Faith and Knowledge

 Most people are of the opinion that the truths that we accept by faith are less certain than those that we consider to be knowledge.   This is reflected in the way they use the verbs “believe” and “know” and their equivalents in other languages.   When someone says “I believe X” and “I know Y” it is usually safe to infer from this that he is more sure of Y than he is of X.   Most people, although perhaps not quite as many, infer from this that faith is inferior to knowledge.

 

 

Those of us who are Christians ought not to think this way.  

 

 

Consider how Bishop Pearson explained the distinction between belief and knowledge in his Exposition of the Creed. (1)   He began by defining belief (in general) as “an Assent to that which is credible, as credible” and by defining assent as “that act or habit of the understanding, by which it receiveth, acknowledgeth, and embraceth any thing as a truth”.  He then went on to explain that assent was more general than belief or faith, and to distinguish the latter from other forms of assent in terms of their objects.   The difference was in what makes “that which is credible” credible:

 

 

For he which sees an action done, knows it to be done, and therefore assents unto the truth of the performance of it because he sees it: but another person to whom he relates it, may assent unto the performance of the same action, not because himself sees it, but because the other relates it; in which case that which is credible is the object of Faith in one, of evident knowledge in the other.

 

 

Bishop Pearson expanded on this by providing several different ways in which the truth of something is apparent to us and thus our assent to it is properly knowledge rather than faith.   Something might be apparent to our senses (the examples he gives are the whiteness of snow and the heat of fire) or to our understanding (“the whole of anything is greater than any one part of the whole”).   Things which are apparent in these ways are more properly described as being evident than as being credible.   Then there are things which are not evident in these ways, but the truth of which we can establish through their “immediate and necessary connection with something formerly known”.   These things, he described as “scientifical”.   Note that this term as he uses it is not only an archaic form but also more comprehensive than our “scientific”.   He used mathematics as an example of a science, demonstrating thereby that his “scientifical” embraced the products of both methodologies in the Rationalism v. Empiricism debate which, at least in its Modern phase, was in its infancy at the time he preached these sermons.

 

 

He then said:

 

But when anything propounded to us is neither apparent to our sense, nor evident to our understanding, in and of itself, neither certainly to be collected from any clear and necessary connection with the cause from which it proceedeth, or the effects which it naturally produceth, nor is taken up upon any real arguments, or reference to other acknowledged truths, and yet not withstanding appeareth to us true, not by a manifestation but attestation of the truth, and so moveth us to assent not of itself, but by virtue of the testimony given to it: this is said properly to be credible; and an Assent unto this, upon such credibility, is in the proper notion Faith or Belief.

 

 

After distinguishing between faith and knowledge, Bishop Pearson then went on to distinguish between different kinds of faith based upon the different kinds of authority of those whose testimony makes that which is believed credible.   The authority of those offering testimony, he said, rests upon both their ability and integrity.   Someone lacking the former might be deceived himself and so deceive others with his testimony unintentionally.   Someone lacking the latter might deliberately deceive others.   The authority of human testifiers greatly varies and may be deficient in one or both of these foundations, but God, Whose testimony may be immediate, as it was to Noah, Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles, or mediate, as passed on through these human messengers, is perfect in both ability and integrity and so can neither be deceived Himself nor deliberately deceive others.   Faith based upon Divine Testimony, therefore, is the truest of faiths, and so, with regards to the “I believe” that begins the Creed, Bishop Pearson said that it is:

 

 

[T]o assent to the whole and every part of it, as to a certain and infallible truth revealed by God (who by reason of his infinite knowledge cannot be deceived, and by reason of his transcendent holiness cannot deceive) and delivered unto us in the writings of the blessed Apostles and Prophets, immediately inspired, moved, and acted by God, out of whose writings this brief sum of necessary points of Faith was first collected.

 

 

Now, for the very same reasons why faith in God’s Word is more certain than faith in human testimony, that is to say, that God Himself is by contrast with human authorities a sure and infallible testifier, faith in God’s Word is more certain than human knowledge.   Just as human authorities can fail us through ignorance or the intent to deceive, so the senses and understanding by which we perceive what is apparent and evident and comprehend what must necessarily follow fall short of the infallibility of the witness of God.

 

 

Dr. Edward F. Hills wrote:

 

 

He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.  (Heb. 11:6b)   If I truly believe in God, then God is more real to man than anything else I know, more real even than my faith in Him.   For if anything else is more real to me than God Himself, then I am not believing but doubting.   I am real, my experiences are real, my faith is real, but God is more real.   Otherwise I am not believing but doubting.   I cast myself on that which is most real, namely, God Himself.    I take God and Jesus Christ His Son as the starting point of all my thinking. (2)

 

 

If by God, we mean the God that orthodox Christianity has always proclaimed, taught, and confessed belief in, then that which Dr. Hills has affirmed must necessarily follow.   The God of orthodox Christianity is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New.  The very first verse of the Bible declares that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.   When Moses asked Him for His name He declared “I AM”.   This God is the Creator of everything else that exists, Whose Being is eternal and in Himself in a way that cannot be said of anything created.   Whereas the classical philosophers distinguished between things which exist in themselves, and things which exist only in other things, apple as an example of the former, redness as an example of the latter, even things which exist in themselves in this sense, are in other senses dependent upon other things for their existence.   The apple you eat today, would not have existed had the tree on which it grew not existed first.   That tree would not have existed, had it not been planted from a previous example – and so on, all the way back to the first apple tree, which was created directly by God, the uncreated Source of all being.   If everything else depends upon God for its existence, and God as the Source of all being exists eternally in Himself independent of anything else, then God must necessarily be more real than anything else.   Faith in God, therefore, must be the starting point of our thinking, for such faith is more certain, not only than faith in the testimony of human authorities, but that which we presume to call our “knowledge”.

