The Necessity of Objective Assent in the Act of Christian Faith

By Timothy Paul Jones

[Timothy Paul Jones is Pastor, First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills, Tulsa, Oklahoma.]

Since the Reformation, theologians have viewed saving faith as simultaneously encompassing three components—notitia, assensus, and fiducia.[1] In notitia the individual becomes aware of the conditions, promises, and events that constitute divine revelation, especially the events surrounding God’s consummate self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In assensus the individual expresses objective confidence in the truthfulness of these claims (Rom. 10:9; Heb. 11:3, 6; 1 John 5:1). In fiducia the individual places his or her personal trust in Jesus Christ. Central to this threefold model is a single key assumption: Faith, as presented in the New Testament, necessarily entails the recognition and acceptance of specific, objective content.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith is virtually unknown among evangelical theologians, but he is widely renowned in the field of comparative religions. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Smith taught religion classes at Harvard University and the University of Toronto until his death in February 2000. In The Meaning and End of Religion and Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them, Smith argued that when properly used the terms translated by the English words “faith” and “belief” excluded the recognition and acceptance of objective content.[2] According to Smith, whether an individual assented to specific cognitive claims was never “a matter of final human destiny” for premodern people.[3] It is therefore “a mistranslation to render any word in the Christian scriptures by the English terms ‘belief,’ ‘believe’; those concepts not being found in the Bible.”[4]

An Overview of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s View

According to Smith to believe or to have faith meant to regard another person with “a certain ultimate loyalty” and to set one’s heart on a relationship with that person.[5] The essence of this faith was personal engagement that did not demand assent to any objective or propositional assertions. “Contrary to modern impressions,” Smith concluded, “the classical creeds of the Church include no propositional statements… Believing is not what in those centuries Baptism and the Creeds were about.”[6]

Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment the meaning of “believe” and “belief” (and to a lesser extent “faith”) shifted, according to Smith, from an expression of personal loyalty to the acceptance of certain facts as true. By the late nineteenth century only the word “faith” had retained any fragments of the premodern implication of an ultimate, personal loyalty that requires no assent to specific assertions. “The modern world has to rediscover… what it means to have faith, to be faithful, to care, to trust, to cherish, to be loyal, to commit oneself: to rediscover what ‘believe’ used to mean.”[7]

In an attempt to recover the premodern meaning of faith Smith suggested that “faith” and “belief” should be more sharply distinguished in contemporary usage. He defined “belief” as personal assent to and confidence in the veracity and validity of specific, objective assertions. But he said “faith” describes what he understood as the premodern definition of “faith” and “belief”—personal loyalty that requires no intellectual or propositional assent.[8]

Smith derived primary proof for his observations from Protocatechesis, a fourth-century baptismal rite attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem. The crux of this baptismal rite was not, Smith claimed, assent to any assertions about God. It was, instead, “authenticity of purpose: a genuine intent to move from the old life to the new, a determination to turn from ‘the world’ to Christ.”[9] The word credo, Smith stated, “is a compound from cor, cordis, ‘heart’… plus -do, ‘put, place, set,’ also ‘give.’… There would seem little question but that as a crucial term used at a crucial moment in a crucial liturgical act of personal engagement—namely Christian baptism—credo came close to its root meaning of ‘I set my heart on.’… [The] concern is about passing from…an involvement in one order to a committed involvement in another. It is not at all a question of moving from non-belief to belief.”[10]

Smith did not deny the presence or the necessity of confident assent in what he called “faith.” Faith, he said, is “secondary to, derivative from, [and] answerable to, transcendent reality and truth.”[11] From Smith’s perspective, however, the core belief that comprises the content of faith is not assent to any corpus of assertions; it is instead allegiance to truth as a transcendent principle. Because the content of this faith is neither objective nor specific, Smith could state that “there is no reason, in the modern world, why in principle an intelligent and informed Jew or Muslim and an intelligent and informed Christian, and indeed an intelligent and informed and sensitive atheistic humanist…should have different beliefs. Yet also there is no reason why they should not continue to live in terms of their differing symbols.”[12]

In the fields of comparative religions, the history of religions, and the psychology of religion the results of Smith’s research have been widely received—even revered—with no apparent reservations. The promotional copy from a recent compendium of Smith’s research declares, “Wilfred Cantwell Smith is so renowned that the discipline of comparative religion is divided by some into areas described as ‘pre’ or ‘post’ Cantwell Smith. He is the author most frequently cited in books on comparative religion and appears on every reading list for students of religious studies.”[13] According to structural-developmental theorist James W. Fowler, “Smith is one of the very few students in the history of religion who has the linguistic competence to study most of the major religious traditions in the languages of their primary sources. For nearly two decades he has devoted himself to, among other things, the task of researching and interpreting the contribution each of the central world religious traditions makes to our understanding of faith.”[14]

The primary difference between faith as understood by evangelical Christians and what Smith called faith is the necessity of assent to specific content within the act of faith. The New Testament indicates that if an individual compromises or denies certain assertions about God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, the resultant confession is something other than Christian faith (see, e.g., 1 John 4:3, 15; 5:1–5; 2 John 1:7).

