While walking my dogs on a recent fall evening, I caught Jonah Goldberg’s recent podcast interview with the social scientist Charles Murray. Murray, it seems, has found God after most of a lifetime of keeping religion at a respectful intellectual distance.
I thought their conversation was intriguing for several reasons. For starters, it’s always interesting to see anyone’s journey from agnosticism to belief, and Murray tells an interesting story of the path he’s walked.
It was also a healthy reminder to a weird guy like me that many intelligent people don’t have the same background in metaphysics and religious discourse, even those the general orbit of the intellectual Right. The Fine-Tuning Argument that Murray has discovered was, for one example, a subject of not a few dinner table conversations at my house when I was growing up. The same goes for his recent exposure to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, or questions about the reliability of the New Testament. That’s all less a mark against Murray, I think, than an indicator of the ways some of us have been unusually fortunate.
Then, as they were discussing difference between “faith” and “religion,” Goldberg and Murray stumbled over one of my pet peeves in the philosophy of religion. Beginning around the 32-minute mark, Goldberg presses Murray on using the term “religion” for the title rather than “faith.”
Murray explains:
Faith is a really problematic thing for people like me who do not have that spiritual sensitivity [discussed a few minutes earlier]. . . . I just hate to say, “Well, I just don’t have any good reason for believing this, but I still believe it. And a lot of people would say, “You’re just missing the point, Murray: taking that leap is just absolutely essential.” Okay, maybe so, but I can’t do that.
I sympathize with Murray here, feeling a need to choose intellectual honesty above all. Of course, the “faith” in the discussion here is that of the “leap of faith”: accepting the truth proposition despite a lack of evidence—or evidence to the contrary. This is hardly Murray’s fault; my sense is that most religious people who speak English use the word “faith” in precisely this way on a regular basis. And I would share with him the aversion to that term—if that’s what I thought the word meant to the seminal thinkers and authors who put that word into Western religious discourse.
I would like to suggest that the “faith” of the proverbial leap is not the concept the Bible has in mind.[1] It is, in my view, certainly not what the word pistis and the corresponding verb pisteuō convey in Greek. The term is quite a rich one, but under none the standard lexical entries—nor in any of the occurrences I’ve found “in the wild” of Greek literature—does the word mean something like filling the epistemological gap where proof is lacking.
What the lexicons do show is that pistis not infrequently means something like “evidence” itself.
Let’s quickly run down the major definitions from listed near the beginning of the BDAG lexical entry, shall we?[2] These include: “faithfulness,” “reliability,” “fidelity,” “commitment;” in another cluster of meanings, “oath,” “assurance,” “pledge,” “proof,”; then “trust,” confidence,” and “faith.”
For one to “give” or “provide pistis” in a legal context, for example, means to bring in evidence. To do so in the context of doubt or uncertainty often means to bring in support for oneself or one’s case.
BDAG just happened to reference two Greek texts on my shelf that illustrate this idea of pistis as “proof” or “evidence.”
One text is Josephus’ Antiquities, which contains two separate examples. In the first of these, Herod the Great’s wife Mariamme doubts his love for her, of which the regent Joseph attempts to reassure her. It turns out that Herod loved her so much, he had ordered Joseph to kill her if anything happened to Herod while he was abroad. After hearing her doubts,
Joseph, having been overeager to demonstrate the heart of the king, he was induced speak about his instructions, rendering it pistis that [Herod] could not live without her. . . .[3]
(For those looking for ways to reignite marital romance, Joseph’s report failed to reassure Mariamme.)
Later, in another episode of domestic strife within Herod’s family, his sister Salome chooses to divorce one Kostabaros. She did this out of ostensible loyalty to Herod himself, to whom she whom she would need to explain her actions, since he had arranged the marriage. She claimed she
knew the man [Kostabaros] was aiming for political changes along with Antipater, Lysimachos, and Dositheos. And she was providing the Sons of Sabba as pistis of her account, because they were harbored by him for some twelve years now.[4]
The Sons of Sabba were political enemies of Herod, who was reportedly shocked by this news. As the reader can discern, pistis in these passages by Josephus must indeed mean something close to “evidence,” “proof,” or “backing” in order to make sense.
Or we could consider the passage from the second book on my shelf, which runs as follows:
Being God’s family, we should not think the divine is like gold or silver or stone, in the image of an artist and of a human being’s imagination. God, having disregarded the times of ignorance, now enjoins all human beings everywhere to change their minds, inasmuch as he set a day on which he going to judge the whole world with justice, by the man whom he appointed, rendering pistis to everyone by having raised him from the dead (Acts 17:29-31).