 

 

In connection with all of this, an important observation can be made about the Scriptural account of the Fall of man.   Man, the book of Genesis tells us, was created in the image of God and placed in a Garden, which God had prepared for him in the land of Eden, in which “out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Gen. 2:9).   Two specific trees are identified, “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” and God, after putting man into the Garden, gave him the following commandment:   “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).     While the exact nature of the “knowledge of good and evil” is something that Jewish and Christian theologians have debated for millennia, (3) the account makes it clear that in the prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree, it was this specific kind of knowledge that was forbidden to man.

 

 

In the third chapter of Genesis the serpent, whom the Book of Revelation in the New Testament identifies with Satan, deceives Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.   She in turn gives the fruit to Adam, who also eats.   Their sin is discovered and they incur a number of curses in judgement, the most important of which was that they were driven out of the Garden, barred from the tree of life, and thus assigned to the hard life of human mortality.   In the midst of the judgement, the first promise of the Redemption that God would eventually give to mankind in His Incarnate Son Jesus Christ is made (Gen. 3:15).   The observation that is important for our purposes here pertains to the deception that brought about the Fall.   When the serpent deceived Eve, he began with a question “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1) which, after Eve had answered, he followed up by directly contradicting God “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen 3:4) and tempting Eve with the forbidden knowledge by making it appear desirable in a way that stoked pride and vanity “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).    Note how each part of this deception was designed to progressively undermine faith in God’s word.   The initial question subtly introduced an element of doubt, the contradiction invited outright disbelief, and implicit in the temptation was the suggestion that by withholding the forbidden knowledge from man God was acting against man’s interests out of selfishness, an aspersion on God’s character that led to mistrust.   Therefore, in this temptation the serpent was presenting the kind of knowledge that had been forbidden to man as being preferable to faith.   This then is the source of that common notion that we have been rebutting in this essay that knowledge is superior to faith.   

 

 

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that all knowledge of every type is treated as being opposed to God and faith in Scripture.   The majority of Scriptural references to knowing and knowledge are positive.   God’s own knowledge, obviously, is always good.   Indeed, whatever the “knowledge of good and evil” was, it was appropriate and good in God (Gen. 3:22).   God’s knowledge, as discussed above, is foundational to faith in God.   God is all-knowing (1 Kings 8:39, Job 37:16, Psalm 139:4, Matthew 6:8, 1 John 3:20 to give but a handful of the references which speak of God’s omniscience using forms of the word “know”, themselves but a fraction of the Scriptural testimony to God’s omniscience as there are even more references which express the concept using other terms, such as speaking of God as “seeing” and “understanding” all things).    This is why the element of His credibility that Bishop Pearson called “ability” is absolute.   He cannot be deceived.      Most Scriptural references to human knowledge are also positive, however.   Knowledge is spoken of as a gift of God, as, for example, in the cases of the workmen appointed to make the Tabernacle and its furnishings in the book of Exodus.   King Solomon is commended by God for asking for “wisdom and knowledge” in the first chapter of II Chronicles.   Job and his counsellors are rebuked for speaking “without knowledge”, when God speaks at the end of the book of Job.    The Psalmist describes God as He who “teacheth man knowledge” (Psalm 94:10).    The book of Proverbs says that knowledge is to be desired above material wealth (Prov. 8:10).   These are but a few examples.   The Scriptures also repeatedly speak of the “knowledge of God”, in the sense of man’s knowing God, as something to be desired and sought after.   In His prayer, at the end of His discourse en route to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus Christ said “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”. (Jn. 17:3).  Since the Gospel in which this is recorded repeatedly stresses that eternal life is a gift from God that we receive by believing in Jesus Christ – the Fourth Evangelist states this or quotes somebody else saying it in one way or another about one hundred times – the Lord was either equating faith with knowledge in this verse, or speaking of a knowledge that is received by faith.

 

 

Most often when the Scriptures speak of knowing and knowledge negatively, it is either a false knowledge, that is to say, someone thinks he has knowledge but does not, or knowledge that has been overvalued.   To place too high of a value on something that is good in itself, by, for example, valuing the good over the better, or the better over the best, is to commit an error that is comparable to literal idolatry (placing the creature in the place of the Creator) and which can have similar consequences.    When the devil tempted Eve to choose forbidden knowledge over faith this was an example of overvaluing true knowledge.  Very early in Christian history, heretical sects arose which challenged the teachings of the orthodox leaders of the Church and the Christian faith, in the name of a special kind of “knowledge”.    When this happened, the “knowledge” so valued over orthodox faith in God, was false knowledge.

