Here is another brief
excerpt from J. Gresham Machen’s What is
Faith? (1925; Eerdmans, 1962) in which Machen interprets the significance
of the central statement in Hebrews 11:6.
“…for he that cometh to God must believe that he is…”
(Hebrews 11:6).
….Here we find a rejection of all the pragmatic,
non-doctrinal Christianity of modern times.
In the first place, religion is here made to depend
absolutely upon doctrine; the one who comes to God must not only believe in a
person, but he must also believe that something is true: faith is here declared to involve acceptance
of a proposition. There could be no
plainer insistence upon the doctrinal or intellectual basis of faith. It is impossible, according to the Epistle to
the Hebrews, to have faith in a person without accepting with the mind the
facts of the person.
Entirely different is the prevailing attitude in the modern
Church; far from recognizing, as the author of Hebrews does, the intellectual
basis of faith, many modern preachers set faith in sharp opposition to
knowledge. Christians faith, they say,
is not assent to a creed, but it is confidence in a person. The Epistle to the Hebrews on the other hand declares
that it is impossible to have confidence in a person without assenting to a
creed. “He that cometh to God must believe
that he is.” The words “God is” or “God
exists,” constitute a creed; they constitute a proposition; and yet they have here
placed as necessary to that supposedly non-intellectual thing that is called
faith. It would be impossible to find a
more complete opposition than that which here appears between the New Testament
and the anti-intellectual tendency of modern preaching (pp. 47-48).
JTR
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