Paul’s argument to the Athenian intellectuals is that Christ’s resurrection is the proof they need. And of course, when some heard the words “resurrection of the dead,” Luke notes, “they scoffed.” Some of these might have very well have quoted the playwright Aeschylus to one another, “When a man dies, once the dust sops up his blood, there is no resurrection.” Even Zeus couldn’t undo that. Nevertheless, however strange it may seem to us, Paul insisted the resurrection itself was God’s own testimony to the world.
In any case, that rational aspect of faith has almost entirely dropped out of the contemporary semantics, and I’m curious when this linguistic turn occurred. My understanding is that Kirkegaard popularized the notion of a “leap of faith,” so I assume the semantic shift was before him. The Reformation-era debates also jump to mind, of course, but I don’t know those thoroughly enough to comment.
But it is, in my view, a supremely unfortunate turn insofar as it concedes far too much ground to Enlightenment-era polemics—“faith goes over there while we keep our brains over here”—that many ancient (and at least some medieval) Christians would have had enough sense to contest. For example, I think someone like Justin Martyr would have said the very last thing he wanted to do was put his reason on a shelf away from his “faith”: it was the friendly Ghost of Socrates, after all, that had pointed him in the direction Jesus.
From the ancient perspective, real faith is supposed to grounded on some kind of established, observed rational basis: I “have faith” in my mechanics because they clearly didn’t rip me off the last five times I’ve taken my minivan into the shop, so I trust them when they say I really do need an expensive repair on the sixth visit. I may lack complete epistemic certainty in their honesty, but that’s an absurd standard. By contrast, I have much less “faith” in my minivan itself, which has an established track record of breaking down in the least convenient moments possible. Etc. At least as the New Testament considers it, faith in God is similar: he has acted in creation and he has acted in human history.
Toward the end of their conversation, right as the hounds and I were getting our muddied selves back in the door, Goldberg and Murray touched on the ever sticky matter of the resurrection itself, which Murray seems to find as much an obstacle as the first-century Greek philosophers did. I confess I may have chuckled ever so slightly in sympathy at the intellectual dilemma. Murray, you see, has already more or less conceded the miraculous or “supernatural”: in the act of creation, in the evidence of near-death experiences, in apparent instances of reincarnation or transferred memories, and so on. But the resurrection of Jesus just remains—too spooky? A little too exotic?
Aye, there’s the rub. Many modern people can accommodate all kinds of bizarre anomalies, sci-fi plot points, and worldview-rupturing phenomena, like the existence of aliens. And I for one wish we all had a little more imagination and curiosity along these lines. The world is a strange place, after all. If you had told me in fall of 2019 what we were all about to go through with COVID for the next few years, I would have laughed it off as the premise of a bad movie.
For many intellectual types, however, the resurrection in particular is just a bridge too far. I certainly share the feeling, but spooky I think the alleged resurrection of Jesus will remain. To close with a poignant quotation from a very middle-of-the-road New Testament scholar who was disinclined to apologetics:
That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgement, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to these experiences I do not know.[5]
One could try to backdoor a more existentialist definition of “faith” into English versions of Hebrews 11:1 or perhaps 1 Cor. 13:13 by partly equating it to “hope,” but this other word too has been diluted from the much firmer notion of the Greek word elpis: “expectation.” ↑
For the same entry, the LSJ likewise says the same meaning appears in various authors such the Greek orators and Plato.
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Josephus, Antiquities 15.69. My translation. ὑπερεσπουδακὼς ὁ Ἰώσηπος ἐπιδεῖξαι τὴν διάνοιαν τοῦ βασιλέως προήχθη καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν ἐντολὴν εἰπεῖν, πίστιν αὐτὰ ποιούμενος ὡς οὐδὲ χωρὶς ἐκείνης ζῆν δύναται . . . .
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Antiquities 15.260–1. My translation. καὶ πρὸς τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἡρώδην ἔλεγεν ὑπὸ τῆς εἰς ἐκεῖνον εὐνοίας ἀποστῆναι τἀνδρός· ἐγνωκέναι γὰρ αὐτὸν μετ’ Ἀντιπάτρου καὶ Λυσιμάχου καὶ Δοσιθέου νεωτέρων ἐφιέμενον. καὶ πίστιν παρεῖχεν τοῦ λόγου τοὺς Σάββα παῖδας, ὅτι διασώζοιντο παρ’ αὐτῷ χρόνον ἐνιαυτῶν ἤδη δεκαδύο. ↑
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin Books, 1996), 280. ↑