The Heidelberg Catechism is a confession of Reformed churches of Dutch and German extraction. It defines faith as not only a certain knowledge whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in His Word, but also a hearty trust which the Holy Ghost works in me by the Gospel, that not only to others, but to me also, forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. We are all familiar with the idea that faith is trust in Christ. We are perhaps less familiar with the idea that faith is knowledge by which we hold everything written in the Word to be true. I want to use this second article on faith to say a few things about that.
We have three means of knowing things. The first is by our own observation, the perception of our own senses. We call it empirical knowledge, and it is the kind of knowledge by which we recognize our family and friends. We have heard their voices, seen their faces and other bodily characteristics, observed their behavior, and we can put all that knowledge together to say, “That is John.” The second way of knowing is reason. From things that we already know we draw conclusions. Thus we may say, “The car is gone, and my wife is not answering me when I call. I guess that she is not home.” The third way of knowing is to believe what someone else says. Most of our knowledge of history comes to us in this way. Thus, we believe that George Washington was leader of the Continental Army not because we observed it for ourselves or arrived at it through a process of reasoning, but because it is what others (in this case many others) have said.
Note the word “believe” there. That is faith. We tend to think of faith as believing what we do not have evidence for. So, we talk about a “leap of faith,” or we say “I believe that Jane wrote that,” meaning that our opinion in this matter is somewhat doubtful. But faith is sometimes based on very strong evidence. Few, if any, would doubt General Washington’s leadership in the Revolutionary War. We have the testimony of many reliable witnesses. We believe those witnesses.
The same is true of saving faith. It is based on the evidence of many reliable witnesses. The first and most important of these witnesses is God himself, who has spoken in his word. He is the one who is absolutely true, whose word is entirely reliable. But the apostle Paul also talks, in 1 Corinthians 15, about the witnesses of Christ’s resurrection. We have the testimony of over five hundred people that they had seen the risen Lord. John says in 1 John 1:1 that he and the other apostles bore witness of what they had heard with their ears, seen with eyes, and handled with their hands.
Our faith has other evidence to support it too, and this evidence comes from both the realms of observation and reason. The heavens declare the glory of God. God has fulfilled many prophecies spoken thousands of years ago. Abraham has become the father of many nations. Enemies of Israel have been destroyed just as the prophets predicted. The suffering servant was despised and rejected by men, was wounded for our transgressions and has justified many. Archaeology has confirmed Biblical accounts that many once rejected as mere fable. There is an amazing internal consistency in the teachings of Scripture, even though many different people delivered them over hundreds of years. The fundamental character of faith, then, is believing the testimony of God and of faithful witnesses in the Scriptures, but many other things support this testimony. Faith is not a leap in the dark, but a reasonable response to the overwhelming testimony of many witnesses, our own and others’ observations, and good and necessary conclusions drawn from these. Faith is a well-grounded conviction of the truth of all that God has revealed in his word. It is knowledge