 

 

History knows the heretics in question by the name “Gnostics.”   The way historians use this term it is not the designation of any one specific sect, but is rather a categorical label applying to a broad class of heretical groups.     The early Church Fathers who contended for the orthodox faith against the Gnostics usually referred to them as heretics, or by the name of their specific heresy which was typically the name of its first or chief proponent.   St. John the Apostle writing in canonical Scripture called them by a stronger name - "antichrists".   St. John's account of them was that they were schismatics who had broken away from the Apostolic Church and apostates who had departed from the orthodox faith by denying the Incarnation.   According to such early Church Fathers as St. Justin Martyr, (4) St. Irenaeus of Lyons, (5) and St. Hippolytus of Rome, (6) the first of these sects was the Simonians, founded by Simon Magus - the Samaritan magician who heard St. Philip preach the Gospel in the eighth chapter of Acts and was baptized but who came under St. Peter's curse when he offered money in exchange for the power of the Apostolic ministry of conveying the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands.    Nevertheless, the label Gnostic suits our purposes here because it points to the very element of their thinking that is relevant.  When the members of these sects referred to themselves as γνωστικοί (gnostikoi) it was with the literal sense of “those with γνῶσῐς”.    The Greek word γνῶσῐς (gnosis), like its Latin equivalent scientia and its English equivalent, was a noun formed from the verb meaning “I know” - γιγνώσκω (gignosko) in Greek, scio in Latin (7) – and it was the basic Greek word for “knowledge”.   The way the Gnostics used it, however it did not mean knowledge in general, but a special kind of “knowledge” that they regarded as their unique and elite possession.   It is likely this to which St. Paul referred when he warned St. Timothy to “keep that which is committed to thy trust”, i.e., the Christian faith, against “the oppositions of science falsely so-called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20-21).    The Greek words rendered “science falsely so called” in the Authorized Bible, using the older, more general meaning of “science” are ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως, the first of which is recognizably the source of our “pseudonym”, the second of which is the genitive singular form of γνῶσῐς.

 

 

The so-called “knowledge” of Gnosticism stands in sharp contrast to orthodox Christian faith.    In the orthodox Christian faith, the God Whom Jesus Christ called Father is identical to the God Who created the heavens and the earth in the Old Testament.   This is clearly stated in the first Article of both Creeds (8) and is also obviously the plain teaching of Jesus Christ and the New Testament.  This God is Creator of everything other than God Himself that exists, spiritual and physical, or, in the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed “all things visible and invisible”.   The corruption of sin and evil, in the orthodox Christian faith, has infected all of Creation, and began in the unseen or spiritual part of Creation, before the Fall of man, with the rebellion of Satan and the angels who followed him.    The salvation that God sent His Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ to accomplish, extends to all parts of Creation affected by the corruption of sin and so will ultimately include the corporeal resurrection of the redeemed (1 Cor. 15:12-58) and the redemption of all of physical Creation (Rom. 8:19-23).   Although the redeemed are sometimes spoken of as God’s “elect” (chosen), salvation is freely offered to all through a message, the Gospel, that is to be preached to “every creature” (Mk. 16:15).   Everyone is invited to believe that Gospel and by believing receive the saving grace of God.  

 

 

Gnosticism taught the exact opposite with regards to each of these points.   The Gnostics taught that spirit was pure and incorruptible and matter was irredeemably corrupt therefore both could not have come from the same God.   They taught a supreme deity they called “The One”, from whom lesser divinities they called aeons emanated.   These divinities, they taught, dwelt in a realm of light called the pleroma.   The aeons were grouped in male-female pairs, which in turn would emanate other lower aeons.  One of the lowest pair of aeons, in their teaching, was Sophia (this is the Greek word for “wisdom), which left the pleroma and gave birth to the Demiurge.   This name, the Gnostics borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus.  Like the title character of Plato’s dialogue, they taught that the Demiurge created the material or physical world.    Unlike Plato’s Timaeus they taught that he was evil and so was his creation.   Gnostics who made reference to the Old Testament identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge.   Assisting the Demiurge in creating the physical world and ruling it, in Gnostic theology, were lesser evil divinities called archons, whose total number varied from Gnostic sect to Gnostic sect, although usually there were seven chief ones whom the Gnostics identified with various heavenly bodies. The Demiurge and his archons, according to Gnosticism, imprisoned sparks of divinity from the pleroma within physical bodies, creating human beings.   Salvation, in Gnostic theology, was a release of these divine sparks from the imprisonment of the physical back into the pure spiritual world of the pleroma.   Salvation was attained, the Gnostics claimed, through enlightenment, the achieving of “knowledge” (gnosis).   This “knowledge” did not come in a message that was to be generally preached to all, but was something revealed to individuals through personal experience with the divine of which only an elite few had the capacity.

 

 

Clearly, the core teachings of orthodox Christianity and those of heretical Gnosticism were antithetical to each other.    Just as clear is the fact that this total antithesis grew out of the fact that whereas orthodox Christianity identified itself as a faith - a set of truths  which when proclaimed to the world as a kerygma are called the Gospel ("Good News") and when spoken as a personal and communal confession are called the Creed, both of which terms point to the fact that these truths are accepted by faith,  that is to say, believed on the authority of God's Word, Gnosticism  embraced what it regarded as a special, elite, esoteric "knowledge" rather than the orthodox faith.

