What faith is not
November 27, 2025
The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. […]
One believes one piece of information is correct. One believes that a scientific theory is adequate for the understanding of a series of facts. One believes that a person will act in a specific way.
The Christian may believe in the Bible writers, but not unconditionally. He does not have faith in them. He should not even have faith in the Bible. For faith is more than trust in an authority [or knowledge with a low degree of evidence]. It is participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being. […]
Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to pre-scientific or scientific knowledge of our world, whether we know it through direct knowledge [sense perception] or through the experiences of others. […]
Almost all the struggles between faith and knowledge are rooted in the wrong understanding of faith as a type of knowledge which has a low degree of evidence. […]
The certitude of faith is “existential”, meaning that the whole existence of man is involved. It has two elements: a certainty about one’s own being, namely one’s being related to something ultimate or unconditional; the other, namely the surrender to a concern which is not really ultimate and may be destructive if taken as ultimate. […]
The difficulty of understanding faith as a matter of intellect has led to the interpretation of faith as emotion. This solution was supported by both the religious and the secular side. For religion it was a retreat to a seemingly safe position after the battle of faith as knowledge. For the other side, it was readily accepted because they took it as the best way to get rid of interference from religion in the process of scientific research. […]
Neither of the two sides, the religious and the cultural [secular], could keep this well-defined covenant of peace. […]
It [faith] does not accept the situation “in the corner” of mere feeling. If the whole person is grasped, all his functions are grasped. […] It was not only religion which could not accept the restriction of faith to feeling. It was also not accepted by those who wanted to push religion into the emotional corner. Scientists, artists, moralists show clearly that they also were ultimately concerned. […]
Certainly faith, as an act of the whole personality, has strong emotional elements within it. […] But emotion is not the source of faith. Faith is definite in its direction and concrete in its content. […] It is directed towards the unconditional and appears in a concrete reality that demands and justifies such commitments.
~ Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, Chapter2
