![\"\"](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_U6PRHs8v-Yg\/TUZs4ePaFOI\/AAAAAAAAAAc\/2_oOAZiUvnY\/s1600\/faith-on-bible.jpg\")
We had already read part of Paul Tillich\u2019s classic The Dynamics of Faith<\/em>, and so students were aware of the possibility of other ways of thinking about faith.<\/p>\nIf one says it comes down to faith, does that mean faith in the sense of simply believing that the stories in the Bible are historically\/factually true? Or faith in the sense of believing that the stories are meaningful and significant even if not literal depictions of actual events? Or faith in God in the sense of trust in spite of not knowing quite what to do with the stories in question?<\/p>\n
Often when someone gets to the point of talking about needing to \u201cjust have faith\u201d in practice it means simply to accept a way of interpreting texts that one had previously been told to.<\/p>\n
If we consider the story in Genesis 3, for instance, if \u201cjust having faith\u201d is taken to mean \u201cbelieving that a snake really talked even though I have never experienced such a thing today and would seek professional help if I did,\u201d what the person is actually doing is \u201cjust having faith\u201d not in what the story says, but that those who told them that they must treat the story as a historical account in spite of knowing in all other cases what sort of literature they are dealing with if it includes an animal that talks.<\/p>\n
And so \u201cjust having faith\u201d in many instances turns out to be neither \u201cjust having faith in God<\/em>\u201d or \u201cjust having faith in the Bible<\/em>\u201d but just having faith in other people\u2019s judgment about the appropriate way to interpret the Bible<\/em>.<\/p>\n People are free to \u201cjust have faith\u201d in this sense, but I suspect that for many, it will be appropriate and helpful to point out to them what the actual object of their faith is in such cases. They may not have realized.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In one of my classes, after discussing a number of difficulties and issues related to the creation stories in Genesis, a student chimed in that sooner or later one simply has to have faith. I didn\u2019t disagree, but instead asked: What sort of faith, and faith in what? We had already read part of Paul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[903,1086,1140,1148,1846,3329,3675,6621,8843],"class_list":["post-1836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","tag-authority","tag-belief","tag-bible","tag-biblical","tag-christianity-religion","tag-faith","tag-fundamentalism-religion","tag-literalism","tag-paul-tillich"],"yoast_head":"\n