 

 

Unlike the knowledge that Satan tempted Eve to abandon faith for, the gnosis of the Gnostics was a false knowledge, and quite likely, as stated previously, explicitly called such by the Apostle Paul in Scripture.   In the Modern Age, what was formerly Christendom or Christian civilization, was transformed into what is now called by the secular name of Western Civilization through its permeation by a philosophical spirit that can for lack of a better term be called “liberalism” although it needs to be understood that by this a more general, underlying, attitude is meant rather than the specific philosophical and political formulations that have borne name.    This liberalism places no value whatsoever in the testimony of God, reduces faith in God to personal experience and opinion, and places its own supreme confidence in the rational faculties of mankind.   One of the fruits of this liberalism, has been the exaltation of something that bears the name of “knowledge” – this time the Latin term, Anglicized into “science” – to the level of the highest truth.   What is this thing that Modern name calls by the name of knowledge and prizes so highly?

 

 

At its most basic level it is merely man’s attempts to explain the phenomena of the physical world strictly by means of other phenomena within the same.   As such it is ancient, going back at least as far as Thales of Miletus in the seventh to sixth centuries BC.   At a somewhat higher level it is the methodology devised for these attempts involving observation, hypothesizing, and experimentation.   Depending upon how you look at it there have been either several such methodologies or several major revisions of the same methodology.    Aristotle’s method was the most influential in the pre-Modern world.   Sir Francis Bacon’s was one of the earliest of the Modern versions.   His most important treatise setting forth that method was a direct attack on Aristotle as is evident in the title: Novum Organum - Ὄργανον (Organon) was the title given by Aristotle’s students to the published collection of his books on logic.   Aristotle’s methodology had stressed deductive reasoning, Bacon’s emphasized inductive reasoning.   It was in his unfinished novella New Atlantis, however, that Bacon provided us with the key to understanding why Modern man has come to so value “science”.   The end or goal of “science” or “natural philosophy” as he called it – a much better and more accurate name – he placed in the words of the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House foundation: “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things: and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”   Modern “science” has been exponentially more efficient at achieving this end than any prior “science” which translates into its having more effectively produced results.    This establishes its utilitarian value which Modern man, increasingly incapable of distinguishing between utility and truth, confuses with its epistemic value.   To any sane mind, however, it must be regarded as a mixed blessing at best.   The same “science” that gave us life-saving penicillin, also gave us life-threatening nuclear weapons.   Even before the invention of the atomic bomb, wise minds as disparate as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and German historian and prophet of doom Oswald Spengler perceived Modern “science” as a Faustian bargain after Faust who exchanged his soul for knowledge.   Spengler described Modern Western “scientific” culture as Faustian.   Tennyson allowed his readers to infer the same from his poem Ulysses, in which he places the spirit of Modern Western “scientific” adventurism in the words of his title character’s determination to “follow knowledge like a falling star/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” and against all forces arrayed against him to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, spoken as that character sets out on that final voyage that landed him in the eighth circle of Hell where he is depicted recounting it to Dante in Inferno, Canto XXVI.

 

 

So is this “science” a true knowledge like the “knowledge of good and evil” with which Eve was tempted, or a false “knowledge” like the gnosis of the Simonians, Valentians, Sethians, et al.?

 

 

“Science” obviously contains much true knowledge.   This is to be found in the raw materials of “science”, the facts or data drawn from observation, which are knowledge in the sense that Bishop Pearson used the term when distinguishing it from “belief” or “faith”.   The hypotheses, theories, and laws by which these facts are interpreted and explained are another story.   While the liberal spirit of the Modern world ascribes truth to every proclamation of “science”, “science” makes no such claim for itself.   If it did, it would never have accomplished anything.   To give but one example, if Max Planck and Albert Einstein had taken the same attitude towards the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, that those who tell us to “follow the science’ with regards to climate change or the bat flu take, they never would have developed quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity.   In the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper made a compelling case for falsifiability as the litmus test of whether a theory is genuinely “scientific”, rather than the “verifiability” of logical positivism.   To be falsifiable and therefore “scientific”, a theory had to be susceptible to being disproven under examination.   A theory that cannot be so falsified, whatever else it might be, is not “scientific”.   Something that is susceptible to falsification, however, cannot be said to be true, or at the very least, it cannot be said to be known to be true.   At the explanatory level, therefore, “science” is neither truth nor true knowledge, heresy though this undoubtedly be to the ears of the liberal “follow the science” crowd.

 

 

The “knowledge” that Modern man values highly over faith is, therefore, a mixture of true knowledge and false knowledge.   Moreover the true knowledge within it, is clearly of a lesser order of knowledge.   Consider the example of nuclear weapons from the previous paragraph.   While the observable facts that are the true knowledge in science were the raw material from which the physicists devised the theories that enabled them to build the atomic bomb these same facts clearly did not provide them with the knowledge that they ought not to have done anything of the sort.   Whether they had that knowledge from other sources and chose willingly to ignore it or whether they did not have it at all is beside the point.   Such knowledge could not have come from the facts of the science of physics themselves.  The knowledge that one ought not to create weapons that can wipe out entire cities with a single blow and threaten all life on earth is a higher and more important kind of knowledge than the lesser and lower knowledge that gives scientists the ability to invent such things.    The knowledge within Modern medical science has enabled doctors to perform organ transplants, blood transfusions, and other life-saving surgeries.   It has not, however, provided them with the knowledge that civil liberties should not be put on hold, police states established, social isolation imposed upon everybody, businesses, livelihoods and savings destroyed to stop a respiratory disease from spreading too fast and overwhelming their hospitals.    Nor has it provided them with the knowledge that first-of-their-kind vaccines that have not completed their clinical trials should not be imposed upon people by threatening them with exclusion from society, loss of employment, and the like until they “consent” to taking the vaccines.   Since, until quite recently, this knowledge was widespread, informing international agreements and laws, it would seem that Modern medical science has had the effect of driving this higher, more important, knowledge out.    

