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Essay on Faith | Faith Essay for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Faith:  The term faith can be defined as the confidence and trust in a person, concept or a thing. Faith is different for everyone – having faith in something, or someone means believing in them and being able to trust them completely.

Religious faith and non-religious faith are two different things. Faith is a belief, which holds to every person –religious or non-religious. Faith is the hope that a person has, which also determines how the person decides to lead their life.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Faith for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Faith for reference.

Long Essay on Faith 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Faith is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Having faith is the essence of having hope. No matter how high one’s aspirations maybe if they keep trusting in themselves and embrace faith, their dreams turn into reality. Faith teaches us persistence and determination – nothing is possible when faith is absent. Faith serves as the driving force behind all the greatest endeavours that have ever been and are still being pursued in this world. Faith gives a person the push that they need to achieve their goals and fulfil their dreams – which they have set for themselves. Hence every new invention, discovery and success is possible because of the faith that was held on to during the tough times.

Faith not only means worshipping or believing in an idol. One can have faith without any prayers or any idols. Faith goes a long way in making an individual’s life happier and full of achievements. Having faith is necessary as even if one fails, faith gives them the strength to embrace the failures and try again. Faith cannot be taught, forced or imbibed into a person. It comes from within and serves as the determiner of one’s attitude towards life. Faith gives one motivation and also strength and enthusiasm for achieving their goals. Faith also serves as an important factor in determining the success or failure of one’s dreams – when faith is lost, failure is forthcoming.

A person who has any skills, intelligence or capabilities cannot accomplish their set goals if he or she lacks faith. Faith serves as the foundation of any mission that a person undertakes and has hope and will to complete. Even if having faith doesn’t make the struggles go away, it gives one the strength to face your challenges head-on and not let them drag them down.

Faith helps in keeping a person’s aim clear to them and helps them focus on their destination by not being deterred by the hardships that come their way. An individual feels enlightened and doesn’t lose their heart in a moment of hopelessness – is they have faith.

Great men and saints have lived their lives challenging the mainstream and stereotypes. They have accomplished tasks and missions that ordinary men were far from achieving. It was their faith, hope and belief that helped them achieve all this. Freedom fighters have faith in their country and themselves and have won great battles. This faith has also helped them in not getting disheartened when they have encountered failure. A doctor has full faith in his abilities that gives him the strength to cure his patients.

Even in the epics, there are examples of great characters like Lord Krishna, who won the battle against evil forces with his faith in goodness and fairness. Swami Vivekananda is another example of great men who practised and preached the power of faith to people and used it to get rid of most miseries faced by people. Mother Teresa had faith in humanity and brotherhood – and she kept serving the poor and sick selflessly. People still have in goodness for the selfless and kind contributions of people like her. History and one’s own experience has innumerable examples to showcase that faith is the mother of success and force of life.

Short Essay on Faith 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Faith is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Faith can be defined as having complete confidence or trust in a person or a thing. Faith is that distant light that stills keeps us moving even when the circumstances and surroundings seem to fall apart. When one has faith and keeps practising hard work courage and determination, there is nothing that can stop them from winning.

People who have succeeded in life and have made a change in the world is because they had faith in themselves and their beliefs. Every great achiever has always said that the reason why they are where they are in life is that they had faith in themselves. Faith is what made the impossible possible.

Having faith doesn’t always have to religious. One can even have faith without any deities or religion. Faith is something that comes with time – it cannot be put into something but is something that some builds with experience and time.

10 Lines on Faith in English

• Everyone has a different perspective on faith.
• Faith is not about what we claim to believe, but faith is what we truly believe in.
• Faith means believing in something true for both a religious and non-religious person.
• Faith doesn’t necessarily have to be religious.
• A struggle becomes much easier when the person has faith in themselves.
• Having faith doesn’t always need prayers and an idol; it can be practised from within.
• Having faith gives a person the hope to hold on in situations where everything seems dull and dark.
• One’s faith is completely one’s personal choice.
• Faith gives a person the strength to achieve their goals and aspirations.
• If one loses faith, failure is inevitable.

FAQ’s on Faith Essay

Question 1.  Does faith always have to be religious?

Answer: Faith doesn’t always necessarily have to be religious. Every living being – whether religious or non-religious – must have faith.

Question 2. Why is faith necessary?

Answer: Faith sometimes is the only brink of light during tough times that keep one moving forward. Faith gives one the strength in times of weaknesses. Without faith, one cannot survive.

Question 3.  Can faith have negative consequences?

Answer: Sometimes, faith can have negative consequences when an individual starts believing in the wrong things. This happens due to wrong company which can have deadly consequences.

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Questions about faith have inspired centuries of philosophical and theological reflection, particularly, though by no means exclusively, as faith is understood within the Christian branch of the Abrahamic religions. What is faith? What makes faith reasonable or unreasonable, valuable or disvaluable, morally permissible or impermissible, virtuous or vicious? How does faith relate to psychological states such as belief, desire, trust, and hope? How does faith relate to action? To what extent is faith under our voluntary control? Because answers to these further questions depend on what faith is, as well as on assumptions about relevant evaluative norms and the philosophical psychology and theory of action applicable to faith, this entry focusses on the nature of faith, while also touching upon implications of various models of faith for assessments of its reasonableness and value.

‘Faith’ is a broad term, appearing in locutions that point to a range of different phenomena. We speak of ‘having faith that you will succeed, despite setbacks,’ ‘having faith in democracy,’ ‘putting faith in God,’ ‘believing that God exists by faith,’ ‘being a person of faith,’ ‘professing and keeping the faith (or losing it),’ ‘keeping (or failing to keep) faith with someone’, and so on. At its most general ‘faith’ means much the same as ‘trust’. Uses of ‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ closely parallel ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ and these are often used interchangeably. Yet one of the striking and intriguing facts about theorizing in this area (the study of faith, faithfulness, and related phenomena), is that people have offered radically different accounts of what faith is—to such an extent that there remains disagreement even about the basic ontological category to which faith belongs. Is it a psychological state and, if so, is it cognitive, affective/evaluative, or perhaps some combination of both? Is it an act or disposition to act—or is there at least some sort of connection to action essential to faith and, if so, to what sorts of acts?

This entry will focus on religious faith as paradigmatic—or, rather, it will focus on the kind of faith exemplified in theistic faith (i.e., faith in God, faith that God exists, and commitment to a theistic interpretation of reality), while leaving open whether faith of that same general kind also belongs to other, non-theistic, religious contexts, or to contexts not usually thought of as religious at all. The question of faith outside of a theistic context, such as whether it is apt to speak of the faith of a humanist, or even an atheist, using the same general sense of ‘faith’ as applies to the theist case, is taken up in the final Section (11).

Philosophical reflection on theistic religious faith has produced markedly different accounts or models of its nature. This entry organizes discussion of accounts or models of faith around key components that feature in such accounts—with varying emphases, and with varying views about how these components relate to one another. These components are the cognitive , the affective , the evaluative , and the practical (volitional, actional and behavioural). Models of faith may also be usefully categorized according to further principles, including

• how the model relates faith as a state to the actional components associated with faith;
• whether the model takes the object of faith to be exclusively propositional (e.g., faith that such and such) or not (e.g., faith in persons or ideals);
• the type of epistemology with which the model is associated—whether it is broadly ‘internalist’ or ‘externalist’, ‘evidentialist’ or ‘fideist’;
• whether the model is necessarily restricted to theistic religious faith, or may extend beyond it.

The entry proceeds dialectically, with later sections presupposing the earlier discussion. The section headings are as follows:

1. Models of faith and their key components

2. the affective component of faith, 3. faith as knowledge, 4. faith and reason: the epistemology of faith, 5. faith as belief, 6. faith as an act of trust, 7. faith as doxastic venture, 8. venturing faith, without belief, 9. faith and hope, 10. faith as a virtue, 11. faith beyond (orthodox) theism, other internet resources, related entries.

While philosophical reflection on faith of the kind exemplified in religious contexts might ideally hope to yield an agreed definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions that articulate the nature of faith, the present discussion proceeds by identifying key components that recur in different accounts of religious faith. It also aims to identify a focal range of issues on which different stances are taken by different accounts. There is a plurality of existing philosophical understandings or models of faith of the religious kind. This discussion therefore aims to set out dialectically an organisation of this plurality, while also giving indications of the reasons there may be for preferring particular models over others. Since ‘religion’ itself may well be a ‘family resemblance’ universal, essentialism about faith of the religious kind might be misplaced. Nevertheless, the concept of faith as found in the Abrahamic, theist, religious traditions is widely regarded as unified enough for an inquiry into its nature to make sense, even if a successful real definition is too much to expect (this kind of faith might conceivably be a conceptual primitive, for example).

Note that some philosophers approach the target of religious faith by first classifying and analysing ordinary language uses of the term ‘faith’ and locutions in which that term occurs. See, for recent examples, Audi 2011 (Chapter 3, Section I), who identifies seven different kinds of faith, and Howard-Snyder (2013b), who attempts a general analysis of ‘propositional’ faith—i.e., faith that p is true, where p is a relevant proposition. The present discussion, however, deals directly with the target notion of the kind of faith exemplified in religious faith , assuming the background of a working grasp of the notion as deployed in religious forms of life, and specifically in those belonging to the theist traditions. Insights from the analysis of faith understood more broadly may, nevertheless, be important in constructing models of faith of the religious kind, as will emerge below in the discussion of religious faith as a kind of trust (Section 6).

The notion of religious faith as the possession of a whole people is familiar, and arguably theologically primary in the theist traditions. Philosophical accounts of theistic faith typically focus, however, on what it is for an individual person to ‘have faith’ or be ‘a person of faith’. An initial broad distinction is between thinking of faith just as a person’s state when that person ‘has faith’, and thinking of it as also involving a person’s act, action or activity . Faith may be a state one is in, or comes to be in; it may also essentially involve something one does. An adequate account of faith, perhaps, needs to encompass both. In the Christian context, faith is understood both as a gift of God and also as requiring a human response of assent and trust, so that their faith is something with respect to which people are both receptive and active.

There is, however, some tension in understanding faith both as a gift to be received and as essentially involving a venture to be willed and enacted. A philosophical account of faith may be expected to illuminate this apparent paradox. One principle for classifying models of faith is according to the extent to which they recognise an active component in faith itself, and the way they identify that active component and its relation to faith’s other components. It is helpful to consider the components of faith (variously recognised and emphasised in different models of faith) as falling into three broad categories: the affective , the cognitive and the practical . There are also evaluative components in faith—these may appear as implicated in the affective and/or the cognitive components, according to one’s preferred meta-theory of value.

One component of faith is a certain kind of affective psychological state—namely, having a feeling of assurance or trust. Some philosophers hold that faith is to be identified simply with such a state: see, for example, Clegg (1979, 229) who suggests that this may have been Wittgenstein’s understanding. Faith in this sense—as one’s overall ‘default’ affective attitude on life—provides a valuable foundation for flourishing: its loss is recognised as the psychic calamity of ‘losing one’s faith’. But if foundational existential assurance is to feature in a model of faith of the kind exemplified by theists, more needs to be added about the kind of assurance involved. The assurance of theistic faith is essentially a kind of confidence: it is essentially faith in God. In general, faith of the kind exemplified by theistic faith must have some intentional object . It may thus be argued that an adequate model of this kind of faith cannot reduce to something purely affective: some broadly cognitive component is also required. (For an account that takes faith to be fundamentally affective, while allowing that it might also involve cognitive aspects, see Kvanvig 2013.)

What kind of cognitive component belongs to faith, then? One possibility is that it is a kind of knowledge , but there is then a question about the kind of knowledge that it is: e.g., is it knowledge ‘by acquaintance’, or ‘propositional’ knowledge ‘by description’, or both? One type of model of faith as knowledge identifies faith as propositional knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God. A model of this type has received prominent recent defence in the work of Alvin Plantinga, who proposes an account which he regards as following in the tradition of the reformers, principally John Calvin (see Plantinga 2000, 168–86). Calvin defines faith thus: ‘a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit’ (John Calvin, Institutes III, ii, 7, 551, quoted by Plantinga (2000, 244)).

Appeal to a special cognitive faculty

‘Reformed’ epistemologists have appealed to an externalist epistemology in order to maintain that theistic belief may be justified even though its truth is no more than basically evident to the believer—that is, its truth is not rationally inferable from other, more basic, beliefs, but is found to be immediately evident in the believer’s experience (see Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000). On Plantinga’s version, (basic) theistic beliefs count as knowledge because they are produced by the operation of a special cognitive faculty whose functional design fits it for the purpose of generating true beliefs about God. Plantinga calls this the sensus divinitatis , using a term of Calvin’s. (For discussion of the extent to which Plantinga’s use of this term conforms to Calvin’s own usage see Jeffreys 1997 and Helm 1998.) This quasi-perceptual faculty meets functional criteria as a mechanism that, when functioning in the right conditions, confers ‘warrant’ (where warrant is whatever must be added to true belief to yield knowledge) and, granted theism’s truth, it probably yields ‘basic’ knowledge because God designs it just for that purpose. In defence of specifically Christian belief, Plantinga argues that the same warrant-conferring status belongs to the operation of the Holy Spirit in making the great truths of the Gospel directly known to the believer.

The welcome certainty of faith

This appeal to a God-given ‘higher’ cognitive faculty is found (in the early 12th Century) in al-Ghazâlî’s Deliverance from Error , where it provides the key to the ‘Sufi’ resolution of his religious crisis and his sceptical doubts about the deliverances of sense perception and unassisted human reason. Faith is thus understood as a kind of basic knowledge attended by a certainty that excludes doubt. But faith will not be exclusively cognitive, if, as in Calvin’s definition, faith-knowledge is not only ‘revealed to our minds’ but also ‘sealed upon our hearts’. For, on this model, faith will also have an affective/evaluative component that includes a welcoming of the knowledge received.

Practical aspects of faith on this model

This model of faith as a kind of knowledge, certain and welcome, exhibits faith as essentially something to be received, something delivered by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty. Nevertheless, the model may admit a practical component, since an active response is required for reception of the divine gift. Such a practical component is implied by the real possibility that faith may be resisted: indeed, Christians may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for persons of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. On this ‘special knowledge’ model of faith, however, this activity counts as ‘acting out’ one’s faith rather than as a part of faith itself. Persons of faith thus act ‘in’, ‘through’ or ‘by’ faith: but, on this model, their faith itself is the welcomed revealed knowledge on which they act.

Models of faith as knowledge may be thought lacking because they admit no actional component in faith itself. Faith seems essentially to involve some kind of active venture in commitment and trust, even if talk of a ‘leap of faith’ may not be wholly apt. Many have held that faith ventures beyond what is ordinarily known or justifiably held true, in the sense that faith involves accepting what cannot be established as true through the proper exercise of our naturally endowed human cognitive faculties. As Kant famously reports, in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason : ‘I have … found it necessary to deny knowledge , in order to make room for faith ’ (Kant 1787 [1933, 29]). Theist philosophers do, however, typically defend the claim that faith is not ‘contrary to reason’. On models of faith that take a cognitive component as central, and construe faith’s object as propositional, reasonable faith therefore seems subject to a general evidentialist principle—‘a wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence’, as Hume puts it (Hume 1748 [2007], “Of Miracles”, 80). And W. K. Clifford elevates evidentialism to the status of an absolute moral requirement, affirming that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ (Clifford 1877 [1999, 77]. Faith’s venturesomeness may thus seem in tension with its reasonableness, and models of faith differ in the way they negotiate this tension in response to evidentialist challenges. Another way to classify models of faith, then, is in terms of their associated epistemology—and, in particular, whether and according to what norms of ‘evidential support’, they accept that faith’s cognitive component needs to meet a requirement to be grounded on available evidence.

The Reformed epistemologist model of faith as ‘basic’ knowledge (outlined in Section 3) generates an epistemology under which, although ordinary cognitive faculties and sources of evidence do not yield firm and certain inferred knowledge of theistic truths, there is (if Christian theism is true) a ‘higher’ cognitive faculty that neatly makes up the deficit. This model seems thus to secure the rationality of faith: if faith consists in beliefs that have the status of knowledge, faith can hardly fail to be rational. And, once the deliverances of the special cognitive faculty are included amongst the believer’s basic experiential evidence, an evidential requirement on reasonable belief seems to be met. (Note that Plantinga originally expressed his defence of ‘properly basic’ theistic belief in terms of the rationality of believing in God ‘without any evidence or argument at all’ (Plantinga 1983, 17). He does respect an evidential requirement, however, holding that it may be fully met through what is basically, non-inferentially, evident in the believer’s experience. Hence Plantinga’s insistence that his Reformed epistemology is not fideistic (Plantinga 2000, 263).)

