Faith and Christian faith (1)
The faith of the NT Church is faith in Jesus Christ and nothing less than that. Christians are not in the business along with other decent people and clubs and movements to make people kinder and nicer and more law-abiding. The Church is not to say to all these other socially useful people, “Look, we recognize that we’re in the same business only we believe we have the best programme and the greatest source of inspiration—Jesus Christ—so we urge you to join our movement and the world will be a better place.”
Christians are not in the same business as non-Christians. They don’t have a programme that’s tailored to make a better society even though it’s true that if a person becomes a true Christian he/she will be fervent in righteousness, compassion and helpful generosity.
No matter who has it, Christians need not deny that faith in God is real; but what they cannot say is that faith in God that rejects faith in Jesus is Christian! It is not! The Hebrew writer would never have dreamed of denying the rich faith of his fellow-Jews who lived before Jesus came; in fact, he extolled it (see Hebrews 11), but he insisted that with the coming of Jesus the faith that God now called for from Jews was faith in God in and through Jesus Christ(compare 1 Peter 1:21’s repetition)—it was Jesus Christ-shaped faith. Less than that, whatever else it was it wasn’t Christian. Now it might not matter if faith is not Christ-shaped but there’s no point in claiming that a faith in God that refuses to be faith in God through Jesus Christ is the same as Christian faith.
The believing men and women of Hebrews 11 committed to God in faith in terms of God’s self-disclosure up to the point before Christ came but with the coming of Jesus God revealed himself as never before and he called those Jews who were confronted with that self-revelation in Jesus to commit to him in a new way of faith. You simply can’t read Acts 2—4, 7 and 13 without seeing that the gospellers called people who had believed in God to come to faith in God in and through Jesus Christ.
The believing heart that devoted itself to God prior to Jesus’ public manifestation and/or the gospel of Jesus did not cease to be a believing heart; no, it now saw God in a new way and the God it had always embraced was now embraced in the person of Jesus.
[to be continued, God enabling]
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.