Not by sight
Is faith ever blind? | Favorite verses part 5
Can “faith” be part of life for an individual in the modern world?
It depends on what you mean.
Christians are commonly called foolish because of our “blind faith,” which requires us to accept certain propositions regardless of the evidence (or lack thereof). One definiton of faith, provided by Oxford Languages (via Google), calls it “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.”
I don’t think that’s very charitable, though.
Part of the social imaginary of the post-Enlightenment world is the belief that, through scientific progress, we’ve transcended the need to believe anything there’s not falsifiable data for. If a question can’t be answered using the traditional scientific method, was it even worth asking to begin with?
From this perspective, anyone who might affirm something not yet confirmed through these approved processes appears, at best, starry-eyed and naive or, at worst, ignorant and unyielding.
You and I both know that’s not true though. So, how do we answer that claim? What does it mean to walk by faith?
Favorite verses part 5: 2 Corinthians 5:7
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.
2 Corinthians 5:1-7
Though it may be easy to read verse seven in a vacuum and assume that Paul’s prescribing a belief that ignores evidence, I want to pay special attention to the argument he’s making here.
These verses are situated amidst a meditation of sorts on the nature of true Strength. “Though our outer self is wasting away,” Paul says in 4:16, “our inner self is being renewed day by day.” The process is painful, and believers always have the challenge of unmet desires to contend with.
Yet, we know that what we long for is attainable, that it’s a desire placed into our hearts by the Creator himself, a desire that he himself has the power and intention to fulfill. We don’t know that because of a good feeling or because someone else has told us and we decided to believe without questioning; we have the Holy Spirit as a guarantee.
So, the faith that we walk by is only blind insofar as we haven’t yet seen with our eyes the resurrection body that we long for. It’s not inherently foolish or naive to believe something without seeing it with my own eyes; I’ve never been to Paris, but have no reason to doubt the existence of the Eiffel Tower on that basis.
With that, I have two more reasons that the faith of a Christian isn’t blind:
1. We have an explicit, concrete hope
The faith of a believer isn’t just a generic, nonspecific dream or gut feeling that “things will get better” or “it’ll be okay.”
I think this is one spot of many where pop culture Christianity and actual Christian doctrine diverge. The goal of the Christian life isn’t simply to get to a disembodied heaven where we entertain ourselves by playing harps and singing hymns forever. It’s easy to understand why that could be seen as foolish—it’s not warranted Biblically, and there’s no precedent for it in anything we experience now.
The Christian hope is so much more than that. Our destiny is to follow Christ through death and into the resurrection of the body and reconciliation with the Father. The hope of eternal life is specific and explicit; since Christ conquered death, “the last enemy to be destroyed,” and since he is the archetype of true humanity, his existence is the pattern we are to follow, in life and in afterlife.
2. We have millennia of evidence and the rational faculties to study it
Have you considered the immense blessing it is to have fingertip access to not only the Bible in its entirety and in a multitude of translations and languages, but also commentaries, writings from church fathers, and the thoughts of generations of faithful believers?
The modern world is replete with challenges, but I am often in awe of the easy, quick access I have to the word of God and his people at virtually all times. It hasn’t always been this good! In the centuries before the printing press, books were a luxury reserved for the wealthy; even literacy wasn’t guaranteed for the average non-noble.
I might be digressing. But my point is that modern believers have more access to the foundational documents of our faith than anyone who came before us. (You can read the Didache on your lunch break!) If there was ever an opportunity to seek out the “proof” for our beliefs, it’s now, when the source material is accessible to anyone who has internet access.
Not only that—but the “great cloud of witnesses” a la Hebrews 12 keeps growing.
Your doubts and questions, though possibly new to you, are not new to God and they are not new to the great parade of believers who have walked before you. There’s a reason that you’re alive here and now—find strength in this fellowship of believers.
Faith is not a blind exercise. It’s the word we use for belief in something we haven’t seen or experienced—yet—but have good reasons to think that we will. And ultimately, our faith isn’t in doctrine or scriptural interpretation, but in the God who transcends it all. Faith in a perfectly loving, perfectly holy, perfectly perfect God cannot and will not return void.
From the archives:
A visual reminder:
