Does the Bible Teach Blind Faith?

When asked the question, “What is faith?” a little boy once said, “Faith is believing something you know isn’t true.” This idea that faith involves self-deception and unreliability is regrettably all too common in our world today. Religious faith, in particular, is often equated with superstition and myth. Our problem, as usual, is with inexact definitions and understanding of what genuine Biblical faith looks like.

Whether we realize it or not, we all use faith every day. For example, this morning I put my faith (or trust) in my pharmacist and a drug company when I took a prescription drug and most days I trust my car to bring me safely to my destination. In each case, my faith is well-placed and based on a reasonable expectation that the drug I took and the car I drove were designed and manufactured properly even though I did not directly witness or see how or where they were made. So, in a sense, we all exercise “blind faith” every day.

We tend to think that “religious” faith is different from the faith we put in our car or pharmacist because we assume religious faith is based on feelings and/or mysticism. On the contrary, true Biblical faith is the Christian’s rational response of trusting that those spiritual “things” that remain “unseen” are indeed trustworthy and reliable based on empirical experience and material evidence. Our day-to-day challenge remains how to bridge the gap from what we can see to those things we can’t see, namely, the spiritual realm and the future. The apostle Paul challenges us to place our trust in eternal, spiritual things in lieu of temporal visible things because “we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” ¹ The longer I live, the more convinced I am that the eternal “unseen world” is much more real than the transient “seen world” which is passing away. Therefore, we are well advised to place our faith and invest our time, talent, and treasure in the unseen future and in an invisible realm called the Kingdom of Heaven. While in the midst of the current space time continuum, Christians are encouraged to exercise “blind faith” because “we hope for what we do not see and wait for it with patience.” ² I believe that true faith also gives us a more accurate metaphysical perspective because faith sees everything in the light of eternity since the universe we see now “is not made out of things that are visible.” ³

O.K. let’s get back to temporal reality. To answer this question from a nonabstract point of view, the Bible clearly does NOT teach blind faith. In fact, the Bible goes out of its way to build a credible foundation for faith. For example, Doctor Luke starts out his gospel by stating that his objective is “to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” ⁴ Likewise, Jesus tells the Jewish leaders the reason he healed a paralytic was so “you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”.⁵ Finally, while preaching to the early church, Peter provided systematic evidence based on historical writings and eyewitness testimony to “Let Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified”. ⁶

Thankfully, God has left us with overwhelming evidence so that we can indeed know for certain that the object of our faith is indeed “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Footnotes:
1 - 2 Cor 4:18
2 - Rom 8:25
3 - Heb 11:3
4 - Luke 1:3,4
5 - Mark 2:10
6 - Acts 2:36