According to Hebrews, it is by faith that we understand. And of course, if Christianity is actually true, that understanding requires knowledge of the invisible. By faith we know who God is, the truth that He created all things in the beginning and will judge all things in the future, and even present unseen realities like our union with Christ, our nature as Image of God, and the moral order. These invisible realities and their interconnections are at the heart of Christianity. Faith, therefore, is necessary for grasping the Christian vision of the world: it is by faith that we understand reality as it really is.

The things I love deeply are also the things that irk me most easily. And most profoundly. This makes sense: when we love, we care. (Likewise, indifference breeds apathy.) For nerds like me, this applies especially to books.
Let me first say that I love Luc Ferry’s little gem A Brief History of Thought. It’s a gem because it succinctly if simplistically traces through the whole history of the Western intellectual tradition by articulating four major epochs; and it does this by charting the ligaments between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. So, so helpful.
But as this is the internet, we must race past vague, general praise toward concrete, specific, detailed, brash criticism.
Allow me, dear reader, to explain what irks me about Ferry’s book. Ferry thinks of philosophy as an attempt to construct a theory of salvation without recourse to divine revelation. In religious traditions, the divine brings salvation to humanity. In philosophical traditions, humanity seeks salvation on its own. In the introduction, Ferry puts it this way: “Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far as our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.” (p. 6) I happen to think this is an unhelpful way to differentiate religion and philosophy, but what really irks me is that word ‘blind’…
Ferry is, of course, not alone in insinuating that religious faith is an agent of blindness, that to have faith is to shut oneself off from some aspect of reality, that faith requires persistent belief without evidence or even in the fact of evidence to the contrary. Both outside the church and, more troublingly, inside, Christians are often told that the claims they are meant to hold most dear, the claims they ought to order their lives around, are either irrational or, at best, a-rational. Anyway, the central, credal claims of Christians throughout history aren’t subject to the sort of careful, reasoned investigation that, in the physical universe known to humanity, only humans can undertake. We must simply believe.
1. Seeing the Invisible
The Scriptures paint a different picture of faith’s relationship to sight.
In the letter we know as 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul connects faith in God to Christians’ ability to suffer well. He writes:
For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. … Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believe, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. … So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. … So we are always of good courage. … [F]or we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 4:6-10, 13-14, 16-18; 5:6a, 7)
Notice that Paul runs headlong into a connection between faith and knowledge: we believe by faith, and so speak, because we know we will be raised. This connection between faith and knowing, which is not unique to Paul, eliminates the idea that faith is opposed to knowing, and therefore to reasonable belief. Notice that Paul includes the faith-sight contrast in this very context. In whatever sense faith is opposed to sight, faith simply is not opposed to knowledge.
We can go further.
The author of Hebrews toys with the idea of knowing by faith through seeing the unseen as well. Moses is said to have endured the wrath of Pharaoh “as seeing him [that is, God] who is invisible”. (11:23) Moses looked to his unseen future reward. (11:22)
Hebrews goes beyond Paul: “By faith we understand”, it says. (11:3) The things understood are themselves invisible: the creation of the world by the Word, the promises of God fulfilled, Jesus seated at the right hand of God. This goes further than mere knowledge because understanding requires knowledge but is more than knowledge. Understanding is knowledge organized and applied. To understand is to systematize what you know and be able to utilize that knowledge in the right circumstances.
2. Understanding by Faith
In the context of religion—or, more broadly, any perspective on the whole of reality—understanding involves not just knowledge of certain religious facts, but the systematization of those facts.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, April 7, 2023
The answer to formation is not “more preaching” it’s community. You need to be in thick community with other Christians who you talk to every day. That takes years of work, so you need to start by starting. It’s OK if the good stuff comes for your generation’s children, keep plugging away at genuine community. Don’t assume that a midweek group is this, though it can be a place to get to know people to do it with. If you’re a church leader, your people won’t live this way unless you do.

It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to form them towards Christ—you might get a third of them for another two hours midweek—and everything else that is trying to form them has about six and a half days to do so.
It’s a fatal equation. We start with the fact that we are being catechised by everything we view on our phones, all the TV we watch, the games we play, the ads we see, and a bunch of structural artifacts in the world at large. All of it shapes us.
The classic way of framing it is that the Christian is more formed by their favourite Insta influencer than by their Pastor. That might be true. I think this is a real problem, but to get the shape of it right I’d like to push back in two directions on the way I’ve framed it.
Firstly, the things that are forming us are forming us in lots of directions. Some of them are bad, some of them are explicitly towards Christ, the vast majority are mixed phenomena. For example, it’s not so easy to say that the motorcar is explicitly terrible and should be eschewed by all people, even though it has had a long series of unintended effects on the way we understand and interact with the world and the church, some of which I think are really bad.
It’s not that the content we’re consuming might happen to be Christian, I’m a little leary of the idea of Christian content in the first place, but even if we assume it’s all good stuff my point is that all the other things that form us do so in a variety of directions. In other words, we can formed in ‘good’ directions that Christians can use to form themselves towards Christ by things that are not necessarily forming them towards Christ per se. All truth is God’s truth.
Though, I’m not sanguine about the average Christian’s ability to find dredge gold from the bottom of a murky pond without swallowing a whole lot of pond water. We need training and formation to learn how to do this.
Secondly, I don’t think counting the number of hours we do something is the only way to see the impact it has on us. Preaching, for example, is an act of encountering Christ by the Spirit in the text. It is inherently more powerful than the vast majority of everyday activities.
However, it’s also the case that we think modern devices like smartphones have greater formative effects on us than most technology that existed before them. I say ‘we think’ because everything here is very new and we’ve opened ourselves to a whole world without really thinking it through. The principalities and powers are strongly in evidence.
The problem isn’t as simple as counting the hours—which means the solution won’t be to be ‘in church’ for more hours than we’re outside of it.
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Written by Jared C. Wilson |
Sunday, October 17, 2021
The church is empowered by the Spirit through the gospel to bless the world as the overflow of God’s blessing of us. That the world may know the God we serve and worship him alongside us in spirit and truth. We love and believe and serve and bless, that the whole world might “go to church” with us.

Biblically understood, there is a lot more involved in “going to church” than simply attending a worship service. The gospel is designed to remake our entire souls, reorienting us away from ourselves and instead around God and others. The gospel makes the church, so the church that operates according to the gospel that has made it magnifies the Christ of the gospel more than the church that doesn’t. And yet, the commitments the church makes to “go to each other” must necessarily entail “going out” as well. The church that is not on mission, in fact, is not acting true to its own nature. The gospel is not meant to be hoarded but to be shared.
Over and over again, the apostle Paul in his letters necessarily connects the inner life of the church with the outer witness of the church. He transitions from inward relational harmony and service to outward acts of justice and mercy and blessing. For instance, in Romans 12, Paul is discussing what the inner life of the church looks like and then transitions into a statement like this:
Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  (Romans 12:17-21)
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