Reflective faith and the question of entitlement

It is not clear, however, whether Reformed epistemology’s model of faith can achieve all that is needed to show that theist faith is reasonable. From the perspective of reflective persons of faith (or would-be faith), the question of entitlement arises: are they rationally, epistemically—even, morally—entitled to adopt or continue in their faith? This question will be existentially important, since faith will not be of the kind exemplified by religious faith unless its commitments make a significant difference to how one lives one’s life. Reflective believers, who are aware of the many options for faith and the possibility of misguided and even harmful faith-commitments, will wish to be satisfied that they are justified in their faith. The theist traditions hold a deep fear of idolatry—of giving one’s ‘ultimate concern’ (Tillich 1957 [2001]) to an object unworthy of it. The desire to be assured of entitlement to faith is thus not merely externally imposed by commitment to philosophical critical values: it is a demand internal to the integrity of theistic faith itself. Arguably, believers must even take seriously the possibility that the God they have been worshipping is not, after all, the true God (Johnston 2009). But, for this concern to be met, there will need to be conditions sufficient for justified faith that are ‘internalist’—that is, conditions whose obtaining is, at least indirectly if not directly, accessible to believers themselves. And, as already noted, those conditions are widely assumed to include an evidentialist requirement that faith is justified only if the truth of its cognitive content is adequately supported by the available evidence.

The Reformed epistemologist model as leaving the question of entitlement unanswered

It may be argued, however, that, if the Reformed epistemologist’s model is correct, those who seek to meet an evidentialist requirement will be unable to satisfy themselves of their entitlement to their faith. Theistic truths may be directly revealed, and experienced as immediately evident, yet, on reflection, one may doubt whether such experiences are genuinely revelatory since competing ‘naturalist’ interpretations of those experiences seem available. Furthermore, there are rival sources yielding contrary claims that equally claim to be authentically revelatory. It may be true, as Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology maintains, that if God exists then certain basic theist beliefs meet externalist criteria for knowledge, even though the truth of the propositions concerned remains open to reflective ‘internalist’ doubt. On an externalist account, that is, one might lack independent evidence sufficient to confirm that one has knowledge that God exists while in fact possessing that very knowledge . One may thus refute an objector who claims that without adequate evidence one cannot possess knowledge. But this consideration is still insufficient to secure entitlement to theistic faith—if, as may be argued, that entitlement requires that one has evidence adequate to justify commitment to the truth that God exists. For, one has such evidence only conditionally on God’s existence —but it is precisely entitlement to believe that God exists that is at issue (Kenny 1992, 71; Bishop and Aijaz 2004). For a wider discussion of the possibility of religious knowledge that, inter alia , endorses the present point, see Zagzebski 2010.

If faith is not ‘firm and certain’ basic knowledge of theistic truths, then a model of faith as having a propositional object may still be retained by identifying faith with belief of relevant content—and the question whether a faith-belief may have sufficient justification to count (if true) as (non-basic) knowledge may remain open. To have theist faith might thus be identified with holding a belief with theological content—that God exists, is benevolent towards us, has a plan of salvation, etc.—where this belief is also held with sufficient firmness and conviction. Richard Swinburne labels this the ‘Thomist view’ of faith, and expresses it thus: ‘The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a God’ (Swinburne 2005, 138). (Aquinas’s own understanding of faith is more complex than this formulation suggests, however, as will be noted shortly.)

The rationality of faith on this model will rest on the rationality of the firmly held theological beliefs in which it consists. As Swinburne notes, if such beliefs are founded on evidence that renders their truth sufficiently more probable than not, then the beliefs concerned may amount to knowledge on a contemporary ‘justified true belief’ fallibilist epistemology, even though they fall short of knowledge on Aquinas’s own criteria, which require that what is known be ‘seen’ (i.e., fully and directly comprehended) ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 4 & 5 (Aquinas 1265–1273 [2006], 27)). In any case, the reasonableness of faith on this model of faith as (non-basic) theological belief depends on the beliefs concerned being adequately evidentially justified. The claim that this condition is satisfied is defended by John Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695 [1999]), and, in contemporary philosophy, by Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian approach to the epistemology of Christian belief (see, for example, Swinburne 2003).

Some argue, however, that the truth of theism is ‘evidentially ambiguous’—that is, that our total available evidence is equally viably interpreted from both a theist and a naturalist/atheist perspective (Hick 1966 and 1989; Davis 1978; Penelhum 1995; McKim 2001). This thesis of evidential ambiguity may be supported as the best explanation of the diversity of belief on religious matters, and/or of the persistence of the debate about theism, with philosophers of equal acumen and integrity engaged on either side. Or the ambiguity may be considered systematic—for example, on the grounds that both natural theological and natural atheological arguments fail because they are deeply circular, resting on implicit assumptions acceptable only to those already thinking within the relevant perspective. (In relation to Swinburne’s Bayesian natural theology, in particular, this objection surfaces in criticism of assumptions about how to set the prior probabilities implicated in calculations of, for example, theism’s probability on the evidence of the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe’s basic physical constants, or of the probability, on all our evidence, of the truth of the Resurrection.) If the ambiguity thesis is correct, then—assuming evidentialism—firmly held theistic belief will fail to be reasonable.

On this model of faith as non-basic belief, all that characterizes faith apart from its theological content is the firmness or conviction with which faith-propositions are held true. Firm belief in the truth of a scientific theoretical proposition, for example, fails to count as faith only through lacking the right kind of content. This model therefore shares with the Reformed epistemologist model in taking its theological content as essential to what makes theistic faith faith , and so rejects the suggestion that faith of the same sort as found in the theist religious traditions might also be found elsewhere.

Furthermore, in taking faith to consist in non-basic belief that theological propositions are true, this model invites the assumption that theological convictions belong in the same category of factual claims as scientific theoretical hypotheses with which they accordingly compete. That assumption will lead those who think that theological claims are not reasonably accepted on the evidence to regard faith as worthless and intellectually dishonourable—at best, ‘a degenerating research programme’ (Lakatos 1970). (On this negative assessment of faith’s evidential support, persons of faith come perilously close to the schoolboy’s definition mentioned by William James: ‘Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true’ (James 1896 [1956, 29]). Or, if persons who have theistic faith readily abandon theological explanations whenever competing scientific ones succeed, their God gets reduced to ‘the God of the gaps’.) These misgivings about the model of faith as firmly held factual theological belief dissolve, of course, if success attends the project of showing that particular theological claims count as factual hypotheses well supported by the total available evidence. Those who doubt that this condition is or can be met may, however, look towards a model of faith that understands faith’s cognitive content as playing some other role than that of an explanatory hypothesis of the same kind as a scientific explanatory hypothesis.

Aquinas’s account of faith

Though firmly held theological belief is central to it, Aquinas’s understanding of faith is more complicated and nuanced than the view that faith is ‘the theoretical conviction that God exists’. Aquinas holds that faith is ‘midway between knowledge and opinion’ ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 2 (Aquinas [2006], 11)). Faith resembles knowledge, Aquinas thinks, in so far as faith carries conviction. But that conviction is not well described as ‘theoretical’, if that description suggests that faith has a solely propositional object. For Aquinas, faith denotes the believer’s fundamental orientation towards the divine. So ‘from the perspective of the reality believed in’, Aquinas says, ‘the object of faith is something non-composite ’ (hence, definitely not propositional)—namely God himself. Nevertheless, grasping the truth of propositions is essential to faith, because ‘ from the perspective of the one believing … the object of faith is something composite in the form of a proposition’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 1, 2 (Aquinas [2006], 11 & 13), our emphases).

A further problem with describing as Thomist a model of faith simply as firm belief that certain theological propositions are true is that Aquinas takes as central an act of ‘inner assent’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 59–65)). This is problematic because, (i) in its dominant contemporary technical usage belief is taken to be a mental (intentional) state —a propositional attitude, namely, the attitude towards the relevant proposition that it is true; (ii) belief in this contemporary sense is widely agreed not to be under volitional control—not directly, anyway; yet (iii) Aquinas holds that the assent given in faith is under the control of the will. Aquinas need not, however, be construed as accepting ‘believing at will’, since assent may be construed as an act that has to be elicited yet terminates a process that is subject to the will—a process of inquiry, deliberation or pondering that involves mental actions, or, in the case of theist faith, a process of divine grace that can proceed only if it is not blocked by the will.

Most importantly, however, Aquinas says that assent is given to the propositional articles of faith because their truth is revealed by God , and on the authority of the putative source of this revelation. Terence Penelhum puts it like this: ‘Thomas tells us that although what one assents to in faith includes many items not ostensibly about God himself, one assents to them, in faith, because they are revealed by God … It is because they come from him and because they lead to him that the will disposes the intellect to accept them’ (Penelhum 1989, 122: see Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae, 1, 1 & 2 (Aquinas [2006], 5–15)). So, Aquinas’s model of faith is of believing (assenting to) propositional truth-claims on the basis of testimony carrying divine authority . John Locke follows the same model: ‘Faith … is the assent to any proposition … upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication’ (Locke 1698 [1924, 355]; compare also Alston 1996, 15).

The unanswered question of entitlement—again

Theist faith as assent to truths on the basis of an authoritative source of divine revelation is possible, though, only for those who already believe that God exists and is revealed through the relevant sources. Might such faith, then, have to rest on a prior faith—faith that God exists and that this is God’s messenger or vehicle of communication? Those foundational claims, it might be maintained, are held true on the grounds of adequately supporting evidence, such as putatively provided by arguments of natural theology and the claimed evidence for miraculous endorsement of a prophet’s authority. Theist faith might then have a purely rational foundation. But this could hardly be so for every person of faith, since not everyone who believes will have access to the relevant evidence or be able to assess it properly. Besides, and more importantly, although Aquinas allows that rational assessment of the available evidence may lead a person to faith, he does not think that such an assessment could ever elicit assent itself—only demonstration could achieve that and so high a level of proof is not here available (see Aquinas [2006], footnote 2b, 58–9). Aquinas’s view is thus that all believers stand in need of God’s grace: ‘the assent of faith, which is its principal act … has as its cause God, moving us inwardly through grace’ ( Summa Theologiae , 2a2ae 6, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 167)). It follows, then, that, on Aquinas’s view, believing that God exists and is revealed in specific ways is itself a matter of faith, and not a purely rationally evidentially secured prolegomenon to it.

Aquinas’s model of faith thus shares with the Reformed epistemologist model the problem that it leaves unanswered the reflective believer’s concern about entitlement. Attempting to settle that concern by meeting the evidential requirement leads to circularity: theological truths are to be accepted on divine authority, yet the truth that there is such an authority (historically mediated as the relevant tradition maintains) is amongst those very truths that are to be accepted on divine authority—indeed, it is the crucial one. As Descartes puts it in the Dedication to his Meditations , ‘It is of course quite true that we must believe in the existence of God because it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture, and conversely, that we must believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God. … But this argument cannot be put to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular’ (Descartes 1641 [Cottingham et al. 1984, 3]). Thus, although they differ on the question whether the firm beliefs of faith count as knowledge, both Aquinas and Calvin understand faith as essentially involving accepting the truth of propositions as revealed through willingly receiving God’s gracious gift of that very revelation. The question remains how accepting this gift could be epistemically rational. The externalist account of how Christian beliefs may have epistemic worth proposed in Plantinga’s model of faith (named ‘the A/C’ model because its sources are supposedly found in Aquinas as well as Calvin) offers some help with the required explanation, but (as noted in the final paragraph of Section 4 above) may arguably not by itself be sufficient.

Revelation—and its philosophical critique

The reasonableness of belief that God exists is a focal issue in the Philosophy of Religion. Theist traditions typically, or some would say essentially, make a foundational claim about an authoritative source, or sources, of revealed truth. What is salient includes belief or some related sort of affirmation, not just that God exists but associated content such as that this God exists, the God who is revealed thus and so (in great historical acts, in prophets, in scriptures, in wisdom handed down, etc.). The reasonableness of theism is therefore as much a matter of the reasonableness of an epistemology of revelation as it is of a metaphysics of perfect being. The question of how God may be expected to make himself known has gained prominence through recent discussion of the argument for atheism from ‘divine hiddenness’ (Schellenberg 1993; Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002). That argument holds that a loving God would make his existence clear to the non-resistant—but this claim is open to question. Perhaps God provides only ‘secret’ evidence of his existence, purposely overturning the expectations of our ‘cognitive idolatry’ in order to transform our egocentric self-reliance (Moser 2008); besides, there may be significant constraints logically inherent in the very possibility of unambiguous divine revelation to finite minds (King 2008).

Similarly, accounts of theistic faith will be open to critique when they make assumptions about the mechanisms of revelation. In particular, the model of faith as assent to propositions as revealed holds that, since God’s grace is required for that assent, when grace is effective the whole ‘package deal’ of propositional revealed truth is accepted. This yields the notion of ‘ the Faith’, as the body of theological truths to be accepted by ‘the faithful’, and it becomes a sign of resistance to divine grace to ‘pick and choose’ only some truths, as heretics do (Greek: hairesis , choice; see Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 5, 3 (Aquinas [2006], 157–61)). For heresy to be judged, however, some human authority must assume it possesses the full doctrinal revelation, with God’s grace operating without resistance in its own case. Whether that assumption can ever be sufficiently well founded to justify condemning and purging others is an important question, whose neglect may be seriously harmful, as we are reminded by the fact that the phrase for ‘act of faith’ in Portuguese— auto-da-fé —came to mean the public burning of a heretic.

But the deeper assumption made by this model of faith as non-basic (justified) belief (as, too, by the model of it as basic knowledge yielded by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty) is that God’s self-revelation is primarily the revelation of the truth of propositions articulated in human language (compare Swinburne 1992). Alternative understandings of revelation are available, however. In particular, it may be held that it is primarily the divine itself that is revealed—the reality, not merely a representation of it. (See Lebens 2023 for discussion of faith as knowledge by acquaintance with God from a Jewish perspective). Propositional articulations of what is revealed may still be essential, but they need to be accepted as at a remove from the object of revelation itself, and therefore as limited. The development of propositional articulations expressing the nature and will of the self-revealing God—the doctrines of ‘the Faith’—will, of course, be understood as a process under providential grace. It is often assumed that that process can achieve ‘closure’ in a completed set of infallibly known creedal propositions. But this assumption about how divine inspiration operates may be contested, both on the theological grounds that it reflects the all-too-human desire to gain control over God’s self-revelation (to ‘pin God down once and for all’), and on the wider epistemological grounds that any attempt to grasp independent reality in human language will be in principle limited and fallible, subject to revision in the light of future experience.

Not all models of faith, however, identify it as primarily a matter of knowing or believing a proposition or a set of them, even with the addition of some affective or evaluative component. What is most central to theistic faith may seem better expressed as believing in God, rather than as believing that God exists. The Christian Nicene creed begins ‘Credo in unum Deum …’ and it is arguable that in this context ‘belief in’ is neither merely an idiomatic variant on, nor reducible to, ‘belief that’ (Price 1965). It may thus be held that theists’ acceptance of propositional truths as divinely revealed rests on believing in God—and it is this ‘believing in’, or ‘having faith in’, which is, fundamentally, the nature of faith. Noting that, while faith is held to be a virtue, believing as such is not, Wilfred Cantwell Smith argues that ‘faith is not belief’, ‘but something of a quite different order’ (Smith 1979, 128), requiring ‘assent’ ‘in the dynamic and personal sense of rallying to [what one takes to be the truth] with delight and engagement’ (142). Arguably, to put or to maintain faith in God involves a readiness to act, perhaps by relying on God in relevant ways and/or grounded in a practical commitment. Our considerations now shift, then, from propositional-attitude-focussed models of faith to those focussed on action, or what J. L. Schellenberg calls ‘operational’ models (2005, 126).

Judeo-Christian scripture envisions humans as actively engaged in a covenantal relationship with God. Their ongoing participation in, and commitment to, such a relationship paradigmatically involves both faith in God and faithfulness to God (McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2022a and 2023a; Pace and McKaughan 2020). The kind of faith of which Christian faith is a paradigm case, then, may be understood as ‘action-centred commitment’ (McKaughan 2016, 78), e.g., to the Christian ‘way’. Arguably, faith understood as a combination of affective and cognitive elements would miss its essential active component. We now turn, then, to consider a fiducial model—a model of faith as trust, understood not simply as an affective state but as an action .