According to Smith’s research, however, the idea that faith might require assent to specific content is a modern notion that would have been alien to the original readers of the New Testament. In fact he stated that the terms translated “faith,” “belief,” and “believe” in the Scriptures and in the early Christian creeds could not connote the acceptance of certain assertions as true when these documents were written.[15]

Smith’s research, virtually unknown among evangelicals, represents the theoretical construct underlying the pluralism currently promoted in the broader field of comparative religions. While contemporary evangelicalism has struggled passionately against the symptoms of this pluralistic understanding of faith, the theoretical cornerstone on which pluralism rests has seldom been addressed. Smith’s conclusions, however, cannot be ignored. If his claims are correct, the concept of Christian faith that evangelicals understand to be taught in the New Testament is a fallacy.

Problems in Smith’s Understanding of the Meaning of “Faith” and “Belief”

As already noted, according to Smith “faith,” “belief,” and “believe” in the Bible denote personal allegiance (“I believe [have faith] in”) but not assent to specific assertions (“I believe [have faith] that”).

Smith made similar claims with reference to patristic writers and medieval theologians.[16] Building on Smith’s claims, Fowler has written, “For the ancient Jew or Christian to have said, ‘I believe there is a God,’ or ‘I believe God exists,’ would have been a strange circumlocution. The being or existence of God was taken for granted and therefore not an issue.”[17]

Such claims, however, require highly selective readings of the Scriptures and of the theologians of the early church. In Smith’s primary works he never fully analyzes the terms for “faith,” “belief,” and “believe”—πιστεύειν and its cognates—in the New Testament and in the writings of the postapostolic theologians. His analysis of Christian faith in Faith and Belief begins not with the New Testament but with the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem, more than two centuries after the completion of the New Testament.

The Meaning of Pisteúein in Ancient Writers

An analysis of the use of πιστεύειν in the apostolic writings reveals that the faith of the earliest Christians was not only a matter of having faith in a person but also a matter of believing that certain assertions were true—believing, for example, that God exists, that God created the cosmos, that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that Jesus is the Savior (Rom. 10:9; 1 Thess. 4:14; Heb. 11:1–6; 1 John 5:1–5). In the Septuagint πιστεύειν repeatedly implied assent to specific historical and ontological assertions (see, e.g., Gen. 45:26; Exod. 4:5, 8–9; 1 Kings 10:7; Job 9:16; 15:22; Ps. 26:13 [Eng., 27:13]). The second-century church leader Clement of Alexandria expanded on these assumptions regarding faith. “For Clement… faith [was] that which is taught by God, through Christ, in a written revelation.”[18]

This understanding of faith was also present in the Greek patristic writings. In a crucial passage from his catechetical writings, Cyril of Jerusalem—the theologian from whom Smith claimed to have derived primary proof for his theses—clarified what he meant when he used the term “faith.” (All quotations from Greek and Latin authors have been translated from the primary source materials. Although Cyril originally wrote in Greek, his writings circulated in Greek and Latin. Key phrases and references from both languages have therefore been inserted in the following translation.)

The term “faith” is…one word, yet it has two meanings: One kind of faith concerns doctrine. It involves the soul’s rising to and accepting some particular point [Greek, συγκατάθεσις, “assent to something credible”], and it is profitable for the soul… For if you will have faith that [Latin, credideris quod] Jesus Christ is the Lord and that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved and will be transported into paradise by the same one who brought the thief into paradise…

The other kind of faith,…given by the Holy Spirit as a special favor, is not only doctrinal but it also produces effects beyond any human capacity… Whenever anyone speaks in faith, having faith that it will come to pass, without doubting in his heart, he receives that grace…

In learning and professing faith, acquire and maintain only that which is now delivered to you by the church and which is built up strongly from all the Scriptures. Since all cannot read the Scriptures,…so that the soul may not perish because of ignorance, we hand down all of the doctrine of faith in a few lines… Be careful, brothers! Hold tightly to the things-handed-down that you now receive![19]

Despite Smith’s claims to the contrary, the use of credere and πιστεύειν in this passage suggests that Cyril’s understanding of faith specifically included assent to objective claims.

Classical Greek authors, including Homer, Plato, and Xenophon, employed πιστεύειν and its cognates to describe the trustworthiness of the statements in a treaty. Later Greek authors, such as Plutarch and Plotinus, used πιστεύειν when discussing the existence or nonexistence of the pagan deities.[20] Again πιστεύειν implied assent to specific claims.

The Meaning of Credere in Ancient and Medieval Authors

In the Latin patristic writings credere carried much the same meaning that πιστεύειν has in the New Testament and in Greek literature. For Cyprian of Carthage to believe in (credere en) God was to believe that (credere quod) it was God who had appointed the church’s leaders.[21] According to Origen of Alexandria, sound doctrines (dogmata) are essential to Christian faith.[22]

In the Vulgate Jerome used forms of credere to indicate assent to specific claims. In Genesis 21:7 credere simultaneously suggested belief in a person and assent to an objective claim: “Who, hearing this, would have believed Abraham that [crederet Abraham quod] Sarah would nurse a son?” In the Book of Job the protagonist cried, “If I invoked him and he answered me, I do not believe that [non credo quod] he would listen to my voice” (Job 9:16). (See also Deuteronomy 2:11; Psalm 26:13 [Eng., 27:13]; Luke 1:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:14; and Hebrews 11:6.) Again the terms translated by the English words “have faith” and “believe” imply assent to certain facts.

