Smarter folks than I

Not so long ago, I wrote about my realization that faith is trust, not assertion. That I was in a really toxic behaviorist headspace, because "faith" to me meant assertion; "faith" was a work in its own right, and that work was faith, because without it it was dead, and what the Epistles were saying had absolutely no connection to what was going on on the ground, and that contradiction heightened to collapse.

I'd never thought to look outside myself that way, because I was confessing, not critiquing. And I'm still not really in any position to look outside myself that way, because I'm not sure whether I can without envy.

So I'm going to let Morgan Guyton, who's made a similar observation, say it better than I:

But what is this faith that we receive from God? Many Christians have been taught that faith means simply “believing in things you cannot prove.” Under this definition, “faith” very quickly turns into a set of propositional statements about Jesus that we’re supposed to accept without proof: born of a virgin, died on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead, coming again at the end of time, etc. To have faith comes to mean simply that you agree with whatever the Bible says about Jesus. I don’t think this is unimportant, but is it really what the Bible is talking about when it says the word faith?

Here’s the problem with this definition of faith: it’s really a work even though it’s not supposed to be....

Seriously, give the man a read. Everything he says is like that.

He is the first of those that this blog will tag as "smarter folks than I."