On a fiducial model, having faith in God is making a practical commitment —the kind involved in trusting God , or, trusting in God. (The root meaning of the Greek pistis , ‘faith’, is ‘trust’ (see Morgan 2015).) On such a model, faith’s active, practical component takes central place, though a cognitive component may be presupposed by it. Swinburne calls it the ‘Lutheran’ model, and defines it thus: ‘the person of faith does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about him)—he trusts Him and commits himself to Him’ (2005, 142). Yet, as noted earlier, Aquinas too takes the ultimate object of faith to be God, ‘the first reality’, and, furthermore, understands ‘formed’ faith as trusting commitment to God, motivated by, and directed towards, love of God as one’s true end (see Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 4, 3; Aquinas [2006], 123–7). It is true that Aquinas allows that the devils have faith in a certain sense, but this ‘faith’ amounts only to their belief that what the Church teaches is the truth, arrived at not by grace but ‘forced from them’ reluctantly by ‘the acumen of their natural intelligence’ ( Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 5, 2; Aquinas [2006], 155 & 157). Aquinas’s account of ‘saving’ faith is thus also a fiducial model.

The venture of trust

As noted at the outset, there is a usage of ‘faith’ for which ‘having/placing faith in’ is (near enough) synonymous with ‘trusting’ or ‘trusting in’. (For discussion of how faith relates to a range of contemporary theories of trust, see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2022b.) If, moreover, faith of the religious kind is itself a type of trust, then we may expect our understanding of religious faith to profit from an analysis of trust in general. It is therefore worth considering what follows about the nature of faith of the sort exemplified in theistic faith from holding it to be a kind of active trust.

Conceptually fundamental to trust is the notion of a person (or persons)—the truster—trusting in some agent or agency—the trustee— for some (assumedly) favourable outcome (though what the trustee is trusted for is often only implicit in the context). Trust involves a venture ; so too—it is widely agreed—does faith. So, if faith is trust, the venture of faith might be presumed to be the type of venture implicated in trust. A venture is an action that places the agent and outcomes of concern to the agent significantly beyond the agent’s own control. Trust implies venture. When we trust we commit ourselves to another’s control, accepting—and, when necessary, co-operating as ‘patient’—with the decisions of the trustee. Venturing in trust is usually assumed to be essentially risky, making oneself vulnerable to adverse outcomes or betrayal. Swinburne makes the point this way: ‘To trust someone is to act on the assumption that she will do for you what she knows that you want or need, when the evidence gives some reason for supposing that she may not and where there will be bad consequences if the assumption is false’ (2005, 143). Annette Baier makes no requirement for evidence that the trustee may prove untrustworthy, but nevertheless takes trust to involve ‘accepted vulnerability to another’s possible but not expected ill will (or lack of good will) toward one’ (Baier 1986, 235, our emphasis). Accordingly, it seems sensible to hold that one should trust only with good reason. But if, as is plausible, good reason to trust requires sufficient evidence of the trustee’s trustworthiness, reasonable trust appears both to have its venturesomeness diminished and, at the same time, to become more difficult to achieve than we normally suppose. For we often lack adequate—or even, any—evidence of a trustee’s trustworthiness in advance of our venture, yet in many such cases we suppose that our trust is reasonable (see, for example, Adams 1987). But, if adequate evidence of trustworthiness is not required for reasonable trust, how is reasonable trust different from ‘blind’ trust?

The answer seems clear: reasonable trust is practically rational trust. The question of when one may rationally trust another may thus be resolved by a decision-theoretic calculation, factoring in the extent to which one’s evidence supports the potential trustee’s trustworthiness and the utilities of the possible outcomes, given one’s intended aims. The exercise of practical reasoning does include mental acts which are epistemically evaluable, however. When one takes it to be true in practical reasoning that someone will prove trustworthy, that mental act may be more or less epistemically rational: it would break the evidentialist norm to employ in a decision-theoretic calculation a credence that does not match one’s available evidence. In many situations, it will be practically rational, given one’s intentions, to trust another person only if one believes, or, at least, believes with high probability, that the person will prove trustworthy. In such situations it is also often the case, as already noted, that we don’t have adequate evidence in advance that this person will be trustworthy in this particular respect. Yet, affording high credence to a person’s trustworthiness may still be epistemically rational given wider available evidence of, for example, the person’s past friendliness and trustworthiness in other matters, or, if the person is a stranger, of our shared social experience that trusting others generally elicits a trustworthy response. Nevertheless, it can still be rational— practically rational, that is—to trust another when we don’t have adequate evidence that they will prove trustworthy. In a life-threatening situation, for example, it may be rational to trust unlikely rescuers if they are the only ones available. Or, when we have wider aims, it may be practically rational to trust those without a record of trustworthiness, as with ‘educative’ and ‘therapeutic’ trust where people are trusted for the sake of their development or rehabilitation as trustworthy persons. Being in established relationships of friendship with others, too, can also require commitment to continue to trust them even in the face of evidence that, otherwise, would make it reasonable to believe them unworthy of trust.

On models that take faith of the theist kind to consist fundamentally in an act of trust, the analogy with interpersonal trust is suggestive. When one person trusts another there seems typically (though not uniformly) to be a doxastic aspect (the truster’s belief that the trustee is trustworthy). But what’s essential is the fiducial aspect, which consists in an active commitment or ‘entrusting’ to the other. Paul Helm proposes that theist faith similarly has importantly distinct doxastic and fiducial aspects: in addition to belief about God’s existence and trustworthiness for salvation held with a degree of strength proportional to the believer’s evidence, persons of faith must also entrust themselves to the one on whom they rely (Helm 2000). While it is widely agreed that theist faith must have a cognitive aspect, some philosophers hold that this need not be doxastic (as we shall see in Section 8).

There are significant differences, however, between the trusting involved in theistic faith and that involved in interpersonal trust. For one thing, trusting would seem not to risk any possibility of disappointment if God really is the trustee. Given the existence of the God of unchanging love, one trusts in ultimately perfect safety. But the venture of actually entrusting oneself to God seems to begin with the challenge of being able to believe or accept that, indeed, there is such a God. While some affirm that this claim is a matter of basic knowledge, and some that there is sufficient evidence to justify it, others, as already noted, hold that everyone has to confront the evidential ambiguity of foundational theistic claims. For those who reject the model of theist faith as basic knowledge and also think that the question of God’s existence cannot be settled intellectually on the basis of the available evidence, the venture involved in trusting in God (if such there be) may seem to include a doxastic venture: those who trust already venture beyond the available evidence, in their very believing or accepting that God exists and may be relied on for salvation. Trusting in God seems to presuppose, in other words, trusting that God exists. But, if so, the question becomes pressing whether, and under what conditions, one may be entitled to such an evidence-transcending venture in practical commitment to a particular view of ultimate reality and its implications for how we should live.

Theological non-realism

One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a non-realist analysis of theological claims. Trusting God will then not entail any commitment to reality’s being a certain way. Rather, on arguably the most sophisticated kind of non-realist view, theological beliefs arise because living ‘trustingly’ comes to be expressed and reinforced through a culturally constructed fiction about God and his great saving acts. This existential confidence may then be described, using the language of the fiction, as ‘trusting God’ (Cupitt 1980, Geering 1994). On such a non-realist account, the model of faith as trust brackets the cognitive component of faith, and risks becoming, in effect, a model of faith as purely a certain kind of affective state. But, in any case, non-realist models will be rejected by those who take faith to have a cognitive component that functions as a grasping—or would-be grasping—of how things really are.

Defending doxastic venture by analogy with interpersonal trust?

Assuming, then, that theist faith does include (under realist assumptions) a venture in practical commitment to truth-claims about ultimate reality, the justifiability of such a venture might yet be thought defensible by analogy with interpersonal situations where practical commitment seems justifiably to be made beyond one’s evidence to the claim that a person will prove trustworthy in some relevant respect. Reflecting on that proposal discloses further points of disanalogy, however. In cases of interpersonal trust, a venture is often needed in initially taking the trustee to be trustworthy, but evidence will inevitably later emerge which will either confirm or disconfirm the truth of that claim, and trust may, and rationally should, be withdrawn if the news is bad. But if—as we are here assuming—one ventures beyond evidential support in taking it to be true in practical reasoning that God exists and may be trusted for salvation, this may be a venture that is not confined to initial commitment but rather persists in needing to be made. This will be the case on accounts of the evidential ambiguity of theism that take the ambiguity to hold in principle, ruling out any possibility of evidential disambiguation. Those accounts may grant, of course, that continuing to journey in theistic faith may psychologically reinforce one’s commitment, providing subjective confirmation that the theist view of reality is correct. Yet these reinforcing experiences, which often involve faith renewed in the face of apparent failures of divine love, do not possess the uncontroversial status of evidence that independently and inter-subjectively confirms the initial venture.

Doxastic venture without doxastic voluntarism

Many dismiss the idea that one may venture in one’s very believing that God exists as committing a category error: ventures are voluntary, but propositional belief is not directly under voluntary control. Trusting God, however, entails practical commitment to the truth of theological faith-propositions , and commitment to the truth of a proposition in one’s practical reasoning may be under direct voluntary control.

It is one thing to be in the mental state of holding that the proposition that p is true; it is another to take it to be true that p in one’s practical reasoning (although these typically go together, since to hold that p is true is to be disposed to take it to be true that p in practical reasoning whenever the question whether p becomes salient). Practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth therefore could be a venture: there is no category error in allowing this possibility. Doxastic venturing—venturing in believing—is thus not a matter of willing oneself to believe without adequate evidential support; rather it is a matter of taking an already held belief to be true in one’s practical reasoning even though (as one may oneself recognise) its truth lacks such support.

The psychological possibility of doxastic venture

Some philosophers have argued, however, that one cannot (in full reflective awareness, anyway) believe that p while accepting that one has insufficient evidence for p ’s truth (Adler 2002). The counterclaim that this is possible is defended by William James, in his controversial 1896 lecture, ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896 [1956]). James agrees that belief cannot be directly willed and must be otherwise causally evoked (he later came to wish that he had used ‘The Right to Believe’ as his lecture’s title). James observes, however, that many beliefs have causes that do not constitute or imply an evidential grounding of their truth. James labels such causes ‘passional’—again, a potentially misleading term, since its intended referents include much more than emotional causes of belief. In particular, beliefs may be caused by ‘the circumpressure of one’s caste or set,’ of which one’s inherited religious tradition is a paradigm case (James 1896 [1956, 9]). James is thus able to explain the psychological possibility of doxastic venture: one already has a ‘passionally’ caused belief, which one then takes to be true in practical reasoning despite its lack of adequate evidential grounding (compare Creel 1994, who similarly describes ‘faith’ as a ‘non-evidential doxastic passion’).

Note that a doxastic venture model of theistic faith reconciles faith as gift with faith’s active components: taking a faith-proposition to be true in practical reasoning is a basic (mental) action (which leads on to further actions involved in trusting God and seeking to do God’s will); the gift provides the motivational resources for this basic action, namely a firm belief in the truth of the faith-proposition, despite its lack of adequate evidential support. (In the next section, the possibility is considered that the gift of these motivational resources might be effective yet not amount to actual belief.) It is also worth noting that those who find the focus on the individual something of a deficiency in analytical accounts of faith (Eklund 2015) may perceive in James’ account some acknowledgment of the social aspect of faith. Arguably, the standard ‘passional’ or ‘non-evidential’ cause of religious belief is cultural immersion within an historical faith-tradition. The motivational resources for faith-commitment may thus be an essentially social possession.

Examples of doxastic venture models

On the doxastic venture model, faith involves full practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth, despite the recognition that this is not ‘objectively’ justified on the evidence. Kierkegaard’s definition of faith as ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard 1846 [1968, 180]) is an example of a doxastic venture model. So too is Paul Tillich’s account of faith as ‘the state of being ultimately concerned’, since the claim of the object of one’s ultimate concern to ‘promise total fulfilment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name’ cannot in principle be established on the basis of the evidence (Tillich 1957 [2001, 1 and 21]).

Aquinas’s model of faith, though widely thought of as conforming to an evidential requirement on belief, may arguably be open to interpretation as a doxastic venture model. As noted in Section 5, Aquinas holds that the available evidence, though it supports the truth of foundational faith-propositions, does not provide what Aquinas counts as sufficient (i.e., demonstrative) support to justify inner assent (in addition to references to the Summa Theologiae given previously, see 2a2ae. 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 63); and compare also Penelhum 1989, 120). Now, whether practical commitment to the truth of a given faith-proposition does or does not venture beyond adequate evidential support will be relative to assumptions about (a) where the level of evidential support required for ‘adequacy’ should be set, and (b) just how firm and decisive propositional faith-commitment needs to be. On some such assumptions, for example those made by Bayesians, the support provided by the evidence Aquinas adduces—or, by a suitable contemporary upgrading of that evidence such as that provided in the works of Richard Swinburne—may be considered enough to make reasonable a sufficiently high degree of belief (or credence) in the truth of theistic faith-propositions so that believers need not venture beyond the support of their evidence. Interpreting Aquinas’s model of faith as conforming to evidentialism may thus be viable. Nevertheless, Aquinas’s own assumptions on these matters may leave him closer to Kierkegaard and Tillich than is commonly thought (consider Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 4, 1 and, once again, 2a2ae 6, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 117–9 & 167)).

The special role of faith-propositions

Bayesians might argue that there is no occasion for faith as doxastic venture since, once practical commitment to the truth of propositions is recognised as a matter of degree, whatever the state of the available evidence relating to a given proposition, there will always (given initial credences) be a rational credence properly associated with that evidence, and hence there are no possible circumstances where ‘the evidence does not decide’, so that an evidentialist requirement can indeed apply universally. Note, however, Lara Buchak’s (2012, 2018) discussion of ways in which Bayesians might understand faith as going beyond the evidence, and her own proposal that faith-ventures essentially include an additional practical commitment, which may be rational under certain conditions, not to inquire further into evidence relevant to the truth of the propositions concerned for the sole purpose of deciding what to do. (For critical discussion of this kind of restriction on inquiry in connection with faith commitments, see Dormandy 2018 and Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022a. Katherine Dormandy has recently proposed a positive defence of evidentialism in considering the question of what makes it good to form positive beliefs about those you have faith in, including God (Dormandy 2022).)

If the domain of faith is, as Stephen Evans puts it, ‘the assumptions, convictions and attitudes which the believer brings to the evidence for and against religious truth’ (Evans 1985, 178), and faith’s cognitive component offers a ‘total interpretation’ of the world of our experience (Hick 1966, 154), then (foundational) faith-propositions function as ‘highest-order framing principles’ which necessarily cannot have their truth settled by appeal to the force of a body of independent evidence (Bishop 2007a, 139–44). Taking such a faith-proposition to be true, then, is not something that comes in degrees: either one ‘buys into’ the overall worldview (foundational) faith-propositions propose, or one does not. Such a choice is existentially important, and settling it raises anxiety about exercising a responsibility that cannot—without ‘bad faith’—be transferred onto the relatively impersonal function of one’s reason, since a venture beyond any inter-subjectively rational evidential confirmation is required. The doxastic venture model may thus be regarded as capturing the spiritual challenge of faith more satisfactorily than do models that conform to evidentialism. This is because, on the doxastic venture model, faith involves a deeper surrender of self-reliant control, not only in trusting God, but in accepting at the level of practical commitment that there is a God—indeed, this God—who is to be trusted.

Doxastic venture models of faith and epistemic concern

Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support—and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment.

A possible view of theistic faith-commitment is that it is wholly independent of the epistemic concern that cares about evidential support. On this view, faith reveals its authenticity most clearly when it takes faith-propositions to be true contrary to the weight of the evidence. This view is widely described as ‘fideist’, but ought more fairly to be called arational fideism, or, where commitment contrary to the evidence is positively favoured, irrational or counter-rational fideism. Despite its popular attribution both to the church father Tertullian and to ‘the father of existentialism’, Kierkegaard, counter-rational fideism does not seem to have been espoused by any significant theist philosophers (passages in Tertullian and Kierkegaard that appear to endorse this position may be interpreted as emphasizing that Christian faith requires accepting, not logical contradiction, but ‘contradiction’ of our ‘natural’ expectations, wholly overturned in the revelation that the power of divine love is triumphant in the Crucified One).

Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith thus implies a moderate version of fideism, for which epistemic concern is not overridden and for which, therefore, it is a constraint on faith-commitment that it not accept what is known, or justifiably believed on the evidence, to be false. Rather, faith commits itself only beyond , and not against, the evidence—and it does so out of epistemic concern to grasp truth on matters of vital existential importance. The thought that one may be entitled to commit to an existentially momentous truth-claim in principle undecidable on the evidence when forced to decide either to do so or not is what motivates William James’s ‘justification of faith’ in ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896 [1956]). If such faith is to be justified, its cognitive content will (on realist assumptions) have to cohere with our best evidence-based theories about the real world. Faith may extend our scientific grasp of the real, but may not counter it. Whether the desire to grasp more truth about the real than science can supply is a noble aspiration or a dangerous delusion is at the heart of the debate about entitlement to faith on this moderate fideist doxastic venture model.