 

Modern man, therefore, has clearly placed far too high a value on scientific knowledge.    In doing so, he has embraced the same kind of error that produced Gnosticism and the same kind of error that brought about the Fall of man.   The testimony of God is the highest possible Truth, and faith in that testimony is the highest path to Truth available to man, superior to all forms of genuine knowledge attainable by human effort, and especially to spurious types of knowledge, or lower kinds of genuine knowledge such as those found in science.

 

 

(1)   John Pearson (1613-1686) was consecrated Bishop of Chester in 1672.   The work referred to was first published in 1659 and was compiled from sermons he had given at St. Clement’s, Eastscheap in London after he had been appointed preacher there five years previously.   It is an explanatory commentary on the Apostles’ Creed that is very thorough, going through the Creed Article by Article, and indeed, clause by clause – sometimes word by word – within the Articles.   Quotations here are taken from the first volume of the 1843 Oxford University Press edition, edited by the Reverend Doctor E. Burton, Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church.   They all come from the exposition of the words “I believe” which begin the first Article, which exposition starts on page 2 and continues to page 22.

(2)   Edward Freer Hills, Believing Bible Study, 3^rd edition, Christian Research Press Ltd., Des Moines, Iowa, 1967, 1991.    Several sections of this book are near identical to ones found in the same author’s The King James Version Defended.   The paragraph quoted is one such paragraph.   Whereas it is the fourth paragraph of the first chapter of Believing Bible Study it is also the second last paragraph of the second chapter of The King James Version Defended.

(3)  One interpretation is that the “knowledge of good and evil” meant to experience both good and evil in man’s own existence, a problem with which interpretation is that God, within Whom there is no evil, affirms that He possesses this knowledge.   Another interpretation is that by expressing the opposite poles of “good” and “evil” this was meant to comprehend everything in between and thus “knowledge of everything” or omniscience was meant.   While this is consistent with God’s describing the knowledge as being like His Own, mankind obviously did not become omniscient in the Fall.

(4)   Apologia Prima, xxvi.

(5)   Adversus Haereses, I.xxiii, IV, VI.xxxiii.

(6)  Refutatio Omnium Haeresium,IV.li and especially VI.ii, iv-xv.

(7)  There is another Latin verb for “know” which is obviously cognate with the Greek word.   This is gnosco, gnoscere, which was frequently used in compounds with many, ahem, recognizable English derivatives, including the one just highlighted, and the one used in the first sentence of this note.  Nevertheless, the functional equivalent of γιγνώσκω was scio.   Both were the primary verbs for knowing in their respective languages.

(8)“Creed” comes from the Latin credo – “I believe”.  The Latin texts of both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds begin with this word, although the plural credimus (“we believe”) is sometimes used.   There is another ancient statement of faith that is commonly called a Creed, the Athanasian.   It does not begin with this word but with “Quicumque vult” (“Whosoever will”).   Its form, therefore, is more properly that of a kerygma – the faith proclaimed as a message for others – than a Creed – the faith expressed as a confession of personal/communal belief.   It is obviously, however, a more precise – in the case of the doctrine of Trinity extremely precise – expansion of the Apostles’ Creed, which is where its common title presumably comes from. 

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part One of Part Two – Evangelical

In the outline of this series at the end of Part One, I had stated that in the second entry we would look at how shifts in the meaning of “evangelical” and “Catholic” have indicated a move away from orthodoxy. In the writing of this second entry it has become apparent that this will require more than one essay. This, therefore, is Part One of Part Two, in which we will look at “evangelical.” Part Two of Part Two will focus on “Catholic.” There will, of course, be overlap, because both semantic shifts point to the same movement away from orthodoxy in evangelical Protestantism.

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers referred to themselves, their teachings, and their followers as “evangelical”. For this reason, in continental Europe the term evangelical is still largely synonymous with “Protestant.” Before looking at how this word has developed different connotations in the English-speaking world and especially North America, we should consider why the Reformers adopted this term in the first place.

Evangelical is a word formed from the Greek word that is usually translated “Gospel” in the New Testament and which literally means “good news.” The Gospel is the kerygma of the Christian faith - the message of good news that Jesus Christ told His disciples to proclaim to the whole world. St. Paul summarized the content of that message in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians – that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of a long list of eyewitnesses culminating in his own. Stated in its fullest, it includes the entire revealed narrative concerning Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Ascension. This is why the books of the New Testament that provide such a narrative are, accordingly, called Gospels.

What, therefore, did the Protestant Reformers mean by calling themselves “evangelical”?

They did not mean to say that they had rediscovered the Gospel after it had been lost. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and indeed His Incarnation and Ascension, are the very heart of the ecumenical or Catholic Creeds that the Church in both its Greek and Latin divisions, had been affirming since the early centuries of Christianity. In both the baptismal (Apostles’) and Eucharistic (Nicene-Constantinopolitan) Creeds these are the found in the second and longest, of the three paragraphs that make up the Creedal confession.

