Faith and Knowing What You Know

Spirituality Column #218
January 11, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Faith and Knowing What You Know
By Bob Walters

Simon Peter evidently was the first of the 12 apostles to catch on to who Jesus really was.

In Matthew 16:16, Mark 8:29 and Luke 9:20, St. Peter identifies Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Peter knew the truth not because someone told him. He knew because … well, he just knew.

Isn’t our faith still that way? We simply “know.” Like Peter, we see things we can’t explain. We feel things we can’t explain. We do things we can’t explain. We understand things we can’t explain.

Faith in Jesus Christ is a completely knowable, experiential, real, absolute, moral, living relationship, but trying to explain it falls short of proving it. Why is that?

The key is the next verse, Matthew 16:17. Jesus explains that Peter’s faith “was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” Maybe we can’t “prove it” to others because we’re not supposed to; because our faith in Christ comes from God. Faith is in our own hearts because God put it there, not because some human argued it into us.

The historical wave of mankind’s own knowledge hinders faith, too. The Classical Greek influence in epistemology – the study of how knowledge is formed and known – has urged the Western world to “prove it” for the past 2,500 years.

Thanks to the lasting intellectual influence of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, if we can’t prove something by talking about it or showing evidence, then what we have is an opinion, not the truth; certainly not The Truth – the ultimate, inviolable, objective Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

When Hebrew Jesus showed up, he threw the Greek knowledge of knowledge entirely out of round. It wasn’t the intellectual elites who first identified the Truth. It was the simple, hot-headed, uneducated, until-then unspecial Jewish fisherman Peter who first understood what the anointed John the Baptist (not John the Apostle) had been saying all along … that Jesus was the Christ, the living Son of the Creator God.

We possess Truth not because a human argued it, but because God’s word demands it, Christ’s sacrifice proves it, the Holy Spirit reveals it, and my heart and mind know it. Jesus wasn’t here to argue His case with the Socratic Method.

When our faith and God’s Truth join forces, relax. There’s nothing left to prove.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) loves a good debate, but is thankful the Holy Spirit does the heavy lifting where faith is concerned.