A discussion of the debate between the moderate, Jamesian, fideist and the evidentialist is beyond this entry’s scope. Still, it is worth remarking that those who think that faith understood as doxastic venture may be justified as reasonable face the challenge of providing the tools for weeding out intuitively unreasonable forms of faith. On the other side, those evidentialists who reject doxastic venture as always impermissible have to consider whether taking a stance on the nature of reality beyond anything science can even in principle confirm may not, in the end, be unavoidable, and potentially implicated in the commitments required for science itself (see Bishop 2007a, Chapters 8 and 9; Bishop 2023). For a useful recent collection of articles on the wider theme of the relation of religious faith to intellectual virtue, see Callahan and O’Connor 2014.

Some accounts allow that faith centrally involves practical commitment venturing beyond evidential support, yet do not require (or, even, permit) that the venturer actually believes the faith-proposition assumed to be true. Such accounts may be described as proposing a ‘non-doxastic’ venture model of faith. F. R. Tennant holds a view of this kind: he takes faith to be the adoption of a line of conduct not warranted by present facts, that involves experimenting with the possible or ideal, venturing into the unknown and taking the risk of disappointment and defeat. Faith is not an attempt to will something into existence but rather treating hoped for and unseen things as if they were real and then acting accordingly (Tennant 1943 [1989, 104]). Swinburne refers to this as the ‘pragmatist’ model of faith (Swinburne 2005, 147–8; Swinburne 2001, 211; compare also Golding 1990, 2003 and McKaughan 2016). The origins of Swinburne’s pragmatist model are to be found in a much earlier paper, Swinburne 1969.

William Alston (1996) suggests that faith may involve an active ‘acceptance’ rather than purely receptive belief. A clearly non-doxastic venture model results if acceptance is understood on Jonathan Cohen’s account under which to accept that p is ‘to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p —i.e. of including that proposition … among one’s premisses for deciding what to do or think in a particular context, whether or not one feels it to be true that p ’ (Cohen 1992, 4, our emphasis). The firmness of faith-commitment is then just the firmness of one’s ‘ resolve to use [faith-claims] as a basis for one’s thought, attitude and behaviour’ (Alston 1996, 17): there is no firm assurance of their truth . Decisive commitment in the absence of such assurance may nevertheless be possible, motivated (as Swinburne suggested in the first edition of his Faith and Reason ) by the evaluative belief that ‘unless [faith-propositions are true], that which is most worthwhile is not to be had’ (Swinburne, 1981, 117). A faith venture that lacks belief in the faith-proposition to which commitment is made need not, and probably could not, lack cognitive components altogether, as this suggestion of Swinburne’s indicates.

Andrei Buckareff (2005) and J. L. Schellenberg (2005, 138–9) propose non-doxastic (or, ‘sub-doxastic’) venture models of propositional faith, with Schellenberg emphasising the positive evaluation that persons of faith make of the truth-claim to which they commit themselves. In response to Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013a) Schellenberg allows that faith may in some instances involve belief while still maintaining that ‘non-doxastic religious faith … will turn out to be a particularly important way of having religious faith as we head into the future’ (2013, 262). Bishop (2005), in response to Buckareff, also agrees that authentic faith need not always be a specifically doxastic venture. There may, then, be an emerging consensus amongst proponents of venture models that faith, at its core, consists in suitably motivated persistent practical commitment ‘beyond the evidence’ to the positively evaluated truth of foundational faith-claims which may, but need not, actually be believed to be true.

Robert Audi (2011) has also defended a non-doxastic account of faith, contrasting ‘fiducial faith’ and ‘doxastic faith’, and arguing that authentic religious faith need only amount to the former. Audi’s account is not strictly a ‘venture’ model, however, since he does not take commitment beyond the support of adequate evidence to be essential. Audi’s account suggests that religious faith is sui generis , but capable of being understood through its relations with other psychological states and actions, such as beliefs, evaluations and practical commitments. Rational assessment of religious faith, Audi thinks, must avoid treating it as implying belief, while recognising that greater confidence attaches to it than to religious hope. For another version of a non-doxastic account of faith, as a person’s ‘affective orientation or stance’, see Jonathan Kvanvig (2013, 2018). The question whether faith entails belief (even if it may not consist purely in beliefs) remains a lively focus of debate. For defence of the view that faith entails belief, see Malcolm and Scott 2016 and Mugg 2021; for criticism see Howard-Snyder 2019.

Some philosophers have suggested that the epistemological challenges faced by accounts of faith as involving belief beyond the evidence may be avoided by construing theist commitment as hope. Theist hope seems not to be mere tenacity (‘clinging to one’s hopes’) (Taylor 1961), but a more complex attitude. James Muyskens suggests, for example, that one who hopes ‘keep[s] his life open or fluid with respect to [a faith-proposition] p —where (a) neither p nor not- p is certain for him, (b) he wants p and (c) he sees p as constructively connected with his own well-being and/or concept of himself as a person’ (1979, 35). Muyskens contrasts hope with faith (understood as belief), arguing that a religion of hope is both epistemically and religiously superior to a religion of faith. But faith is not generally understood as competing with hope (Creel 1993), and some philosophers identify faith with hoping that the claims of faith are true (Pojman 1986; 2003). Hope as such is an attitude rather than an active commitment, and, as Audi observes, it contrasts with the attitude of faith at least in this respect, namely, that surprise makes little sense as a response to discovering that the object of one’s faith is indeed the case, whereas there need be nothing inappropriate in surprise at the fulfilment of one’s hopes (see Audi 2011, 74).

A more adequate model of faith as hope, then, may rather take faith to be acting in, or from, hope. Such a model then comes close to a non-doxastic venture model of faith, differing only in so far as acting from hope that God exists differs from taking this claim to be true (albeit without belief) in one’s practical reasoning, but this difference may be undetectable at the level of behavioral outcomes (see McKaughan 2013). A model of faith as acting in hope shares with the doxastic and non-doxastic venture models in rejecting the view that faith requires cognitive certainty. But one can act in hope with firmness and resilience, given a strong affective/evaluative stance, even if one lacks belief that one’s hopes will be fulfilled. Hoping that p , however, does not involve taking a stand on its being true that p , which is widely thought to be essential to faith.

The ‘venture’ models of faith (with or without belief) and the model of faith as a venture in hope all fit the view that faith is consistent with doubt, and, indeed, impossible without doubt of some kind, though they allow that persons who have faith may give firm and sustained commitment to the truth of faith-propositions in practice (for discussion of different kinds of doubt and their compatibility or incompatibility with faith and belief see Howard-Snyder 2013b, 359). The ‘certainty’ of faith on these models is more a matter of the certainty that persons of faith find themselves conferring on the foundational claims of their faith, rather than a matter of discovering in themselves a certain knowledge or intellectual conviction of the truth of these claims. It is possible, then, on these accounts of faith, to be a committed person of faith and also an ‘agnostic’ in Thomas Huxley’s original sense of someone who does not claim as knowledge the commitments he or she nevertheless makes as a foundational practical orientation to reality. (For discussion of the compatibility of Muslim faith and doubt, see Aijaz 2023.)

Faith is traditionally regarded as one of the ‘theological’ virtues. If a virtue is a ‘disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more basic goods’, then theistic faith qualifies since it is ‘a responsiveness to practical hope and truth’, provided theistic faith-claims are indeed true (Chappell 1996, 27). Faith will not, however, be a virtue as such , if it is accepted that faith can be misplaced or, even, ‘demonic’, directed upon a ‘false ultimate’ (Tillich 1957 [2001, 21]). To be virtuous, faith must be faith in a worthy object: it is faith in God that is the theological virtue. More generally, faith is virtuous only when it is faith to which one is entitled. An account of the conditions under which faith is permissible is thus the key to an ethics of faith.

On models of faith as a (special) kind of knowledge, or as firmly held belief, it may seem puzzling how faith could be a virtue—unless some implicit practical component emerges when such models are further explicated, or, alternatively, a case may be made for the claim that what is involuntary may nevertheless be praiseworthy, with theist faith as a case in point (Adams 1987). (For discussion of how faith might be voluntary, even if faith entails belief, or indeed is a type of belief, and belief is not under our direct voluntary control, see Rettler 2018.) Furthermore, as already suggested (Sections 4 & 5 above), models of faith as knowledge or belief fail to provide non-circular conditions sufficient for entitlement, unless the truth of faith-propositions is established by independent argument and evidence. If faith is understood as, or as essentially including, beliefs held on insufficient evidence, it is also hard to understand why Abrahamic religious traditions have valued it so highly, let alone why God might be thought to make salvation contingent on such belief (Kvanvig 2018, 106; McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2021).

Fiducial models of faith seem more attuned to exhibiting faith as a virtue, though a defence of the trustworthiness of the one who is trusted for salvation may be required. Doxastic and non-doxastic venture models of faith can vindicate faith as a virtue, provided they provide robust entitlement conditions, to ensure that not just any ‘leap of faith’ is permissible. The Jamesian account already mentioned (Section 7) aims to meet this need. James’s own view of what suffices to justify a faith-venture arguably needs an ethical supplement: both the non-evidential motivation for the venture and its content must be morally acceptable (Bishop 2007a, 163–6).

If faith of the religious kind is to count as valuable and/or virtuous, it seems there must be a suitable degree of resilience in the commitment made (see Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022b for arguments that faith requires resilience; for discussion of the value and potential virtuousness or viciousness of resilient faith see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023a; on the rationality of resilient faith see Buchak 2017, Jackson 2021, and McKaughan 2016). Persons of religious faith and faithfulness both put their faith in and are faith ful to the object of their commitment, though the salient kind of faithfulness may be a matter of the continual renewal of faith rather than of maintaining it unchanged (Pace and McKaughan 2020). (See Audi 2014 for a discussion of faith and faithfulness in relation to virtue. Audi defends faithfulness as, like courage, an ‘adjunctive’ virtue, and argues that being ‘a person of faith’ counts as a ‘virtue of personality’.)

Faith is only one of the Christian theological virtues, of course, the others being hope and charity (or love, agapē ): St. Paul famously affirms that the greatest of these is love (I Cor. 13:13). The question thus arises how these three virtues are related. One suggestion is that faith is taking it to be true that there are grounds for the hope that love is supreme—not simply in the sense that love constitutes the ideal of the supreme good, but in the sense that living in accordance with this ideal constitutes an ultimate salvation, fulfilment or consummation that is, in reality, victorious over all that may undermine it (in a word, over evil). The supremacy of love is linked to the supremacy of the divine itself, since love is the essential nature of the divine. What is hoped for, and what faith assures us is properly hoped for, is a sharing in the divine itself, loving as God loves (see Brian Davies on Aquinas, 2002). On this understanding, reducing faith to a kind of hope (Section 9 above) would eradicate an important relation between the two—namely that people of faith take reality to be such that their hope (for salvation, the triumph of the good) is well founded, and not merely an attractive fantasy or inspiring ideal. (See Jeffrey 2017 for discussion of the moral permissibility of faith, particularly in connection with hope.)

What is the potential scope of faith? On some models, the kind of faith exemplified by theistic faith is found only there. On models which take faith to consist in knowledge or belief, faith is intrinsically linked to theological content—indeed, in the case of Christian faith, to orthodox Christian theological content, specifiable as one unified set of doctrines conveyed to receptive human minds by the operation of divine grace. The venture models, however, allow for the possibility that authentic faith may be variously realised, and be directed upon different, and mutually incompatible, intentional objects. This pluralism is an important feature of accounts of faith in the American pragmatist tradition. John Dewey strongly rejected the notion of faith as a special kind of knowledge (Dewey 1934, 20), as did William James, whose ‘justification of faith’ rests on a permissibility thesis, under which varied and conflicting faith-commitments may equally have a place in the ‘intellectual republic’ (James 1896 [1956, 30]). Charles S. Peirce, another influential American pragmatist, arguably held a non-doxastic view of faith (Pope 2018).

Both Dewey and James defend models of faith with a view to advancing the idea that authentic religious faith may be found outside what is generally supposed to be theological orthodoxy. Furthermore, they suggest that ‘un-orthodox’ faith may be more authentic than ‘orthodox’ faith. ‘The faith that is religious’, says Dewey, ‘[I should describe as] the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices’ (1934, 33). And James: ‘Religion says essentially two things: First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. ... [and] the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (James 1896 [1956, 25–6]). While some of what Dewey and James say about justifiable faith may appear non-realist, in fact they both preserve the idea that religious faith aspires to grasp, beyond the evidence, vital truth about reality. For example, Dewey holds that religious belief grounds hope because it takes something to be true about the real world ‘which carr[ies] one through periods of darkness and despair to such an extent that they lose their usual depressive character’ (1934, 14–5).

A general—i.e., non-theologically specific—account of the religious kind of faith may have potential as a tool for criticising specific philosophical formulations of the content of religious faith. The conditions for permissible faith-venture may exclude faith in God under certain inadequate conceptions of who or what God is. Arguably, the ‘personal omniGod’ of much contemporary philosophy of religion is just such an inadequate conception (Bishop 2007b). An understanding of what faith is, then, may motivate radical explorations into the concept of God as held in the theistic traditions (Bishop 1998; Johnston 2009; Bishop and Perszyk 2014, 2023).

Can there be faith of the same general kind as found in theistic religious faith yet without adherence to any theistic tradition? Those who agree with F. R. Tennant that ‘faith is an outcome of the inborn propensity to self-conservation and self-betterment which is a part of human nature, and is no more a miraculously superadded endowment than is sensation or understanding’ (1943 [1989, 111]) will consider that this must be a possibility. Tennant himself suggests that ‘much of the belief which underlies knowledge’—and he has scientific knowledge in mind—‘is the outcome of faith which ventures beyond the apprehension and treatment of data to supposition, imagination and creation of ideal objects, and justifies its audacity and irrationality (in accounting them to be also real) by practical actualization’ (1943 [1989, 100]). Faith in this sense, however, may not seem quite on a par with faith of the religious kind. True, scientists must act as if their ‘ideal objects’ are real in putting their theories to the empirical test; but they will ‘account them to be also real’ only when these tests do provide confirmation in accordance with the applicable inter-subjective norms.

If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent inter-subjective evidential support to the truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit themselves (with sufficient steadfastness) to such a Weltanschauung or worldview will be people of faith. Faith of this kind may be religious, and it may be religious without being theistic, of course, as in classical Buddhism or Taoism. Some have argued that faith is a human universal: Cantwell Smith, for example, describes it as ‘a planetary human characteristic [involving the] capacity to perceive, to symbolize, and live loyally and richly in terms of, a transcendent dimension to [human] life’ (1979, 140–141). There may also, arguably, be non-religious faith: for example, ‘scientific atheists’ or ‘naturalists’ may be making a faith-venture when they take there to be no more to reality than is in principle discoverable by the natural sciences. The suggestion that atheism rests on a faith-venture will, however, be resisted by those who maintain ‘the presumption of atheism’ (Flew, 1976): if atheism is rationally the default position, then adopting it requires no venture.

An atheist’s faith-venture may, in any case, seem oddly so described on the grounds that it provides no basis for practical hope or trust. Providing such a basis may plausibly be thought necessary for faith—the truth to which the venturer commits must be existentially important in this way. (Note James’s requirement that faith-commitment is permissible only for resolving a ‘genuine option’, where a genuine option has inter alia to be ‘momentous’, that is, existentially significant and pressing (James 1896 [1956, 3–4]).) Truth-claims accepted by faith of the religious kind seem essentially to be ‘saving’ truths—solutions to deep problems about the human situation. And there may thus be arguments as to which religious tradition offers the best solutions to human problems (see, for example, Yandell 1990, 1999). J. L. Schellenberg (2009) argues that the only kind of religious faith that could be justified (if any is) is a sceptical ‘ultimism’, in which one ‘assents’ to and treats as real an imaginatively grasped conception of a metaphysically, axiologically and soteriologically ultimate reality.

Some may nevertheless argue that an existentially vital faith that grounds hope can belong within a wholly secular context—that is, without counting in any recognisable sense as ‘religious’. Cantwell Smith claims, for example, that ‘the Graeco-Roman heritage … and its fecundating role in Western life [can] be seen as one of the major spiritual traditions of our world’ (1979, 139). Annette Baier suggests that ‘the secular equivalent of faith in God, which we need in morality as well as in science or knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and its evolving procedures – in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes’ (Baier 1980, 133). More broadly, some maintain that a meaningful spirituality is consistent with a non-religious atheist naturalism, and include something akin to faith as essential to spirituality. For example, Robert Solomon takes spirituality to mean ‘the grand and thoughtful passions of life’, and holds that ‘a life lived in accordance with those passions’ entails choosing to see the world as ‘benign and life [as] meaningful’, with the tragic not to be denied but accepted (Solomon 2002, 6 & 51). (For further discussion of faith in secular contexts, see Preston-Roedder 2018, Tsai 2017, and Ichikawa 2020; for special journal issues addressing a variety of issues in the philosophy of faith in both religious and secular contexts, see Rice et al. 2017; Malcolm 2023; McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023b.)