The reason the earliest Reformers, the Magisterial Reformers – Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, et. al., - began referring to their teachings as evangelical was because of their emphasis on the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is just that, “Good News”, for the whole world. In this, they did not see themselves as recovering something that had been long buried beneath the accumulation of centuries of tradition. They saw their understanding of the Gospel as being consistent with rather than opposed to the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church. They saw their opposition as being the papacy – the patriarch of Rome who had usurped jurisdiction far beyond the legitimate confines of his own ecclesiastical province in clear violations of the canons of the early Councils – and his followers. They called the papal doctrines that they opposed “Roman” rather than “Catholic”, insisting that they were fairly recent inventions of the papacy rather than part of the faith that was “quod ubique, quod semper, et quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all”) and therefore “Catholic” as defined by St. Vincent of Lerins.

So what is the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is “Good News”?

The answer to this is spelled out for us by St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans. In this epistle, he declares that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” because “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith” (1:16-17). He then spends the next three and a half chapters explaining what this means, which explanation culminates in another summary statement of the Gospel, that Christ “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” (4:25).

St. Paul begins his explanation with an indictment of the nations of the world for turning away from God to idols, which resulted in their being given over to a depraved mind and wicked practices. He rests this indictment upon God’s having given a sufficient revelation of Himself and His character, including His wrath against wicked and unrighteous behaviour, in His creation as to render all men without an excuse (1:18-32). He then shows that national Israel derives no special advantage in this regard from her having received God’s written Law because unless she obeys the Law it will only condemn her (chapter 2). The “day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” is coming, he warns, and on that day He will “render to every man according to His deeds”, whether good or bad, regardless of whether they be Jew or Gentile and a hypothetical Gentile who lacks the written Law but nevertheless does what is right according to it, will be better off than a Jew, who boasts of the Law, but does not obey it. However, this hypothetical Gentile does not exist, because neither Jews nor Gentiles maintain the righteousness that God requires of man in His Law. With a string of quotations from the Old Testament, St. Paul draws his indictment of the entire world, Jew and Gentile, alike to a close by stating plainly that all have sinned, there is none righteous, that the whole world is guilty before God, and that therefore “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.” No one will be pronounced righteous by God, on account of his having done what is right.

While so far this sounds more like bad – even terrible - news than good, St. Paul then immediately declares that “now”, that is, in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and prophets.” The ‘righteousness of God” so manifested, however, is not the righteousness of God’s wrath against “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, however, but the righteousness by which God counts as righteous all those who believe in Jesus Christ. This is the significance of the Gospel – Christ’s death is both a redemption (a price paid to free someone from bondage, in this case bondage to sin and death) and a propitiation (an offering which satisfies the offended justice of God against sinners) and therefore the grounds upon which God can so credit sinners who believe in Jesus with righteousness without compromising His own justice. (3:22-28).

In his next chapter St. Paul explains justification further by considering the example of Abraham. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God comes to Abram – he would not become Abraham until two chapters later when circumcision was established as the sign of the covenant - in a vision and tells him “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” This is in reference to Abram’s having just turned down the reward offered him by Bera, king of Sodom, for recovering all that had been taken by Chederlaomer of Elam and his confederates when the latter defeated the kings of the Plain of Jordan in the Battle of Siddim. Abram’s response was to ask God what He would give him, hinting heavily as to what he wanted it to be by twice mentioning that he was without child and that his servant, Eliezer of Damascus was his steward and heir. God makes him the promise he is looking for and tells him that “he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels” shall be his heir and that his seed shall be as the stars of heaven in number. Moses then says of Abram that “he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”

St. Paul draws two important conclusions from this. He uses the fact that this took place prior to Abraham’s circumcision to make the point that just as Jew and Gentile are alike sinners, so they are justified before God in the same way, by faith, and that Abraham is the father of all who follow him in being justified by faith, whether circumcised Jews or uncircumcised Gentiles. Before going into this, however, he makes it clear that works are no part of justification in the eyes of God. If Abraham was justified by works, he says, “he hath whereof to glory, but not before God”. That God credited Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness was an act of grace on God’s part – grace meaning favour that is freely bestowed upon its recipients. The justification of sinners in the eyes of God is always an act of grace – and therefore it can never be by works for “to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.”

The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith without works became one of the five famous Solas in which the Reformers summed up their evangelical doctrine. Specifically, it became Sola Fide – by faith alone. In his Lectures on the Psalms of Ascent Dr. Luther declared of this doctrine: “quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia” - “because if that article stands, the Church stands, if it collapses, so collapses the Church.” It accordingly was made prominent in the confessions of all the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation – Article XI of the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article IV of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and Article XXIII of the Reformed Belgic Confession. Against this doctrine, the Romanists asserted a) that it violated Catholic consensus, b) that it added a word “alone” which is never used by St. Paul to qualify “faith” in his writings on justification, and c) that the qualification of justifying faith by “alone” is in fact denied by St. James in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his epistle.

