faith

Parent: Mere Christianity: Leaders' Notes Series

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Chapter 12: "Faith"

This is Faith in the "second" or "higher" sense of the Christian term.

We discover this Faith when we have tried our hardest to be Christian, and we find that we cannot. We discover our bankruptcy, and discover what God really cares about:

• Not our actions
• He desires that we become "creatures of a certain kind or quality -- the kind of creatures he intended us to be -- creatures related to Himself in a certain way."
• that we become creatures that relate to each other in a way dictated by the statement above.

Parent: Mere Christianity: Leaders' Notes Series

Buy a copy of Mere Christianity from Amazon.com

Chapter 11: "Faith"

"Faith" in the first sense: Belief -- "accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity."

• Obviously, something should be accepted or rejected based on the facts about what seems to be true.
  • Being honestly wrong about something doesn't mean a person is 'bad,' only (possibly) 'not very clever.'
  • If a person thinks the evidence for something is bad, but he wills himself to believe it anyway, he's just stupid.

This assumes that we accept and reject things strictly on reason, which is not true.

Popular culture and the modern Church teach about a "faith" that is believing without evidence, a kind of faith that is weakened by evidence. Real faith, Biblical faith, is actually evidence based belief. C.S. Lewis defines faith as continuing to believe what your reason has accepted. The real enemy of faith is fear, not reason.