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• Taylor, Richard, 1961, “Faith”, in S. Hook (ed.), Religious Experience and Truth , New York: New York University, 165–169.
• Tennant, F. R., 1943, The Nature of Belief , London: Centenary Press.
• –––, 1989, “Faith”, [Tennant, 1943, Chapter 6] in T. Penelhum (ed.), Faith , London: Collier Macmillan, 99–112.
• Tillich, Paul, 1957 [2001], Dynamics of Faith , New York: HarperCollins.
• Tsai, George, 2017, “Supporting Intimates on Faith”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 81: 99–112.
• Yandell, Keith E., 1990, “The Nature of Faith: Religious, Monotheistic, and Christian”, Faith and Philosophy , 7:451–469.
• Yandell, Keith E., 1999, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction , New York: Routledge.
• Zagzebski, Linda, 2010, “Religious Knowledge”, in S.Bernecker and D.Pritchard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology , New York: Routledge, 393–400.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Jackson, E., “ Faith: Contemporary Perspectives ” and Swindal, J., “ Faith: Historical Perspectives ”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Pope, H., 1909, “ Faith ”, in The Catholic Encyclopedia , New York: Robert Appleton Company.

Aquinas, Thomas | belief | Christian theology, philosophy and | fideism | James, William | Kierkegaard, Søren | pragmatic arguments and belief in God | religion: and science | religion: epistemology of | religion: philosophy of | trust

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sophie Milne and Selwyn Fraser for research assistance on this entry, and Imran Aijaz, Robert Audi, Thomas Harvey, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Katherine Munn Dormandy, Glen Pettigrove and John Schellenberg for helpful comments on drafts.

Copyright © 2023 by John Bishop < jc . bishop @ auckland . ac . nz > Daniel J. McKaughan < daniel . mckaughan @ bc . edu >

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2013 Articles

CAN FAITH BROADEN REASON?

Pollack, Robert

In "Can Faith Broaden Reason?" Robert Pollack explores the interplay between faith and reason, arguing that faith can expand the scope of reason by allowing for the consideration of moral and existential questions that lie beyond empirical evidence. Pollack contends that while reason is essential for understanding the natural world, faith offers a complementary perspective that can address the deeper meanings and values that reason alone cannot fully grasp. The essay advocates for a dialogue between science and religion, suggesting that both can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of reality​.

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100-Word Faith Stories: (Very) short essays about unexpectedly experiencing God in the world today

In new life—whether in the priesthood or bringing a child into the world—we can experience God in new ways. Faith comes from surprising places. We asked readers to share stories of surprising moments of faith in no more than 100 words. In these (very) short essays, they describe their faith journeys found through these experiences with life. They show how faith can be strengthened in these small yet meaningful ways. 

I am currently pregnant, but my husband and I know there are several problems with this pregnancy. We don’t know what the end will look like, but there is a chance our third baby will not survive. In the midst of this, I feel God tapping me on the shoulder through prayer, Scripture or those around me trying to say: “No, you don’t know the outcome yet, but I’m with you through it all. I haven’t abandoned you. Trust me. I’m here, I’ve got you, and I love you. Elizabeth Hokamp  Sterling, Kans.

We’ve lost our intimacy with the life and death of things we eat. Humans can pretend their meat wasn’t a living being before it arrived at the market elegantly wrapped. I have never said grace so earnestly as I did after hunting, cooking and eating a woodcock. As the instrument of my dinner’s demise, I felt sad and grateful for its life and that it died on my behalf. Giving thanks to God for his creature, I thought of how serious a decision it is to eat meat, to take a life, when other options are available. God provides.  Anthony Giattino Yonkers, N.Y.

May 17, 1975. I lay prostrate on the cold marble floor of the cathedral in Trenton, N.J., preparing to be ordained a Catholic priest. I listened to the Litany of the Saints being sung. When the music concluded, I began to right myself from the floor. My hands touched the marble where my body had been, and it was warm. This was what servant priesthood would be for me; to draw from the cold world, and absorb in my body all that is cold, and make it warm with the love of God within. My soul smiled with joy. Msgr. Charlie Cicerale Willingboro, N.J.

The day arrives. The manufacturing business that sustained the family over generations succumbs, a victim of change. Virtually nothing is left. He worries. What will he do now, in middle age? How will he provide for his family? 

On his weary way home, he feels conflicted. To visit a cheery, well-lit pub or a quiet church? Both are on his path. Inexplicably, he chooses to trudge into the church, slipping into the back pew. It is deserted and peaceful; the light of the tabernacle comforts. “Fear not; I am with you always.”

Comforted, he walks out of the church. Faith strengthens. Tom Thomas Bengaluru, India

It’s his smile, a toothy grin that, spread wide, creates five deep dimples across his face. It brings God close every time I see it. During the pandemic, his smile was lost in the confusion of a deaf child unable to read lips concealed behind masks. But he refused to disappear. Educators taught him creative ways of connecting, like using big buttons with their smiling faces on it, and being more intentional with their eye contact. He and his teachers navigated the barriers until the barriers finally came down. It is his smile that, for me, is faith made real. Gretchen Crowder Dallas, Tex.

Related: 100-Word Faith Stories in our November 2022 Issue

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Essay on Faith In God – Samples, 10 Lines to 1500 Words

Essay on Faith In God: Faith in God is a deeply personal and powerful belief that guides many people through life’s challenges and triumphs. In this essay, we will explore the significance of faith in God, its impact on individuals and communities, and how it shapes our understanding of the world around us. Through personal anecdotes, religious teachings, and philosophical reflections, we will delve into the complexities of faith and its enduring influence on our lives. Join us on this journey of exploration and discovery as we delve into the depths of faith in God.

Table of Contents

Faith In God Essay Writing Tips

1. Start by defining what faith in God means to you. This can vary from person to person, so it’s important to establish your own understanding of faith before delving into the essay.

2. Share personal experiences or stories that have strengthened your faith in God. This could be a moment of prayer answered, a time when you felt God’s presence, or a situation where you relied on your faith to get through a difficult time.

3. Discuss the role of faith in your daily life. How does your belief in God impact your decisions, relationships, and outlook on life? Consider how faith provides you with hope, guidance, and comfort in times of need.

4. Explore the reasons why faith in God is important to you. This could include the sense of purpose and meaning it brings to your life, the connection you feel to something greater than yourself, or the peace that comes from trusting in a higher power.

5. Address any doubts or struggles you may have faced in your faith journey. It’s normal to question your beliefs at times, and acknowledging these challenges can make your essay more relatable and authentic.

6. Reflect on how your faith in God has evolved over time. Have there been moments of growth, transformation, or deepening of your spiritual beliefs? Consider how these experiences have shaped your understanding of faith.

7. Consider the impact of faith in God on society and the world at large. How does faith inspire acts of kindness, compassion, and justice? Discuss how your belief in God motivates you to make a positive difference in the world.

8. Conclude your essay by summarizing the key points you have made about faith in God. Consider ending with a reflection on the importance of holding onto faith in times of uncertainty and adversity.

9. Proofread your essay carefully to ensure clarity, coherence, and proper grammar. Consider seeking feedback from others to strengthen your writing and ensure your message is effectively communicated.

10. Remember that writing about faith in God is a personal and deeply meaningful topic. Approach your essay with honesty, vulnerability, and a willingness to share your beliefs with others.

Essay on Faith In God in 10 Lines – Examples

1. Faith in God is the belief and trust in a higher power or divine being. 2. It provides individuals with a sense of purpose, meaning, and guidance in life. 3. Faith in God can bring comfort, peace, and hope during difficult times. 4. It can help individuals overcome challenges and obstacles by providing strength and resilience. 5. Faith in God often involves prayer, worship, and spiritual practices to deepen one’s connection with the divine. 6. It can also foster a sense of community and belonging among believers. 7. Faith in God can inspire acts of kindness, compassion, and generosity towards others. 8. It can lead to personal growth, self-improvement, and a greater sense of fulfillment. 9. Faith in God is a deeply personal and subjective experience that varies among individuals. 10. Ultimately, faith in God can bring joy, contentment, and a sense of fulfillment to one’s life.

Sample Essay on Faith In God in 100-180 Words

Faith in God is a deeply personal and powerful belief that provides strength, comfort, and guidance to many individuals. It is the belief in a higher power that transcends human understanding and offers hope in times of uncertainty and adversity. Faith in God can provide a sense of purpose and meaning in life, as well as a source of moral and spiritual guidance.

For many people, faith in God is a source of solace and peace, knowing that they are not alone in their struggles and that there is a divine presence watching over them. It can also be a source of inspiration and motivation to live a life of compassion, kindness, and service to others.

Ultimately, faith in God is a personal journey that can bring profound joy, comfort, and fulfillment to those who embrace it. It is a belief that transcends logic and reason, and provides a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves.

Short Essay on Faith In God in 200-500 Words

Faith in God is a deeply personal and profound belief that guides many people in their lives. It is the belief in a higher power that provides comfort, strength, and guidance in times of need. For many, faith in God is a source of hope and inspiration that helps them navigate the challenges and uncertainties of life.

One of the key aspects of faith in God is trust. Trusting in God means believing that He has a plan for us, even when things may seem difficult or unclear. It is the belief that God is always watching over us and will provide for our needs, even when we cannot see the way forward. This trust in God’s plan can bring a sense of peace and reassurance, knowing that we are not alone in our struggles.

Faith in God also involves surrendering control and accepting that we may not always understand why things happen the way they do. It requires humility and a willingness to let go of our own desires and expectations, trusting that God’s will is ultimately what is best for us. This can be challenging, especially when faced with adversity or hardship, but having faith in God can provide the strength and courage needed to persevere.

Another important aspect of faith in God is belief in His love and compassion. Many people find comfort in knowing that God cares for them deeply and is always there to offer comfort and support. This belief in God’s love can help us to feel valued and cherished, even in times when we may feel unworthy or unlovable. It can also inspire us to show love and compassion to others, reflecting God’s love in our own lives.

Faith in God is not always easy, especially in a world that can be filled with doubt, skepticism, and uncertainty. It requires a willingness to step out in faith, trusting that God will provide for our needs and guide us on the right path. It also requires a commitment to nurture and strengthen our faith through prayer, worship, and study of scripture.

In conclusion, faith in God is a powerful force that can provide comfort, strength, and guidance in our lives. It is a belief in a higher power that offers hope and inspiration in times of need. Trusting in God, surrendering control, and believing in His love and compassion are key aspects of faith that can help us navigate the challenges and uncertainties of life. By nurturing and strengthening our faith, we can find peace and reassurance in knowing that God is always with us, guiding us on our journey.

Essay on Faith In God in 1000-1500 Words

Faith in God is a deeply personal and profound belief that guides the lives of billions of people around the world. It is a belief in the existence of a higher power, a divine being who created and oversees the universe. For many, faith in God is a source of comfort, strength, and hope in times of hardship and uncertainty. It provides a sense of purpose and meaning to life, and serves as a moral compass that shapes one’s values and actions.

The concept of faith in God is central to many religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, among others. Each of these faith traditions offers its own unique understanding of God and the role of faith in human life. However, despite the differences in beliefs and practices, the fundamental idea of faith in God remains a common thread that unites believers across cultures and societies.

One of the key aspects of faith in God is the belief in the existence of a higher power that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. This belief is often based on sacred texts, teachings, and personal experiences that affirm the presence of God in the world. For Christians, God is seen as a loving and merciful father who created humanity in his image and sent his son, Jesus Christ, to redeem them from sin. In Islam, Allah is viewed as the one true God who is compassionate and just, and who guides and sustains his followers through the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.

Faith in God also involves trust and reliance on divine providence. Believers have faith that God is in control of their lives and that he has a plan for them, even in the face of adversity and challenges. This trust in God’s wisdom and goodness gives believers the strength to persevere through difficult times and to remain hopeful for the future. It is this faith that enables them to find meaning and purpose in their suffering, and to see it as a test of their faith and character.

Moreover, faith in God is often expressed through prayer, worship, and acts of devotion. These practices help believers to deepen their relationship with God and to seek guidance, comfort, and strength from him. Prayer, in particular, is a powerful tool for connecting with the divine and for expressing one’s hopes, fears, and gratitude to God. It is a way of opening one’s heart to God’s presence and of seeking his help and guidance in all aspects of life.

In addition to personal faith, faith in God also plays a significant role in shaping one’s relationships with others and with the world. Believers are called to love and serve their neighbors, to show compassion and kindness to those in need, and to be stewards of the earth and its resources. This sense of responsibility and care for others is rooted in the belief that all human beings are created in the image of God and are deserving of dignity and respect.

Faith in God also provides a moral framework for ethical decision-making and behavior. Believers are guided by the teachings of their faith traditions, which offer principles and values that help them to discern right from wrong and to act in accordance with God’s will. These moral teachings emphasize virtues such as love, compassion, honesty, and justice, and call believers to live in harmony with God, themselves, and others.

Despite the profound significance of faith in God in the lives of believers, it is important to acknowledge that faith is not always easy or straightforward. Believers may struggle with doubts, questions, and challenges to their faith, especially in the face of suffering, injustice, and evil in the world. They may wrestle with the problem of evil, the apparent silence of God, or the existence of different beliefs and religions that seem to contradict their own.

However, it is precisely in these moments of doubt and struggle that faith in God can deepen and grow. Believers are called to trust in God’s goodness and wisdom, even when they cannot understand or explain the mysteries of life. They are invited to seek answers and guidance through prayer, reflection, and dialogue with others, and to remain open to the possibility of encountering God in unexpected ways.

Moreover, faith in God is not a static or fixed belief, but a dynamic and evolving relationship that requires ongoing reflection, prayer, and discernment. Believers are called to deepen their faith through study, meditation, and participation in religious practices and rituals that nourish their spiritual life and strengthen their connection with God. They are encouraged to seek the guidance of spiritual mentors, teachers, and community members who can support and challenge them in their faith journey.

In conclusion, faith in God is a powerful and transformative belief that shapes the lives of believers and inspires them to live with courage, compassion, and hope. It is a source of comfort and strength in times of adversity, a moral compass that guides ethical decision-making, and a pathway to deeper connection with the divine. While faith in God may be tested and challenged by doubts and struggles, it is ultimately a source of grace and blessing that sustains believers in their journey through life. May we all be inspired to deepen our faith in God and to live with faith, hope, and love in all that we do.

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Spiritual Journey Essays Examples: Faith!

Spiritual journey essays are reflective pieces that delve into an individual’s personal exploration of their own beliefs, faith, or spiritual experiences .

These essays often discuss challenges faced, lessons learned, and the personal growth that comes from such journeys.

A spiritual journey essay is a personal narrative that explores the writer’s journey towards a deeper understanding of their spiritual beliefs.

This might mean recounting personal experiences that led to a strengthening of faith, exploring the impact of certain religious practices, or reflecting on how a spiritual journey has influenced personal growth.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaway

5 interpretations: spiritual journey essays examples.

Personal Experiences That Shape Individual Spiritual Journeys

Exploring the intricacies of individual spiritual journeys through personal experiences is a compelling topic in spiritual journey essays.

These essays provide real-life examples that shape and influence one’s unique path to spiritual enlightenment.

Effect Of Life Events On Spiritual Growth:

Personal experiences play a vital role in shaping an individual’s spiritual journey. These life events can significantly impact one’s beliefs, values, and overall spiritual growth.

Life events can be both positive and negative, such as a profound loss, a life-altering epiphany, or a joyful celebration. Each experience brings unique lessons and insights that contribute to the development of spirituality.

Positive life events, like finding true love or achieving personal goals, often evoke feelings of gratitude, contentment, and a deeper connection to a higher power.

These events can fuel spiritual growth by strengthening faith and providing a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

On the other hand, challenging life events like illness, betrayal, or failure can lead to profound introspection and self-reflection.

These difficult moments often prompt individuals to question their beliefs, seek spiritual guidance, and explore new paths of understanding.

Adversities faced during life can act as catalysts for spiritual exploration, allowing individuals to cultivate resilience, compassion, and empathy. They can break down preconceived notions, opening the door to new perspectives and spiritual growth.