I will defer discussion of the first of these objections to Part Two of Part Two for while it pertains to a significant difference between the sixteenth century evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformation and subsequent evangelicalisms, that difference has to do with their understanding of the Catholic tradition, namely that whereas the Reformers denied that any such break with Catholic consensus had taken place, the later evangelicals affirmed it. The second objection is entirely specious as the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works” which is stated repeatedly and in much stronger language than this by St. Paul in Romans: 3:28; 4:4-8 (note the especially strong wording of verses 5 “to him that worketh not” and 8 “without works”); 9:30-32; and 10:4-10. Similar statements can be found throughout the entire corpus of Pauline literature. As for the third objection, it is quite evident that the Jacobean use of the terms “justification”, “faith” and “works” cannot be the same as the Pauline use of these same terms, for if the two Apostles were using all of these words with the same meaning, they directly contradicted each other. It is entirely defensible to maintain that all three words have different meanings in St. James than they do in St. Paul. It is certain, however, at least for anyone who believes in the verbal, plenary, inspiration of the entire New Testament, which all orthodox Christians do, that St. James means something different by the word “justification” than St. Paul and that the justification that he writes about is not justification before God. St. Paul himself tells us that in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans. (1)

It was because of their insistence on the primacy of the doctrine of justification by faith and not works that the sixteenth century Reformers called themselves “evangelical.” For it meant that the Gospel was just that – the message of the Good News of a salvation already accomplished and completed to be proclaimed to the world in the hearing and believing of which the salvation so proclaimed is personally appropriated by the believer and not a set of instructions as to how people are to save themselves.

Is it not evident that what is called “evangelical” today is radically different from this?

Consider the average “evangelical” formulation of the Gospel today. There are many variations, of course, but they all tend to follow this three part pattern. The first part is to present people with the Scriptural truth that all of us are sinners and cannot achieve the righteousness which God requires of us through our own works. The second part is to present the Gospel message itself – that God has given us His Only-Begotten Son to be our Saviour, Who died for our sins on the cross and rose again from the dead. So far this is in accordance with Scripture, Catholic orthodoxy, and the evangelical doctrines of the Reformers. The first part is what the Reformers called the message of the Law, the second part the message of the Gospel. The third part of the contemporary evangelical formulation, however, is to present the step – or steps, this detail is where all the variation comes in – that the individual must take to personally appropriate the offered salvation.

The wide variety of ways in which this step is presented is itself a huge problem because it generates confusion. Expressions such as “invite Jesus into your heart”, “accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour”, “make a commitment to Christ”, etc. are manifestly NOT different ways of saying the same thing and if one attempts to argue otherwise he is likely to end up proving merely that none of them mean anything at all. Moreover, to make these things into steps that one must take to appropriate Christ’s salvation AFTER one has heard and believed the Gospel is to teach salvation by works. As Orthodox Presbyterian Bible scholar Dr. Edward F. Hills put it:

And this would imply that we are saved not by believing but by a receiving which is different from believing, by a "yielding" to Christ perhaps, or a "surrendering" to Him, or a "turning over of our lives" to Him. But all this is salvation by works and contrary to the Bible. For the Scriptures plainly teach that to receive Christ as Saviour is to believe on Him. (The King James Version Defended, 4th edition, 1984, p. 184, bold indicating italics in original)

Sometimes, however, the step is presented as to “believe in Jesus Christ” or to “trust Jesus Christ” which expressions do mean the same thing. As the late Missouri Lutheran pastor John M. Drickamer put it:

What is faith? Faith is belief and faith is trust. Faith is believing the facts of the Gospel: God the Son, died for my sin and rose again from the dead; for His sake God has forgiven all my sins, so that I will not be damned to hell but welcomed into heaven forever. Faith is trusting God that this forgiveness is real because of Christ. There is no difference between faith as belief and faith as trust. Trusting a person to drive safely is the same as believing that he is a safe driver. (What is the Gospel? It is Finished, 1991, p. 2)

It is, of course, true to say that faith – believing the Gospel, trusting Jesus Christ – is how we appropriate the salvation God freely gives to ourselves. This is the role assigned to faith in God’s order of salvation. As the Right Reverend Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, nineteenth century Bishop of Lincoln, helpfully explained, St. Paul represents our faith neither as the principal cause, meritorious cause, efficient cause nor instrumental cause in God’s hand of our justification, for these are, respectively, God’s mercy, Christ’s death, the gracious operation of God the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Sacraments and Ministry of the Word, but rather:

He represents Faith as the instrument on our side, by which we rely on God’s word, and appeal to Him for mercy, and receive a grant of pardon, and a title to the Evangelical promises from God. (The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Original Greek: With Notes by Christopher Wordsworth D.D., Part III – St. Paul’s Epistles, 1859, p. 200)

To present the appropriation of salvation by faith as a step to be taken after one has heard the Gospel and been persuaded of its truth is a distortion, however. Faith is precisely the condition of the heart that ensues from being persuaded of the truth of the Gospel and not a further step, an act of the will, to be taken in response to said persuasion. The Gospel, properly presented, as the sixteenth century Evangelical Reformers understood, directs the repentant sinner’s focus away from himself and makes it to rest in faith upon Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God, crucified for us and risen again. By presenting faith as a step to be taken by an act of the will after one has been persuaded of the truth of the Gospel, contemporary Evangelical Gospel formulae redirect that focus onto ourselves.

