My take on faith in Christianity

[Lux Aeterna]

Hi everyone. I wanted to talk a little bit about one feature of Christianity that really attracted me to it, and that's the nature of faith.

I think that, as a society, we're inclined to shy away from faith and instead stay undecided on uncertain matters. That's reasonable and I can see the logic to it. When I was new to Christianity, faith was the one sticking point that I had a hard time getting past. I asked, like many others do, why God doesn't just give us definitive proof of his existence so we don't have to take it on faith. That's a major argument from atheists as well. I'm sure you've heard that argument many times before so I won't rehash it.

I was troubled by that until I realized that faith is the glue that makes Christianity possible on all levels. You see, one thing that attracted me to Christianity was the doctrine of parallelism. For example, the Bible says: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." (1 John 3:16). Just as we ought to lay down our life for our brothers because Jesus laid down his life for us, we need to have faith in our brothers just as we have faith in Jesus.

This is because if you distrust a man, you will surely come to dislike him. You can't love your brother while simultaneously having no faith in him. You need to believe that he will do the right thing or else you can never feel safe in treating him appropriately. If we don't have faith in our brothers, we can't have faith in Jesus. Faith is the glue that ties together all the relationships that are important in the Christian religion.

The Bible talks about being pure inside and out; speak good things, think good thoughts, do good acts. If you fail in one of those areas, you will be brought down all around. Similarly, you must have faith inside and out: both for your brothers and for Jesus. If you lack one, you begin to lack the other.

That's why I think faith is so essential in Christianity.