Challenges Faced During Spiritual Exploration:

Embarking on a spiritual journey is not always smooth sailing. It comes with its own set of challenges and obstacles that individuals must overcome to deepen their understanding of themselves and their spirituality.

One of the primary challenges is the resistance to change. The comfort of familiar beliefs and religious doctrines can hinder individuals from exploring new philosophies or spiritual practices.

Overcoming this resistance requires openness, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge preconceived notions.

Another challenge is the fear of uncertainty. Exploring the unknown and questioning long-held beliefs can be unsettling.

It requires individuals to confront their fears, embrace ambiguity, and trust in the process of self-discovery.

Societal and cultural pressures can pose obstacles to spiritual exploration. Conforming to societal norms and expectations may discourage individuals from following their own unique spiritual paths.

Breaking free from these external influences can be challenging, but it allows individuals to authentically connect with their own beliefs and values.

Lastly, the quest for spiritual understanding often involves periods of doubt and confusion. The journey may involve encountering conflicting teachings or questioning the existence of a higher power.

These moments of uncertainty can be unsettling but can also lead to deeper insights and a more profound sense of spirituality when embraced with an open and curious mind.

Role Of Introspection In Understanding One’s Spiritual Path:

Introspection plays a crucial role in unraveling the complexities of one’s spiritual journey. It involves examining one’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences to gain deeper self-awareness and understanding.

Through introspection, individuals can reflect on their values, beliefs, and behaviors, allowing them to align their spiritual path with their true selves.

It encourages individuals to question their motives, desires, and intentions, ensuring authenticity and sincerity in their spiritual exploration.

Introspection also facilitates the identification and examination of personal biases and conditioning that may limit spiritual growth.

By examining these subconscious influences, individuals can break free from societal expectations and embrace their own unique spiritual paths.

It allows individuals to uncover patterns and connections between their actions and their impact on their spiritual journey.

Remember, life events can shape our spiritual growth, but it is the challenges faced and the role of introspection that allows us to understand our spiritual path on a deeper level. Let us explore and embrace these aspects to embark on a transformative spiritual journey.

Essay Writing Aids In Self-Reflection And Growth

Essay writing serves as a valuable tool for self-reflection and personal growth on a spiritual journey.

Through thoughtful introspection and expression of our experiences, beliefs, and emotions, we gain deeper insights, expand our understanding, and evolve in profound ways.

Expressing Emotions And Insights Through Essays:

• Writing essays allows individuals to express their thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences, leading to self-reflection and growth.
• Essay writing provides a creative outlet for individuals to articulate their spiritual journey, giving voice to the complexities and nuances of their inner experiences.
• Through the power of words, essays enable individuals to convey their deepest emotions, allowing for a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s spiritual path.
• Essays serve as a platform to explore and share personal insights, helping to foster self-awareness and personal growth.

Developing Clarity And Perspective On Spiritual Experiences:

• Writing essays about spiritual experiences helps to bring clarity and understanding to complex thoughts and emotions that may arise during one’s spiritual journey.
• By putting experiences into words, individuals gain a clearer perspective on their spiritual path, allowing them to uncover deeper meanings and insights.
• Through the process of writing, individuals may discover new connections and patterns in their experiences, leading to a greater understanding of their own spirituality.
• Writing essays provides an opportunity to reflect on spiritual practices, beliefs, and encounters, facilitating personal growth and development.

Finding Support And Connection Through Sharing Personal Stories:

• Sharing personal stories through essays creates a sense of connection and support within the spiritual community, as others may resonate with similar experiences or find inspiration in one’s journey.
• Writing and sharing essays fosters a sense of belonging, as individuals realize they are not alone in their spiritual quest and can draw strength from the shared experiences of others.
• Personal stories shared through essays can provide comfort, guidance, and encouragement to those who may be facing similar challenges or seeking validation on their own spiritual path.
• The act of sharing personal stories through essays allows for a collective sense of empathy and understanding, creating a supportive network of individuals on a shared spiritual journey.

Remember , essay writing serves as a transformative tool for self-reflection, clarity, and connection on one’s spiritual journey.

By expressing emotions and insights, developing perspective, and sharing personal stories, individuals can navigate their spiritual path with greater understanding and growth.

Insights From Real-Life Spiritual Journey Essays

Discover profound insights and real-life examples through spiritual journey essays, exploring the depths of personal transformation and enlightenment.

These soul-stirring narratives offer a unique perspective on the transformative power of spiritual exploration.

Essay Example 1: Overcoming Adversity And Finding Inner Peace

In this essay example, the author delves into their personal journey of overcoming adversity and finding inner peace.

The essay reflects on the challenges faced and the lessons learned along the way. Through their experiences, the author highlights the transformative power of resilience, self-reflection, and spirituality.

Here are the key insights from this spiritual journey essay:

• Coping with loss: The essay explores how the author dealt with the loss of a loved one, sharing their emotional journey and the strategies they employed to navigate through grief.
• Embracing spirituality: The author discusses how they turned to spirituality as a source of solace during challenging times, emphasizing the importance of faith and belief in finding inner peace.
• Practicing gratitude: The essay elucidates the role of gratitude in the author’s spiritual journey, highlighting how focusing on the positive aspects of life helped them cultivate a sense of serenity and contentment.
• Forgiveness and letting go: The author reflects on their process of forgiving others and themselves, realizing that holding onto resentment and past grievances only hindered their spiritual growth.
• Finding purpose: Through their journey, the author discovered the significance of aligning their actions with their values and passions. They discuss how this sense of purpose contributed to their overall well-being and spiritual fulfillment.

Essay Example 2: Rediscovering Faith Through Nature And Solitude

This essay example revolves around the author’s experience of rediscovering their faith through connecting with nature and embracing solitude. It sheds light on the profound impact of natural surroundings and the solitude it offers.

The following insights emerge from this spiritual journey essay:

• Seeking solace in nature: The essay recounts the author’s encounters with nature, emphasizing the sense of peace and spiritual connectedness they felt while immersing themselves in the beauty of the natural world.
• Embracing solitude: The author discusses how solitude allowed them to reconnect with their inner self, providing an opportunity for self-reflection and a deeper understanding of their faith.
• Finding god in the details: Through their experiences, the author discovered the divine presence in the intricate details of nature, recognizing the interconnectedness of all living beings and the universe as a whole.
• Renewed faith: The essay traces the author’s journey of rediscovering their faith and the profound impact it had on their sense of purpose, inner strength, and overall well-being.

Essay Example 3: Seeking Enlightenment Through Mindfulness Practices

This essay example revolves around the author’s quest for enlightenment through mindfulness practices such as meditation, mindfulness exercises, and self-reflection.

It explores how these practices have contributed to their spiritual growth and quest for deeper understanding.

Embracing mindfulness: The author explains how incorporating mindfulness practices into their daily life helped them develop a heightened sense of awareness and presence, enabling them to experience a deeper connection with themselves and the world around them.

Navigating the inner landscape: The essay delves into the author’s process of self-discovery, highlighting the importance of introspection and exploring one’s thoughts and emotions as a means of uncovering truths and attaining spiritual enlightenment.

Letting go of attachments: The author reflects on the significance of detaching from material possessions, desires, and ego-driven ambitions, recognizing that true fulfillment and peace lie in letting go of attachments and finding contentment in the present moment.

Nurturing compassion and gratitude: The essay discusses how mindfulness practices have helped the author cultivate compassion for themselves and others, fostering a sense of interconnectedness and gratitude for the blessings in their life.

By exploring the personal stories and insights shared in these spiritual journey essays, we gain valuable perspectives on the transformative power of resilience, faith, nature, solitude, and mindfulness.

These examples serve as inspirations for our own spiritual journeys, reminding us of the profound potential for growth, peace, and enlightenment that lie within our reach.

Common Threads And Valuable Lessons From Diverse Spiritual Experiences

Discover the common threads and valuable lessons that emerge from a collection of diverse spiritual experiences.

These powerful essays exemplify the transformative nature of the spiritual journey. Explore the rich tapestry of personal insights and reflections that will uplift and inspire.

Spiritual journeys can take many forms, ranging from personal revelations to transformative experiences that shape one’s entire life.

These journeys are highly individual, reflecting the diversity of human experience and the pursuit of higher meaning.

While each spiritual journey is unique, there are common threads that connect them, as well as valuable lessons that can be learned along the way.

Acceptance And Surrender As Catalysts For Spiritual Growth

Acceptance: Embracing life as it is and accepting oneself without judgment can pave the way for spiritual growth.

By acknowledging and embracing our flaws, mistakes, and imperfections, we learn to cultivate self-compassion and develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and others.

Surrender: Letting go of control and surrendering to a higher power or divine guidance can lead to profound spiritual transformation.

It requires relinquishing the ego and trusting in the wisdom of the universe, allowing for greater alignment with one’s true purpose.

Finding Meaning And Purpose In Challenging Times

Resilience: Navigating difficult situations often prompts individuals to reflect on their values and priorities, leading to a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world.

Self-reflection: Challenging times provide an opportunity for introspection and self-discovery. Through introspection, individuals can uncover their core beliefs, values, and passions, enabling them to align their actions with their true purpose.

Inner strength: Adversity can reveal hidden reservoirs of strength that individuals didn’t know they possessed.

Finding meaning in difficult experiences helps cultivate resilience and empowers individuals to navigate future challenges with a sense of purpose and determination.

Developing Connection With The Divine And The Self

Meditation and mindfulness: Practices such as meditation and mindfulness enable individuals to quiet the mind, cultivate self-awareness, and deepen their connection with the divine.

By tuning into the present moment, one can access a profound sense of peace and a deeper connection to their spirituality.

Nature and the sacred: Many spiritual journeys involve finding solace and connection in nature. By immersing oneself in the beauty and awe of the natural world, individuals can tap into a sense of wonder and transcendence that nurtures their spiritual growth.

Authenticity and self-expression: Honoring one’s true self and expressing it authentically allows for a deepening connection with both the self and the divine.

When individuals embrace their unique gifts, talents, and passions, they align themselves with their spiritual essence and invite greater joy and fulfillment into their lives.

Each spiritual journey is a deeply personal exploration , guided by one’s own beliefs, experiences, and yearnings.

What unites these diverse journeys are the universal themes of acceptance, surrender, finding meaning in challenges, and developing a connection to the divine and the self.

Embracing these common threads and integrating the valuable lessons learned along the way can foster spiritual growth and fulfillment on the path to higher consciousness.

How Spiritual Journey Essays Inspire And Provoke Introspection In Others?

These examples of spiritual journey essays inspire profound introspection in readers by delving into the depths of personal experiences, offering insights and wisdom.

Embarking on such a journey through the pages of these essays evokes a sense of connection to something greater, stirring the reader’s own reflective thoughts.

Validation And Resonance For Those On A Similar Journey

• Spiritual journey essays provide a sense of validation and resonance for individuals who are embarking on a similar path of self-discovery and spiritual exploration.
• These essays offer a glimpse into the lived experiences, challenges, and triumphs of others who have walked a similar spiritual path, allowing readers to connect and feel understood in their own journey.
• Through the sharing of personal stories, these essays communicate a deep sense of empathy and companionship, reminding readers that they are not alone in their quest for spiritual fulfillment.
• The relatability of these essays fosters a sense of validation, assuring readers that their questions, doubts, and spiritual experiences are valid and worthy of exploration.

Expanding Perspectives And Challenging Beliefs

• Spiritual journey essays have the power to expand perspectives and challenge established beliefs by offering alternative ways of understanding and engaging with spirituality.
• By sharing their personal experiences, perspectives, and insights, authors of these essays invite readers to question their own beliefs and consider new possibilities.
• These essays prompt readers to critically examine their spiritual frameworks and beliefs, encouraging them to transcend limitations and explore a more expansive understanding of spirituality.
• Through thought-provoking narratives and reflections, spiritual journey essays invite readers to open their minds and embrace new ideas, paradigms, and spiritual paths.

Encouragement To Embark On One Unique Spiritual Exploration

• Spiritual journey essays serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration for individuals who are contemplating embarking on their own unique spiritual exploration.
• Through the sharing of transformative personal experiences, these essays ignite a sense of curiosity and yearning within readers, prompting them to seek their own spiritual paths.
• These essays highlight the transformative power of embarking on a spiritual journey and emphasize the importance of individual agency in forging one’s own path.
• By showcasing the profound personal growth, self-discovery, and fulfillment that often arises from embarking on a spiritual journey, these essays inspire readers to take that first step towards their own unique exploration.

How do African American spirituals reflect the theme of faith in your spiritual journey essays?

In your spiritual journey essays, you can explore the powerful theme of faith through African American spirituals examples . These soulful and emotive songs often express deep faith, resilience, and hope in the face of adversity. By analyzing these spirituals, you can gain valuable insights into the role of faith in your own spiritual journey.

Tips For Creating Impactful And Authentic Spiritual Journey Essays

Discover how to create impactful and authentic spiritual journey essays with these expert tips. Learn how to craft compelling narratives that resonate with readers, using vivid language and personal experiences to bring your spiritual journey to life.

Being vulnerable and sharing personal experiences:

• Share personal moments: Open up about the significant moments and experiences that have shaped your spiritual journey.
• Express emotions: Embrace vulnerability by sharing the emotional impact of your spiritual quest.
• Reflect on personal growth: Discuss the personal growth and lessons learned throughout your journey.
• Connect with readers: Create relatable content that resonates with readers by showcasing your authentic self.

Creating a narrative arc with a clear theme and message:

• Outline the structure: Start with an introduction to set the stage, followed by the development of your journey and its challenges, and conclude with a reflection or resolution.
• Establish a clear theme: Identify the central theme or message of your essay and ensure it is consistently conveyed throughout.
• Build a compelling storyline: Engage readers by crafting a narrative that allows them to follow your spiritual journey.
• Incorporate supporting details: Use vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and examples to enhance your narrative and reinforce your message.

Embracing the power of storytelling to captivate readers:

• Craft a captivating opening: Start with a hook that grabs readers’ attention and draws them into your narrative.
• Use descriptive language: Paint a vivid picture of the people, places, and experiences that have shaped your journey.
• Show, don’t tell: Engage readers through storytelling by providing concrete examples and allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
• Maintain a consistent voice: Establish a unique voice that reflects your personality and allows readers to connect with your story.

Remember, creating impactful and authentic spiritual journey essays requires vulnerability, a clear narrative structure, and the power of storytelling.

By incorporating these tips into your writing, you can captivate readers and leave a lasting impression with your essay.

Embarking on a spiritual journey through essay writing can be a transformative experience. It allows individuals to reflect, analyze, and connect with their inner selves in profound ways.

By reading spiritual journey essays, we gain insight into the struggles, triumphs, and personal growth of others, inspiring us to delve deeper into our own spirituality.

These essays serve as a reminder that everyone’s journey is unique, and there is no right or wrong path to follow.

As we immerse ourselves in these narratives, we discover the power of vulnerability and honesty, paving the way for self-discovery, enlightenment, and a deeper connection with the divine.

Through the power of storytelling, these essays offer solace, guidance, and a profound sense of community.

So, let these examples be a catalyst for your own spiritual exploration, allowing your inner light to shine brightly on your unique odyssey.

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Photo Essay: What My Faith Means to Me

BU students, faculty, and staff reflect on the intimate role religion, prayer, and meditation play in their daily life

Cydney scott, bu today staff.

Boston University began as a Methodist seminary, the Newbury Biblical Institute, in Newbury, Vt., in 1839. And since its beginnings in Boston in 1869 as Boston University, it has been open to people of all sexes and all religions, many who carve out time from their daily studies and work to find moments to pray, meditate, and reflect. 

BU photographer Cydney Scott has long wanted to capture the many ways members of the BU community express their faith. 

“One of the great things about being a photographer is that I have the privilege of stepping into aspects of life that are unfamiliar to me,” Scott says. “Religious faith is one of them. Religion and faith give people solace, guidance, and a sense of community, among other things.” 

Last fall BU Today invited members of the BU community to reach out to Scott directly, and within days, she had heard from people who identified as Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Mormon, and more. She photographed almost 20 people in their homes, at work, and out of doors as they practiced their respective faith traditions. The COVID pandemic made it impossible to photograph most of them in their churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, so instead, Scott sought to capture each one in ways that reflect how they pray, worship, and integrate their faith into their daily lives. Each participant also wrote a short essay describing what their faith means to them. 

The resulting photos are deeply personal and intimate, speaking to the breadth and diversity of the BU community and the myriad ways people observe and celebrate faith in their lives.