In the English-speaking world, the term “evangelical” has come to refer to the subcategory of Protestants who present the Gospel in this way. It has taken on this meaning through a series of historical steps. The first of these took place in the seventeenth century when the Dortian Calvinists who did not separate from the Church of England after the Restoration began to use the label “evangelical” for their own party within the Church. Thus “evangelical” became, for a time, synonymous with “Calvinist”, which was a more limited usage than in the sixteenth century when it included all branches of Magisterial Protestantism. In the eighteenth century, however, there was a further shift in the meaning of the term when it came to be associated with the revival movement represented by both George Whitefield (Calvinist) and John Wesley (Arminian). Since Wesley differed from Whitefield on precisely the doctrines by which the seventeenth century Anglican evangelicals had designated their party, this demonstrates that in the eighteenth century the label evangelical had come to distinguish its referents more by a common experience than by a common doctrine. This became even more obvious in the early nineteenth century, a period in which the most prominent American evangelical preacher was Charles G. Finney. Finney’s doctrine was heretical by the standards of Calvinists and Arminians alike. Indeed, it was heretical by much broader standards than these. Finney came very close to Pelagianism, if he was not actually a true Pelagian, in his rejection of Original Sin. This placed him outside the orthodoxy of all three branches of the Magisterial Reformation – see Article IX of the Articles of Religion, Article II of the Augsburg Confession, and Article III of the Belgic Confession. Indeed, it placed him outside of the orthodoxy of Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for Pelagianism was condemned as heresy in the early centuries long before the Greek, Latin and English branches of the Church broke fellowship with each other. (2) It was with Finney, however, that the term evangelical finally arrived at a meaning recognizable as that of the present day. Having an identifiable conversion experience, understood primarily in terms of a change in one’s life and behaviour, came to be the distinguishing mark of the evangelical.

Moreover, Finney seems to have been the first to have translated the Gospel into the language of technique. By the language of technique, I mean the kind of language used in an instruction manual. A series of steps explaining the irreducible minimum of the correct procedure towards achieving a particular end. This language is the language of modern science and technology, and the product of rationalism. By the last century it had so permeated every field of knowledge that it came under the heavy critique of such thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Jacques Ellul and George Grant. In the nineteenth century is was most evident in the writings of Charles Finney with regards to the conversion of sinners, leading to the criticism that his theology of evangelism was so mechanical and anthropocentric that, in B. B. Warfield’s words, “God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character.” The contemporary evangelical presentation of the Gospel discussed above, while not as susceptible to the charge of having made God irrelevant, nevertheless has its discernible origins in his mechanical, technical, approach to making converts.

In the sixteenth century, evangelical designated the doctrine of justification by faith and not works, the doctrine that God, through events of the Gospel, the death for our sins and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ, had accomplished the salvation of the world so that all who believe in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel are pardoned of their sins and credited with a righteousness that is given to them freely rather than earned through their efforts. It was primarily doctrinal – about the truths which God has revealed in the Gospel in His Word – rather than experiential. Through the changes this term underwent between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this was reversed and it became primarily experiential rather than doctrinal – about our experiences rather than about the truths of God as revealed in His Word.

This itself is an indication of a move away from orthodoxy. The truths which God has revealed in His Word are stable and unchanging. Human experience is ever shifting and changing. Remember the illustration with which Christ ended His famous Sermon on the Mount. God’s truths are a safe foundation to build upon. Personal experience is not. This does not mean that experience is not important, but it very much means that sound doctrine must take primacy over personal experience. When this is reversed in the basic meaning of an important theological label it does not speak well of the orthodoxy of the movement bearing that label. Note that none of this should be taken as meaning any particular individual values personal experience over sound doctrine merely because he calls himself an evangelical.

This change also indicates a shift in the ranking of the doctrines of salvation. The sixteenth century evangelical Reformers awarded the primacy to justification. The Romanists, as we shall discuss in Part Two of Part Two, maintained that this was a departure from Catholic orthodoxy which granted sanctification equality with justification, if not awarding it the primacy. Contemporary evangelicalism, going back to Finney, and some might argue even to Wesley, would seem to award the primacy to regeneration, at least in practice. In doing so, however, they have radically changed the meaning of the new birth. Whenever the new birth is mentioned in the Scriptures it is described as a sovereign act of God (John 1:13; 3:8), operating through His instrumental means of His Word (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23) and baptism (Romans 6:3-5; Colossians 2:12, Titus 3:5), independent of the will of the recipients. In contemporary evangelical theology the new birth is depicted as an experience that you can bring about by following a prescribed set of steps. This is pretty much the complete opposite of how it is presented in the Scriptures. We shall look at this further in Part Two of Part Two.

(1) Note also that the word “grace” does not appear in St. James’ discussion of justification. Whatever St. James means by “justification” it is by works and not by grace and ergo not the same “justification” of which St. Paul writes in Romans.

(2) There are some who would maintain that the Greek branch of the Church – the Eastern Orthodox – is Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian. Those who take this position are generally either strong Calvinists who mean it as a criticism of Eastern Orthodoxy or the type of person I referred to in Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One – Orthodoxy when I said “there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church.” Either way, what they are saying is a distortion of the fact that the Eastern and Western branches of the Church were beginning to diverge already in the days of St. Augustine and that the Eastern Church never embraced Augustinianism. This does not mean that it accepted a form of Pelagianism or dissented from the condemnation of such as heresy by the pre-Schismatic Church. The kind of reasoning that would equate non-Augustinianism with Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism is the same kind that argues that if you are not a Calvinist then you must be an Arminian or vice versa. It is invalid in either case. The Greek Church’s problem with Augustinianism was not with the idea that we have all inherited a broken, fallen, sinful nature from Adam. It was with the idea that we have inherited his guilt for the specific sin committed by Adam and Eve. Pelagianism requires the denial of the former as well as the latter. These ideas can be distinguished as “Original Sin” and “Original Guilt” although the lack of consistent usage has led to much confusion.