In the Middle Ages credere still implied the acceptance of assertions concerning specific historical events. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Some urge: Cannot we believe different doctrines and yet hold the same underlying reality? Faith, they say, assents to a thing, not to a proposition about it… Yet they are in error, for the assent of faith operates only through a judgment of reason… When I profess, ‘I believe in the resurrection,’ you rightly take me to be committed to an assertion about a past historical event.”[23]

Given the functions of πιστεύειν in the New Testament and credere in the writings of ancient and medieval theologians, Smith’s claim that “it is a mistranslation to render any word in the Christian scriptures by the English terms ‘belief,’ ‘believe’ ” is clearly incorrect. The occurrences of πιστεύειν in the New Testament and of credere in the church theologians’ writings lend no credence to Smith’s contention that those words did not entail assent to specific assertions. Perhaps Fowler was hinting at this dimension of Christian faith when he conceded the presence of “an angular, inconvenient, but tough and resiliently integral truth at the heart of orthodox Christian faith.”[24]

Conclusion

The key difficulty in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s view is an apparent assumption that the primacy of credere en excludes the necessity of credere quod. Smith may have been correct that in the premodern world πιστεύειν and credere functioned primarily as descriptors of relational loyalty. However, this article has called into question Smith’s assertion that because “faith” primarily described personal allegiance, to have faith among the earliest Christians was “not at all a question of moving from non-belief to belief.”[25] Instead the terms translated by the English words “believe,” “belief,” and “faith” simultaneously implied personal loyalty and assent to specific facts. To utilize the classical categories, faith entailed both the subjective loyalty implied in fiducia and the objective agreement implied in notitia and assensus. Therefore what occurred in the early modern era was not a shift from faith as personal loyalty to faith as objective assent, as Smith claimed, but a reduction of faith to objective assent.

From an evangelical perspective, if the postmodern world is to recover the premodern meaning of faith, it will not be done by reducing the content of faith to Smith’s amorphous principles of “assent to truth, whatever it may be” and “the closest approximation to the truth of which one’s mind is capable.”[26] Instead it will be by contending for a faith that consists simultaneously of two inseparable aspects—assent to specific assertions concerning God (credere quod) and personal trust in Jesus Christ (credere en).

Notes

1. Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman, 1994), 532–34; Timothy Jones, “Faith,” in Nelson’s New Christian Dictionary (Nashville: Nelson, 2001), 292–93; and Richard Muller, “Fides,” in Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 115–16.
2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963); and idem, Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
3. Smith, Faith and Belief, 159.
4. Ibid., 247.
5. Ibid., 108.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid., 117 (italics his); see also 5–6, 144–45.
8. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 180–202; and idem, Faith and Belief, 12, 61, 77, 118. See also James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 11–13.
9. Smith, Faith and Belief, 70–78, 247.
10. Ibid., 76.
11. Ibid., 125.
12. Ibid., 167-71 (italics his).
13. From http://www.oneworld - publications.com/books/wilfred - cantwell - a - reader.htm, retrieved April 4, 2004.
14. Fowler, Stages of Faith, 9. See also Fred L. Downing, “Toward the Second Naivete: Fowler’s Stages of Faith,” in Perspectives in Religious Studies 12 (spring 1985): 40-41, 47.
15. Smith, Faith and Belief, 77, 247. See also Fowler, Stages of Faith, 11–12.
16. Smith, Faith and Belief, 71–91.
17. Fowler, Stages of Faith, 12.
18. Paul M. Bassett, “Faith,” in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland, 1990), 339; and Clement of Alexandria, “Clementis Alexandrini Opera Quae Existant, Stromateis,” in Patrilogiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857), 1.7.38; 1.20.98; 2.2.8; 8.3.7.
19. Cyril of Jerusalem, “Cyrilli Archepiscopi Hierosolymitani Opera Quae Existant, Catechesis V, De Fide et Symbolo,” in Patrilogiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 5.10-13.
20. Carroll Stuhlmueller, “The Biblical View of Faith: A Catholic Perspective,” in Handbook of Faith, ed. James Michael Lee (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education, 1990), 105.
21. Cyprian of Carthage, “Epistle 68, ” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts (Wheaton, IL: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), CD-ROM.
22. Bassett, “Faith,” 339.
23. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas de Aquino, Scriptum super Sententiis; http://sophia.unav.ed/alarcon/snp3023.html#10454, retrieved April 4, 2004.
24. James W. Fowler, “Dialogue toward a Future in Faith Development Studies,” in Faith Development and Fowler, ed. Craig R. Dykstra and Sharon Parks (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education, 1986), 296. See also James Fowler, “Stages of Faith: Reflections on a Decade of Dialogue,” in Christian Education Journal 13 (autumn 1992): 20-21.
25. Smith, Faith and Belief, 76.
26. Ibid., 167, 171.