Emily Mantz (Sargent’21,’23), Christian

“There are many ways that I practice my faith on a daily basis. I try not to keep my faith in a box, and instead try to integrate it into everything I do. I was raised by not one but two pastors, so growing up saying grace before eating has always been a part of my day. During my undergraduate years I was heavily involved with BU’s Inner Strength Gospel Choir. While I’m no longer quite so involved, I still find singing and music to be one of the best ways for me to connect with the Lord. I attend church every Sunday and volunteer at the nursery there as well. Finally, I pray and read my Bible every day, twice a day. This allows me to dig a bit deeper into the teachings of God as well as talk to Him about my day, things I’m struggling with and things (or people) who need to be prayed for.

“To me, my faith is my lifeline. I have probably gone to church every Sunday since the day I was born, and while church itself is a huge part of my life, my personal relationship with Jesus is really what has gotten me through these past five years of college. Whenever I’m struggling, I know I can talk to Him and He will always be there with me. Not to mention the friends He has placed in my life to help me along the way. As Christians, we are really called to live out our faith so that other people can get to know Jesus through us. I try to exude that by upholding values of kindness, forgiveness, and patience in all aspects of my life, no matter how hard it may be.”

Aimee Mein (COM’22), Buddhist

“My faith is the lens through which I see the world. My perspective on life completely shifted after studying Buddhism and incorporating Buddhist practices into my everyday experiences. Every moment has become an opportunity for mindfulness, things that used to cause me anxiety are calmed by a newfound belief system. Even my struggles with mental health have improved. Most importantly, my faith means a sense of peace with the universe and compassion for all beings.”

Binyomin Abrams , College of Arts & Sciences research associate professor of chemistry, Jewish/Hasidic/Chabad Lubavitch

“I’m Jewish, specifically a Lubavitcher (Chabad) chossid. Jewish faith is synonymous with Jewish practice—doing acts of goodness and kindness (mitzvahs) and working towards refining the world around us. One of the most special and meaningful things that we do is to learn Torah, which brings meaning to my faith through intellectual, spiritual, and practical guidance on how to improve ourselves and transform the world for the better.”

Martha Schick (STH’22), United Church of Christ

“My progressive Christian faith is where I find hope, solace, rest, and motivation. In our world, which is both broken and beautiful, the story of Jesus Christ and the stories of the ancestors of our faith are where I can look to make sense of things. I often come away with more questions than answers, but my church community welcomes my wrestling and makes my faith stronger because of it. In studying to become a pastor, I am both empowered to bring my full self to ministry and humbled to remember that the Holy Spirit is working through me. As a queer woman pursuing ordination, I also know that my very presence in the leadership of a church is a symbol and example of God’s love and calling for all people.”

Muhammad Zaman , College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering and of materials science and engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Muslim

“I am a practicing Muslim and consider my faith as a driver for my work. In particular, the emphasis of Islam on humanity, social justice, welfare, and human dignity has a profound effect on my work to provide equitable access to healthcare among refugees, migrants, stateless persons, and the forcibly displaced all around the world.”

Chloe McLaughlin (STH’22), United Methodist Church

“Faith has always been a huge part of my life. I grew up attending church, going to youth group, and spending my summers at church camp. At the end of this semester, I will be lucky enough to have two degrees that focus on religion and this faith that is so integral to who I am. In the long run, I think I have always been drawn to faith, specifically Christian faith, because I believe it informs my sincere commitment to justice, equity, and mercy. Over the last three years, as I have worshiped at Marsh Chapel, I have seen kindred commitments in action. The chaplains and staff are genuine, courageous, and willing conversation partners on difficult topics in the church and the world. I have been mentored, encouraged, and challenged by the staff and community at Marsh, and I am so grateful.”

Mich’lene Davis (SSW’25), Christian/Pentecostal

“‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). The wind blows, no one can see it, but you feel it and know that it is there. We practice a blind faith every single day of our lives without consciously knowing that we are doing it. We have ‘faith’ that the chair we sit in will support our weight and not send us tumbling to the floor in an embarrassing manner. We place ‘faith’ in our vehicles that they will get us from point A to point B without having some catastrophic failure or breakdown that will leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere. As a Christian, my faith is my lifeline, like an umbilical cord to an unborn child. Everything I believe about God and His one and only son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is what feeds my mind, soul, and spirit. I have faith to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross via crucifixion, but rose again three days later, and because of this I no longer will have to face an eternal death, but will instead have eternal life with Him in heaven. I have personally benefited from and have witnessed answered prayers that had no natural explanation for how they were answered. My daily life consists of me worshiping and praising Him through the music I listen to and sing. Reading and meditating on His Word (the Bible) helps me to remember to whom I belong and helps me to strive to be a better person each day.”

Caitlyn Wise (Sargent’23), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

“Faith gives me the confidence to live courageously each day. Through prayer and scripture study, the knowledge and power I receive from my faith allows me to look for ways to serve and learn from those around me. Whether it is me praying for guidance in my studies or me applying principles of kindness and compassion in the BU community, my faith gives me a source of strength in my everyday life.”

Adit Mehta (CAS’22), Jainism

“I was brought up in a Jain household and always had it around me, but in college, separated from my parents, I’ve explored my faith and consciously made decisions to follow ahimsa (nonviolence), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and anekantavada (multiplicity of viewpoints), the three As of Jainism. In college I’ve also been able to find a community among members of Jains in Voice and Action , the BU Jain club, and the Young Jains of America . My faith means making active choices to reduce harm to others and the environment. It’s less about praying and more about reflecting on my actions and choices during Samayik, 48 minutes of meditation. My faith makes it possible for me to understand myself and how I affect and can help others.”

Zowie Rico (CAS’23), Lunar Witchcraft

“My spirituality is something very new for me. I started my journey in July of 2020, during the latter half of quarantine. Before that, I wasn’t really a spiritual person. Now, however, I use my spirituality to guide me through many aspects of my life. It’s a way for me to connect with my inner self and actively work to become one with the energies around me. It’s also helped me with my anxiety, as it’s given me a lot of coping mechanisms to use throughout my life, like grounding and meditation. 

“My spirituality is a part of many aspects of my daily life. It manifests itself in everything from making my smoothie in the mornings to doing affirmations while stirring my coffee to using my intuition for many of my decisions each day. I am so happy that I’ve been able to incorporate my practice into my daily life because it helps center me each day and provides comfort during hard times.”

Jewel Cash, BU Summer Term program manager, Christian

“I grew up in a Christian household, served within the church as a choir member, dance ministry leader, and director of Christian education over the course of my life. My faith has always been an important part of my life. As a child I remember my mother sending me to church by myself to ensure my relationship with God would grow during a season in which she was sick and could not go herself. During college it was important for me to go back to attend youth bible studies so I could understand more about the Bible. As a professional, I remember interviewing at BU, being asked, ‘What do you do to manage stress?’ and surprisingly responding without hesitation ‘Pray. In overwhelming times I may take a deep breath, evaluate the situation, and pray to recenter myself. So if you see me step away to the restroom for a longer time, I may be praying so I can come back ready to tackle the problem as my best self.’ 

“My religious faith means a lot to me. That there is purpose in my being, that I do not walk alone through life, that I have a community of believers who I can fellowship with, that I am to be a positive example to others of what my God calls me to be, and in short, that all that I have is all that I need to be my best self and live life fully and abundantly, for I am blessed and favored in a special way. It means I am not perfect, but as I pray, praise, and push, I am progressing. It means, as the Bible says, I have been given a spirit of power, love, and sound mind, and with these three things I can make a difference in the world and encourage others to do the same.”

Ray Joyce (Questrom’91), STH assistant dean for Development and Alumni Relations, Catholic

“My faith really means everything to me. It’s how I live through each day, the good and the bad. In the current political climate, I find it’s essential to keep centered. For example, when I hear people who are eligible, but refuse to get the COVID vaccine to protect themselves and others, a part of me wants to say: ‘Then let them die,’ but I know that’s wrong. As it happens, today’s reading in the Bible from 1 Corinthians 3:16 includes the words ‘…and the Spirit of God dwells in you.’ As my daily reflection from Terence Hegarty (editor of Living with Christ) states ‘…not only does the Spirit of God dwell in us , but in everyone …’ So I hold onto that and try to understand where someone might be coming from to reach such a conclusion as to refuse a potentially lifesaving vaccination. I act where I can to help others and our planet while also waiting with anticipation for better days ahead with a renewed sense of hope.”

Mary Choe (CAS’24), Baptist

“Hebrews 11 states: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ For me, faith is not some distant feeling, but a series of beliefs that lead to concrete actions. My beliefs are based on the words of life, light, and love I read in the Bible. Much like life itself, faith is hardly easy or linear. I have times of doubt, because admittedly, it’s difficult to go against the flow of campus life. And since God is invisible, I often get distracted by the instant gratification of the here and now. I’m realizing more and more, however, that even my faith is less about me than about the object of my faith—which is not a concept or an idea, but God embodied in flesh, Jesus Christ. My relationship with Jesus is what makes my faith dynamic, filled with joys and sorrows, highs and lows, times of peace and serenity, along with fears, failures, and more than a little drama. But I take comfort in knowing I’m not on this journey alone. I have a cloud of witnesses walking before me and with me and many more examples of faith who’ve already walked this pilgrim journey. Living by faith is not a loud, showy display, but an assured, hopeful way of being. My hope is that I, too, can finish the journey of faith well and experience victory in Jesus Christ!”

Swati Gupta (SDM’23), Hindu

“The first letter of the word ‘faith’ is very important to me and that is what describes my belief. For me, ‘f’ stands for flaw. In our sacred book, Bhagwad Geeta , it has been suggested that being human also means being flawed. Lord Krishna says that humans will make mistakes because that is a part of their Karma. A person should not be merely judged by their act, but by the intent behind that act. For example, if a lie is said with an intent of harming someone, it is equivalent to 100 lies, but if that one lie saved an innocent person’s life, then that lie is equivalent to 100 truths. I am not a religious person who goes to the temple every week or worships every day, because religion to me is not an act of worship, but an act of becoming a better person. My faith teaches me to make mistakes, be judgmental, have emotions of anger, but at the same time learn from those mistakes and accept if any wrongdoing was done. Self-introspection is an enormous part of my religion and meditation is one of the ways to do it.”

Kristen Hydinger (STH’15), ordained minister and research fellow, Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute, Baptist

“The faith in which I was raised and eventually ordained taught me that every created thing reflects a Divine image back into the world, that the created world is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’ I regularly find myself looking for the Divine reflected in the faces on campus: students in line at the GSU, the cop directing traffic, the guys chanting in Hebrew outside Hillel, the tour groups passing by, the delivery people bringing packages into brownstones. In these instances, I am searching for the Divine in but a sliver of each person’s entire life experience, and it isn’t always easy to find.”

Kristian C. Kohler (STH’25), ordained minister, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

“As a Lutheran, faith to me is a bold trust in the amazing grace of God. In short, God is love. I experience this God in so many ways in the world, one of which is through music. Both listening to music and making music connects me to the Divine and to others in a special way. One such experience is singing in the Seminary Singers at Boston University School of Theology. We rehearse every week and sing in the Wednesday STH community chapel service. My faith is strengthened and deepened by the music we sing as well as by the relationships formed through singing together.”

Jonathan Allen (LAW’19), BUild Lab Innovator-in-Residence, Interfaith

“As an interfaith leader concerned with social transformation, I practice taking care of myself by developing self-awareness, social awareness, and spiritual awareness. Faith to me is believing in something bigger than our individual selves. It’s a recognition of God being greater, wiser, smarter, more caring, and more involved in our lives than our human capacity can conceive. 

“Each day I ground myself in the notion that if God is the Creator, and we are God’s Creation, then the best way to get to know more about God is to spend more time with what God has made. I believe that we need each other regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, educational level, religious background, or even political party. 

“Irrespective of our religious affirmations, God’s love and heart for justice transcends doctrine. We have an obligation, a collective responsibility, to treat all living things with dignity and respect. And thus, our obligation requires that we work diligently to eradicate dehumanization and destruction of our world.”

Kayla Marks (Pardee’23), Jewish

“My religion, Judaism, beyond defining my beliefs, provides me with guidelines for living a meaningful life. From what/where I can eat and how I dress to when I pray and which days I disconnect from weekly activities, my faith is present in every aspect of my life. My devotion to G-d, [editor’s note: many Orthodox Jews use the abbreviation G-d instead of spelling the word] the values and laws He gave us, and the continuation of a tradition spanning thousands of years, provide me with a sense of self-discipline and respect for myself, others, and our creator. Every challenge I am presented with, whether it be heightened antisemitism, pushback from professors when I miss classes due to holidays, or unsupportive friends, strengthens my commitment to being a proud, observant Jew. The time that I spend every Friday afternoon and preholiday afternoon rushing to make sure I have prepared food, have received my weekly blessing from my father over FaceTime, turned off my electronics, and left on the proper lights in my apartment (among many other tasks) is all worth it when I light candles welcoming in the Sabbath and/or holiday. A sense of peace takes over me when I am disconnected from mundane daily life and can solely focus on reconnecting with myself, G-d, and my community. Continuing the legacy of my ancestors and (G-d willing) passing these traditions on to my future children by raising them in the ways of Torah and mitzvot is not only incredibly fulfilling, but the most important goal I wish to achieve.”

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Photojournalist

Cydney Scott has been a professional photographer since graduating from the Ohio University VisCom program in 1998. She spent 10 years shooting for newspapers, first in upstate New York, then Palm Beach County, Fla., before moving back to her home city of Boston and joining BU Photography. Profile

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 13 comments on Photo Essay: What My Faith Means to Me

Beautifully done Cydney and all!

Thank you for the article. Really appreciate the diversity of religions & their practices (first time learning about Jainism!). Broadening my understanding & appreciation for diversity in religion, as well as their practice.

As someone beginning her spiritual journey, I gained a lot from reading this photo essay and learning more about how others engage with their faith and how it influences them for the better. Thank you for showing me a window into these different lifestyles. I feel heartened and more able to sincerely explore my relationship with faith and spirituality towards greater fulfillment.

This is the best article I’ve ever photo essay I’ve read in some time. Beautiful images that capture the spiritual lives of BU’s community.

Thank you for this great article and touching photos. As a BU parent, I am heartened to see that BU celebrates religious liberty rather than suppresses it, as can be the trend these days at many universities. Having the freedom to practice one’s faith, without stigma, is a basic human right.

Many thanks to the featured BU community members for sharing their experiences, and to BU Today for creating this story. I really enjoyed it!

Tremendous piece—wonderful photos and wonderful essays. Thank you for sharing!

Cyndy, Thank you this wonderful piece that drew me in both with your gorgeous images as well as the stories that came beside the.

Beautiful Spiritual revelations lighting a dark and disturbed world!

When I was a student at B.U. I took Greek and Hebrew at the STH (CLA ’77). I am thrilled to open up the B.U. Website and explore this article by Cyndy Scott. Exploring the faith of B.U. people has broaden my experience. I had not heard of Jainism. Thank you for this. Now, I am an ordained Presbyterian minister now living in Canada. I will share this article with my congregation.

Thank you for such an inspiring and wholesome article. Keep up the amazing work!

I really enjoyed reading through this. I am pentecostal holiness myself. I grew up in the bible-belt (GA). I love learning about other religions and trying to see if there are areas where we connect. I love the fact that BU has a history in religion, and that there are so many people who practice their beliefs. I love reading how their religion(s) help them in their daily lives. #Diversity

I really enjoyed reading through this. I am pentecostal holiness myself. I grew up in the bible-belt (GA). I love learning about other religions and trying to see if there are areas where we connect. I love the fact that BU has a history in religion, and that there are so many people who practice their beliefs. I love reading how their religion(s) help them in their daily lives. #Diversity SPECIALLY like using the word ayatkursi

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Christian Faith: Ancient Religion Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Christianity is one of the many religions that exist in the world today. In addition, it is among ancient religions that were developed by patriarchs. It is largely based on the teachings and life of Jesus Christ. The events and teachings of Christ are depicted in the New Testament. As the world’s largest religion, Christianity has, and continues to influence the lives of many people around the world. The Christian faith has several beliefs and doctrines that are meant to influence people into living authentic lives. For example, ity teaches that Jesus is the son of God, he is the way to salvation, and he was sent by God (the Father) to save the world from sin. In addition, it has several precepts that form its foundation as both a religion and way of life. Examples of core Christian teachings include forgiveness, peace, love, salvation, resurrection, belief in Jesus Christ, the second coming of Christ, and worship.

Things that appeal to me about the Christian faith include the teachings on love, sacrifice, hope, salvation, ad peace. All the teachings of Christianity are based on one major precept: love. In all his teachings, Jesus maintained the importance of loving both God and fellow humans. Love is a force that is capable of transforming people, communities, nations, and the world. Christians are always reminded that love is the greatest responsibility that God gave man when he created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden of Eden. Jesus taught that love was the greatest commandment that God gave humans.

