We believe…
But what is it to believe?
To believe in the God described in the Creed, to have saving faith in the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, involves three acts: knowing, assenting, and trusting. If a thing remains wholly unknown to me, then I cannot believe in it. To believe in the triune God first requires that I have knowledge of Him. This is how Paul establishes the necessity of preaching: ‘How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?’ (Rom. 10:14). God must be encountered before He can be believed, and He is encountered in the proclamation of the gospel. Apart from it, we cannot get even to the knowledge that is the first act of faith. Or at least anyone beyond infancy cannot: David does speak of believing in the womb (Ps. 22:9-10), so things can work differently for infants, as they did for John the Baptist too, who was filled with the Spirit and rejoiced at the presence of the unborn Jesus (Luke 1:15;44). Infants are evidently able to have what Reformed theologians have called ‘seed’ or ‘root’ faith. We may think the same of people with impaired mental capacity. For everyone else, hearing the word is the prerequisite for belief.
Faith is only possible because of revelation. At this point it is worth pausing to ponder how it is that God can reveal Himself to us. God’s self-revelation depends on His self-knowledge. That may sound complex, so let me put it more simply: God can reveal Himself to us because He first knows Himself inside-out. If He did not know Himself He could not reveal Himself; He might even misrepresent Himself. We struggle to understand ourselves (‘Why did I wake up feeling like that?’), but God knows Himself fully and flawlessly. The Holy Spirit ‘searches everything, even the depths of God’ (1 Cor. 2:10). Why does this matter? Because it reminds us that revelation is all God’s work that rests on His knowledge of Himself because of who He is in Himself. It is not that we have the power to search out and discover God, as we might search out a new element or galaxy. We are humbled as we grasp that our knowledge of God rests on His own prior knowledge of Himself.
On the basis of God’s self-knowledge we can have knowledge of Him. To knowledge we must then add assent: we agree in our minds that God is truly who He says He is.
At that point, you might think, someone has become a Christian; they have believed the truth of the gospel. But they have not believed it in the sense in which Scripture speaks of saving faith. It is possible to assent mentally to the truths of the Creed, and yet not to have saving faith. I am thinking of the words of James: ‘You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!’ (James 2:19). There is nothing of any great spiritual significance in thinking that the truths stated in the Creed are true. Knowledge and assent do not amount to saving faith.
It is easy to miss this point. When so many people around us hold that the faith outlined in the Creed is not true, it can feel like a great hurdle has been surmounted when we get to the point of holding that they are. But it is not enough. A non-Christian friend said to me that he believed that everything I was telling him from Scripture was true, but he would not become a Christian. It was a chilling moment, but in that moment he was a better theologian than we sometimes are: he knew that mere mental assent is not enough. ‘We believe’ must mean more than knowledge and assent. That more, ‘trust’, we will consider next month.
