause of redemption but its effects.

4. Faith in the Word of God

Faith in Jesus Christ the person, faith in the Holy Spirit and faith in his Death and Resurrection to deliver us from the stranglehold of the Enemy, are the fruits of faith in the Word of God.

The Word of God is not just the written words in the Bible, but faith in the Spirit back of the written words, to be apprehended only through spiritual discernment. The Greek word, Logos, best captures the meaning of the “Word of God”. The Logos is the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s first emanation, and it is He who speaks to us through the words, chapters and books of the Bible.

God is Infinite and His truth is Infinite and there is no way our puny minds can ever comprehend them when they are expressed though human forms, whether the forms be written languages, or marble statues, or paintings or music. It is for that reason that God uses allegories, metaphors and parables to covey the deeper truths which cannot be communicated through ordinary forms. It is for that reason that from Genesis onwards the Bible is full of allegories, metaphors, parables and simple stories, all rich in spiritual meaning and all alike seeking to convey God’s truth.

Therefore faith in the Word requires that we open our minds to the leading of the Holy Spirit who alone can unveil for us the deeper truths hidden within the words of the Bible and within its allegories, metaphors and parables. We will be in grave danger of spiritual error if we take every word of the Bible literally.

However, faith in Jesus Christ the person, and faith in the Death and Resurrection can come only through reading the Word of God.

“Blessed is he who …….. meditates on His Word by day and by night” (Ps.1).

Apostle Paul claims categorically that “faith comes through hearing the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).

I must emphasise again, that to benefit from reading or hearing the Word of God, we must be guided by the Holy Spirit. Merely reading the Word of God as we would any book, or listening to the Word as we would listen to the radio, without seeking the mediation of the Holy Spirit to interpret the Word for us, will not produce fruitage. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates the Word and converts it into Rhema.

Rhema is the inner meaning of the Word, as mediated to us by the Holy Spirit. Rhema is God’s utterance as He intended it to be understood by us.

We may commit to memory every line in the Bible, and be able to quote the Scriptures ad infinitum, but unless the Word is illuminated by Spirit it will be of no avail.

“By itself the letter killeth, but the Spirit brings it to life” (2Cor.3:6).

5. Faith in the Blood of Jesus

Some people react to references to the blood with disgust. That is entirely understandable. It is because they think of blood only as the thick red-coloured plasma associated with criminal deeds, with violence, with war, and not least, with the slaughterhouse, rather than as a conveyance for life, which it really is.

The underlying truth is also that blood conveys oxygen and nutrients essential for life and carries away carbon dioxide and other toxins inimical to life.

When we accept in faith that Jesus’ crucifixion was sacrificial, and that His death was taken upon Himself voluntarily as our substitute, the blood becomes the proof of that sacrifice. Jesus said, “This is my blood, (read “my Life”) shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Drink ye all of it for it is the seal of the new covenant” (Matt. 26:28; Lk. 22:20).

Although the word blood may conjure up images of violence and the abattoir, understood in the context of God in the person of the Son sacrificing himself on behalf of us all, the reference to the blood takes an awesome new meaning, barely comprehensible to the human mind.

The concept of Life is an abstraction and it is easy to see why such a concept would have been beyond the grasp of illiterate shepherds. However, when life is presented as blood it would have been easier for simple shepherds to comprehend that His life was in His blood. As the blood drained out of Jesus, the world could see that His life also drained out, and as we drink the blood we are in truth drinking the life of Jesus. Therefore, the blood is not a symbol for the abattoir, but proof that the price has been paid on behalf of the human race and a symbol for the life of Jesus which is being offered to us in replacement for our Adamic lives.

Jesus also said, “Unless you eat my Flesh and drink my Blood you will not have life” (see all of John 6).

Without faith in the power of the blood to cleanse us of our sins and impart to us the Christ’s Spirit to dwell in us, the Eucharist, which is the central ritual of Christianity, the one thing that distinguishes it from all other religions, collapses!

Therefore I say boldly, that unless, through the Holy Spirit we come alive to a deeper understanding of the cleansing and regenerating power of the blood of Jesus, we will reduce Christianity to another insipid code of ethics.

6. Faith in tradition

I am fully aware that apostolic churches lay great value on tradition as a desirable focus for our faith.

I will not deny the enormous role played by tradition in the history of Christianity for transmitting the Good News, but we have to recognise that tradition has also been a carrier for much else besides the Good News, so much so that it has sapped the Spirit from Christianity and transformed it into a vehicle for ritual and dull formalism.

Tradition began to develop from around the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and over a period of over 1500 years progressively metamorphosed into a straitjacket of rituals and superstitions rather than as a river of spiritual energy. Tradition has been like a river in flood, delivering life and sustenance to farmers plagued by drought downstream, but it has also delivered a lot of toxic substances destroying life in those farms.

It is important to recall that the greatest benchmarks in the history of the church were those moments when churchmen of great faith cut loose from tradition, releasing thereby spiritual energies like flows of molten lava that spew out of erupting volcanoes. Such moments were those ushered by Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, John Knox, Charles Wesley, William Booth, and in our own, time by Pope John XX111. Significantly, one cannot recall any great spiritual trendsetters since William Booth broke new ground.

Has the church become so moribund today that it is incapable of meeting the challenge posed by the rising tide of paganism?

In the context of this chapter, beyond what I have already written, I am deliberately excluding a full-blown discussion of tradition in relation to “faith”, because the effects of such a discussion can be more divisive than harmonising.

Summary

In this article I have argued that a mundane faith is a characteristic of all human consciousness, even though some men and women, in their arrogance, deny it.

Without faith, even the scientific enterprise cannot make headway, and without imputing a power from outside – a deus ex machina – the theory of evolution collapses.

I have also said that religious faith is fundamentally different from mundane faith referred to above.

What distinguishes religious faith from mundane faith is that the former recognises a higher reality than the mundane, and requires the surrender of ego to that higher reality that we call God.

However, within the family of faith, the faith of Christianity is uniquely different from all other faiths.

What distinguishes the Christian faith from all other faiths is that it requires faith in Jesus Christ the person, rather than faith in a doctrine, or faith in a teaching, or faith in rules and commandments, as the only gateway to God.

Faith in Jesus Christ the person means essentially faith in His claim to be the only begotten Son of God and faith in His Death and Resurrection as the only way to be reconciled to the Father.

Four other components complete the faith of Christianity, namely, faith in the Holy Spirit, faith in the Word of God, faith in the efficacy of the Blood to redeem and renew, and faith in the traditions of the church to transmit the Good News.

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