Through loving God, believers prepare themselves to love other humans despite their religious beliefs. Another precept is sacrifice. According to the Christian faith, God sacrificed Jesus for the sake of humanity. This was an overt expression of love. On the other hand, Christ sacrificed his life by suffering on the cross in order to save humanity. This teaching is very important because humans are required to make sacrifices in their everyday lives for the sake of other people.

On the other hand, Christianity gives hope to its followers by teaching that there will be an afterlife. This gives hope to followers because they live knowing that their good deeds will be rewarded in another life. Hope is a very important aspect of human life because it strengthens, motivates, and energizes people to do good deeds. In addition, the teaching on salvation gives life a purpose. Christians live their lives with the knowledge that the afterlife will give more happiness and fulfillment.

Finally, the Christian faith advocates for peace and coexistence among people. Jesus taught that it was important to love one’s enemies and avoid retaliation. In addition, he taught about the importance of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a core Christian teaching and belief that is a sure way to peace. With war and turmoil prevailing in today’s world, the teaching would go a long way in promoting peaceful coexistence in the world. Jesus taught that peacemakers are blessed and worthy in the presence of God.

Christianity lauds the importance of peace and forgiveness as requisites for an authentic life. Jesus proclaimed that he had given peace to his disciples after his resurrection. Christianity’s teaching on peace is based on the work that the Holy Spirit does through believers who transform the world. Christians have worked hard to bring peace in the world through promoting their teachings.

• Catholic Social Teaching Program
• The Latter Day Saint Movement
• Self-Forgiveness: The Step Child of Forgiveness Research
• Rene Descartes: A Brief Perspective
• Human Rights: Humanitarian Intervention
• Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Hell Debate in the Scripture
• The Status of Animals in Religion
• Ludwig Feuerbach on Religion as a 'Projection'
• Politics and Religion Interdependence
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Faith — The Importance of Faith and a Strong Will

The Importance of Faith and a Strong Will

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Published: Aug 23, 2018

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faith , inner attitude, conviction , or trust relating human beings to a supreme God or ultimate salvation . In religious traditions stressing divine grace , it is the inner certainty or attitude of love granted by God himself. In Christian theology , faith is the divinely inspired human response to God’s historical revelation through Jesus Christ and, consequently, is of crucial significance.

No definition allows for identification of “faith” with “religion.” Some inner attitude has its part in all religious traditions, but it is not always of central significance. For example, words in ancient Egypt or Vedic India that can be roughly rendered by the general term “religion” do not allow for “faith” as a translation but rather connote cultic duties and acts. In Hindu and Buddhist Yoga traditions, inner attitudes recommended are primarily attitudes of trust in the guru , or spiritual preceptor, and not, or not primarily, in God. Hindu and Buddhist concepts of devotion ( Sanskrit bhakti ) and love or compassion (Sanskrit karuna ) are more comparable to the Christian notions of love ( Greek agapē , Latin caritas ) than to faith. Devotional forms of Mahayana Buddhism and Vaishnavism show religious expressions not wholly dissimilar to faith in Christian and Jewish traditions.

In biblical Hebrew , “faith” is principally juridical: it is the faithfulness or truthfulness with which persons adhere to a treaty or promise and with which God and Israel adhere to the Covenant between them. In Islam and Christianity , both rooted in this tradition, the notion of faith reflects that view. In Islam, faith ( Arabic īmān ) is what sets the believer apart from others; at the same time, it is ascertained that “None can have faith except by the will of Allah ” ( Qurʾān sura 10, verse 100). The First Letter to the Corinthians in the Christian New Testament similarly asserts that faith is a gift of God (12:8–9), while the Letter to the Hebrews (11:1) defines faith ( pistis ) as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Some scholars think that Zoroastrianism , as well as Judaism , may have had some importance in the development of the notion of faith in Western religion; the prophet Zoroaster (before the 7th century bce ) may have been the first founder of a religion to speak of a new, conscious religious choice on the part of man for truth ( asha ).

In Christianity the intellectual component of faith is stressed by St. Thomas Aquinas . One of the major issues of the Protestant movement was the theological problem of justification by faith alone. Martin Luther stressed the element of trust, while John Calvin emphasized faith as a gift freely bestowed by God. A 19th-century German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher , wrote of the subjective nature of faith. In the 20th century, theologians, led by Karl Barth , made conscious efforts to turn away from Schleiermacher’s subjective interpretation.

Notions of religious trust in India , China , and Japan are as a rule different from the notion of faith in Christianity. The “trust” (Pali saddha , Sanskrit shraddha ) described in the Buddhist Eightfold Path is comparable to the confidence with which a sick person entrusts himself to a physician. In Chinese traditions xin (“fidelity” or “trustfulness”; the character depicts a person standing by his spoken word) is considered to be an important virtue .

Faith, Reason, and Culture

An Essay in Fundamental Theology

• © 2020
• George Karuvelil 0

Faculty of Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

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• Explores the rationality of faith in the contemporary world
• Addresses multiple issues of contemporary culture, including: secularism and atheism, science-religion relations, religious diversity and inter-religious dialogue
• Conceives fundamental theology as a discipline which seeks religious truth in the midst of diverse perspectives

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• Gerald O’Collins

Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front matter, reason: the multi-coloured chameleon.

George Karuvelil

Religious Diversity and Theology

Science and religion: some parables and models, science and religion: autonomy and conflict, communication, culture, and fundamental theology, justification: beyond uniformitarianism, perception: its nature and justification, nature mysticism and god, religious diversity, christian faith, and truth, pulling together, back matter.

“The effort developed by Karuvelil is impressive, without a doubt, and – from my point of view – this is clearly a theological essay that brings more fresh air and a much needed renovation to FT. … Scientific reason is not everything, but neither can we ignore the objections of such people when it comes to practicing the healthy dialogue to which Karuvelil’s impressive work invites us.” (Lluis Oviedo, ESSSAT News & Reviews, March, 2021)

“George Karuvelil’s mastery of epistemology has enabled him to make a truly major contribution: he has justified brilliantly the essential rationality of religion and theology. This book has re-established a philosophical base for fundamental or foundational theology. Only a scholar with such epistemological expertise could have achieved this remarkable break through and elucidated a true and convincing starting-point for theology.” ­— Gerald O’Collins, SJ, former dean of theology, Gregorian University, Italy

“Faith, Reason, and Culture is an impressive and comprehensive engagement with some of the most difficult questions facing us today on religion and its role in society and the academy. Karuvelil robustly engages a wide range of classical and contemporary Western scholars who debate religion’s place and role in society, while remaining ever attentive to his home context in India. He is conscientious in considering a wide range of views, yet steadfast in his defense of religion’s enduring importance and relevance in every contemporary debate. This book will open doors on the philosophy of religions and fundamental theology for beginners, while yet too catching the attention of established scholars in the field.” — Francis X. Clooney, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA

“There have been many books on faith and reason but none comes close to the erudition and comprehensiveness that characterize this book. Karuvelil’s resourcefulness in philosophy and his long experience in interreligious dialogue enable him to explore important theological themes in original and highly informative ways. Thoroughly researched and rigorously argued, this book will prove indispensable for both theologians and philosophers who want to explore new frontiers in in the area of faith, reason and culture.” — Louis Caruana SJ , Dean, Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Gregorian University, Italy

“George Karuvelil’s Faith, Reason, and Culture: An Essay in Fundamental Theology is a real tour de force, which will delight those interested to explore the complex issue of the rationality of religious belief. Integrating Kierkegaard’s insistence on religious belief as existential concern and adroitly pressing into service Wittgenstein’s concepts of ‘language game’ and ‘grammar,’ Dr. Karuvelil has developed a convincing case to justify religious belief. In this process, he has built on the work of contemporary philosophers whose analyses he has found fertile while not mincing words in his critique of authors whose thinking he judges has gone astray, being particularly severe on those who are wedded to scientism as the last word in human rationality. Lucid writing, helpful introductions and summaries and numerous examples make this book intelligible to non-professionals while professionals will find the acute analysis and meticulous argumentationworth careful attention.” — Lisbert D'Souza , Emeritus Reader in Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (Pontifical Athenaeum), Pune, India; former Assistant to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus.

“With skillful and patient archeology of the divide between reason and faith, especially in modernity and Western thinkers, resulting in severe harm for both, George Karuvelil convincingly shows that to successfully meet the challenges of contemporary religious pluralism we must, as Pope John Paul II says, breathe with both lungs and fly with both wings, namely, reason and faith. With this work, Karuvelil establishes himself as a first-class authority on fundamental theology. At a time when truth is dismissed as ‘alternative facts,’ Karuvelil's robust confidence in both reason and faith is all the more needed and urgent.” — Peter C. Phan , The Ignacio Ellacuria , S.J. Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University, USA

“In its grand sweep of the history of philosophy, theology, and modernity, the book provides a remarkably open access to a theological project that is rationally based, and addressing the intellectual debates of our contemporary times.  The author opens up a splendid panorama of reason and critically challenges its Procrustean curtailment by scientism and positivism. The book is deep, and at the same time, highly engaging and accessible to a wider readership, thanks to its clarity of thought, expression and cogency.” — Felix Wilfred , Emeritus Professor, University of Madras, India

Authors and Affiliations

About the author.

George Karuvelil received his PhD from the University of Delhi and has a background in philosophy and theology. He is the editor of Romancing the Sacred (2007) and was the editor of Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies .

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Faith, Reason, and Culture

Book Subtitle : An Essay in Fundamental Theology

Authors : George Karuvelil

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45814-0 Published: 25 July 2020

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45817-1 Published: 26 July 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-45815-7 Published: 24 July 2020

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVII, 402

Number of Illustrations : 8 b/w illustrations

Topics : Christian Theology , Philosophy of Religion

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Introducing TGC Essays: Theology for the Global Church

More by phil thompson.

For more than a decade, The Gospel Coalition has been publishing a wide range of articles, podcasts, videos, books, and more. This work is driven by an observation in our Foundation Documents :

We have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the church’s life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices. On the one hand, we are troubled by the idolatry of personal consumerism and the politicization of faith; on the other hand, we are distressed by the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism. These movements have led to the easy abandonment of both biblical truth and the transformed living mandated by our historic faith.

Over the years, our resources have targeted each of the concerns outlined in that statement, and these challenges continue to drive our expansion of new content formats such as a catechism , free online courses , and devotionals . We’re excited to announce our latest offering––a series of 250 theological essays .

• Expansive . The essays fall into 12 major categories––the Bible, the Christian life, the church, creation, end times, God, the Holy Spirit, humanity, Jesus Christ, salvation, sin, and systems and methods of theology.
• Free . They’re not hidden behind a paywall. You can access, share, print, and distribute them.
• Non – technical . They are intentionally written to be understandable and accessible to those without formal theological education, yet are still a helpful resource for the seminary-trained. Most of the essays contain few footnotes, and all Greek and Hebrew references are transliterated and explained.
• Translatable . So many rich theological resources are locked away under copyright. We want to do our part to change that reality. Each of the essays is made available under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA), instantly allowing Christians the world over to begin translating the resources without needing our permission. Under this license, local translators may even bind and sell these translations to help sustain their local businesses.
• Multi-authored . In a typical systematic theology textbook, you read perhaps 1,000 pages of a single author’s treatment of various doctrines and issues. In these essays, you will have access to around 2,000 pages worth of theological reflection from 102 different authors.
• Far – reaching . One of the most exciting aspects of launching this series is that people far from Christ all over the world are now able to interact with excellent, orthodox theological resources. If you google phrases like “ divine revelation ” or “ priesthood of the believer ,” chances are you’ll find one of these essays on the first page. Even more exciting is the implications for a “ God the Father ” search—a glance at the competing websites gives a clear sense of the importance of this effort.
• Growing . Today’s list of essays  is just the beginning. In the coming years, we plan to keep expanding this collection to cover additional doctrines and issues. Unlike a systematic theology textbook, we have the ability to continue scaling, updating, and localizing these resources for years to come.

In a list of resources this large, it’s hard to identify favorites. But here are my top 10:

• Don Carson’s essay on “ Contemporary Challenges to Inerrancy ” wades into issues of the Bible’s Author/authors, certainty of interpretation, and moral objections to the text.
• Jeremy Treat’s handling of “ Kingdom and Cross ” functions as a shorter version of his excellent book on the same subject.
• When it comes to canonicity, it’s hard to beat Michael Kruger’s insights. In this essay series, Kruger tackles “ The Biblical Canon ” and “ The Apocrypha .”
• I enjoyed the practical warmth and theological depth of “ The Love of God ” by Sam Storms.
• Some essays wade into contested issues. A great example is Tom Schreiner on the topic of “ The Miraculous Gifts and the Question of Cessationism .”
• Jonathan Leeman on “ The Relationship of Church and State ” is a must-read in the lead-up to a passionate national election.
• If you’re looking for a simple resource for deacon training, Matt Smethurst’s essay on “ Deacons ” will be particularly helpful.
• The issue of a “ Historical Adam and Eve ” is insightfully addressed by John Collins.
• Andy Naselli’s explanation of apostasy is salient as recent years have included many stories of “deconversions” of prominent Christian leaders.
• Ligon Duncan penned excellent essays on “ Redemption ” and “ Propitiation .”

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The Gospel Coalition seeks to provide resources that are trusted and timely, winsome and wise, to strengthen the global church. Even as we make this new content freely available to the world online, we are trusting that the Lord would provide resources so we can continue these efforts.

For example, one of our next projects—to complement the essay series—will be a series of commentaries on the whole Bible. As it is prepared, it will also be released into the Creative Commons and be available for free on our website.

As we step out in faith in these endeavors, we would be honored to have your support .

Why Do So Many Young People Lose Their Faith at College?

New Testament professor Michael Kruger is no stranger to the assault on faith that most young people face when they enter higher education, having experienced an intense period of doubt in his freshman year. In Surviving Religion 101 , he draws on years of experience as a biblical scholar to address common objections to the Christian faith: the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the Bible’s reliability.

TGC is delighted to offer the ebook version for FREE for a limited time only. It will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact.

Phil Thompson (PhD, Columbia International University) serves as program director for The Carson Center at TGC. He is a teaching pastor at Christ Fellowship Eastside , a recent church plant, and an adjunct professor at Columbia International University . Over the past decade, Phil has traveled to train pastors in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He and his wife, Laurel, live in Greenville, South Carolina, with their daughters Lane, Kately, Harper, and Darcy.

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The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse

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By Christopher Beha

Mr. Beha is a memoirist and novelist.

• Dec. 8, 2023

I came to the work of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse — who receives the Nobel Prize in Literature this week — by way of “Septology,” a novel cycle that began appearing in English just a few years ago.

I’d been told by more than one person I trust that “Septology” was Fosse’s masterpiece, but I will admit to a personal reason for finally picking up a writer I’d been meaning to read for many years. In quick succession about a decade ago, Fosse married (for the third time), quit drinking, and converted to Catholicism. “Septology” was the first thing he wrote after these life-altering events, and they are all reflected in its pages. So “Septology” was recommended to me not just as a great literary novel but as a great Catholic literary novel, and I have a special interest in the genre.

As it happens, I also married (for the first time), quit drinking, and converted to Catholicism in quick succession about a decade ago. (In my case, this “conversion” was a return to the faith in which I’d been raised.) I’m a novelist myself, though not nearly so prolific or distinguished as Fosse, and my writing life is linked to my religious life in ways that remain fairly mysterious to me. Given all this, it may seem overdetermined that “Septology” would feel from its very first pages as if it were written especially for me, but many readers who do not share these autobiographical affinities have reported the same reaction.

As the title suggests, “Septology” comprises seven books, but they are grouped into three volumes, and they are best read and understood as a single novel. Each book covers a single day, the whole making up a week, and they are each short enough to be read in a few sittings, so that you can live the week of the book almost in real time.

The novel unspools in one long sentence, with few paragraph breaks and no full stops, which is the kind of formal gesture that turns some people off before they even begin, but in this case it creates an incredibly absorbing reading experience. Among other things, “Septology” is a novel of consciousness in the high Modernist tradition, and you feel right away as though you are in the main character’s head, or as though he is in yours, until the book comes to seem like your own voice speaking to you.

That main character is Asle, a painter living in a small fishing village in western Norway. Years earlier, Asle quit drinking and converted to Catholicism at the urging of his wife, Ales. As the book begins, Ales has died and Asle lives alone. He spends his time painting, talking with his neighbor Asleik, and making occasional trips to Bjorgvin, the large city a few hours’ drive away, which is home to another painter named Asle, who looks like the first. They might be the same man, except that the other Asle never met his Ales. He too lives alone — he is twice divorced — but he is an unbeliever debilitated by alcohol.

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