We don’t just “have faith.” We have faith 𝘪𝘯 stuff.

You learned what a transitive verb is back in school, but you might’ve forgotten, ’cause your teachers didn’t make the definition all that memorable. Transitive means you can’t use the verb without an object. Unless you’re a toddler, you can’t just say, “I wet”: You have to indicate what or whom you wet. You wet the whistle; you wet the bed. Got that?

Faith works the same way. Because “faith” is a synonym for “trust,” and trust is also a transitive verb. You can’t just say, “I trust”: Gotta say what or whom you trust. Saying “I have faith” means nothing till we say whom or what we have faith in.

But as you know, lots of people are walking around saying, “I have faith.” Without defining in whom or what they’ve placed their faith. So we’re left to guess whom or what they’re trusting. “I have faith” means “I have faith in [YOUR GUESS HERE].” It’s like when your toddler tells you, “I wet,” and you know they speak English well enough to not mean “I’m wet”—so now you gotta search the house for the puddle.

“I have faith” based on what? Dependent on whom?

Next time one of your friends or acquaintances claims, “Well I have faith,” pin ’em down. What’s that faith in? Most of the time they’ve never even thought about it, and aren’t even sure they need to think about it: “I just have faith.” But I’ve found a lot of those people who “just have faith” actually have faith in karma. They believe the universe is good and just, and that in the end things’ll work out for the best, justice will prevail, and evildoers will be punished. If they’re deist or Christian they’ll give God the credit for a universe which works this way, but that’s what their faith is in: A benevolent universe which rewards goodness and punishes evil—and of course they figure they’re good.

And yeah, “I have faith” can mean other things. They have faith in human decency and goodness. They have faith in our civic institutions and criminal justice system. They have faith that “all things work together for my good.” They have faith in Jesus, or more precisely faith in the things they believe about Jesus, which may or may not be so.

But as you can see, it’s not enough to just say “I have faith.” Ten people can say “I have faith” and mean 10 different things by it. But sorting out the difference is really easy: Figure out whom or what their faith is in.

And for us Christians, we gotta put our faith in Jesus.

“Name it and claim it”: Misplaced faith.

Faith, as I wrote in my previous piece on the subject, is belief, trust, assurance, and moral conviction. If you have faith, you believe. Preferably in something or someone solid. For us Christians that’d be Jesus: We trust him. Everything else, less so. Although not much less; I trust the scriptures pretty strongly. Hopefully you do too.

I also wrote a segment in that previous piece about how way too many people believe faith is the power to believe the unbelievable. Antichrists, who think Christianity is rubbish and we’re idiots for getting mixed up in it, love this definition. They figure we have no basis whatsoever for the beliefs we hold: We believe it only because we want to believe it so very badly. So we suppress all our doubts, suppress any doubters, and wish really, really hard. ’Cause if we wish hard enough, maybe it’ll become real, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

Thing is, this wish-it-into-reality idea has been around for a mighty long time. So long, you get people claiming it’s “the Secret,” a mysterious ancient truth about how the universe works—that all you have to do is declare to the universe your deepest wishes, “put it all out there” so to speak, and the cosmos will magnetically pull your desires towards you. Apparently this “law of attraction” has been found in literature going all the way back into history… and of course it has. Ain’t nothing new under the sun. Ec 1.9

Pagan religions have always seriously taught if you want something to be so, your earnestness, righteousness, or worthiness would get the gods to create it for you. (Or if you don’t have any of that, find a lamp with a djinn in it.) But the storyline woven into just about every single human culture is that if we want something bad enough, and if we’re motivated and deserving, we can get it; we can have it. You want knowledge of good and evil? There’s the fruit; go eat it.

It got mixed into Christianity by the gnostics, particularly those of them who claim reality is just an invention of the human mind, and doesn’t exist outside the mind. And if the mind creates reality, the mind can change reality… so if we actually do wish really hard, we actually can make things happen. Various gnostics have taught this for centuries under various names, and in the 1800s they were calling it “mind science.” One of its practitioners, Mary Baker Eddy, combined it with Christianity to create “Christian Science,” and her church still exists today. (They own a pretty good newspaper.) Problem is, if reality is just a mental construct, Jesus didn’t die in reality… so yeah, they’re heretic.

Other Christians won’t go so far as to claim reality isn’t real: It is, but they still claim if we wish really hard, we can make things happen. They claim God granted us the very same power to “calleth those things which be not as though they were.” Ro 4.7 They insist it’s because the passage where I got that pull quote, says Abraham ben Terah totally did it.

Romans 4.18-25 KJV

[Abraham,] 18 who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. Ge 15.5 19 And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: 20 He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; 21 and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform. 22 And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.

23 Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him; 24 but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; 25 who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.

If you follow their reasoning, this passage isn’t at all about being justified by faith. It’s about how Abraham’s faith made stuff happen. Really.

God promised Abraham a son, and millions of descendants. So Abraham believed. Really hard. Regardless of his circumstances: He was really old, as was his wife. But he dismissed unbelief, kept his eyes on God, and God rewarded this faith with a son. And if we believe in God just as much, he’ll reward our faith with anything we ask of him.

So they do. Unfortunately a lot of the churches which tell Christians to “name it and claim it” this way, tend to be a little too fixated on Mammon, and tend to equate riches and wealth with God’s favor. They covet. A lot. And y’notice a lot of them fall for get-rich-quick schemes (’cause much like Abraham losing patience and fathering Ishmael, they figure they’ve gotta be proactive if they wanna seize those blessings!) and regularly get fleeced by their church leaders. The love of Mammon is the root of all sorts of evil.

Faith. (Which “faith” did you mean again?)

We Christians like to talk about faith, and sometimes refer to ourselves as “faith-based” or “people of faith.” Thing is, we’re not so solid on what faith means—by which I’m talking ’bout the definition of the word “faith.” We use that word all the time, but same as a lot of Christianese words, we never bothered to learn its definition, guessed what it meant, guessed wrong, ran with the wrong definition anyway, and we’ve been stumbling in the dark ever since.

I’ve met more than one Christian who’ve claimed faith has no definition: “Faith is a mystery,” they’ll insist. And again, they’re using that word “mystery” wrong: In the New Testament, a μυστήριον/mystírion is something we used to not know, but Jesus revealed its existence or its meaning, so now we know it. Christian mysteries are revelations, but according to these people God’s still holding out on us: These ideas are way too big for mere mortals. And faith is one of them: We can’t explain faith ’cause God worries the very idea will break our brains. Me, I figure these Christians’ brains are already broken.

The more common guess—and I admit it’s a reasonable one—is that faith is anti-doubt. ’Cause it looks like Jesus kinda said as much.

Matthew 21.21 KJV

21A Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not…

If you have faith, you don’t doubt: It appears to imply faith and doubt are opposites. And since the opposite of doubt, non-doubt, is certainty, that’s how many a Christian defines faith. Even those who insist faith is undefinable, loosely define faith this way: Faith is certainty. Absolute, know-it-in-your-bones certainty. Faith is when you know that you know that you know something’s so. You have no doubts in your mind whatsoever.

Sorry to go on a sidetrack here, but I gotta: Is faith a gift from God, or is it something we develop on our own? Christians are of two minds about this. Some of us claim it’s all God, and never us. Others claim there’s more synergy involved, where God grants us faith, but we clearly gotta work with what he’s given us, which is why Jesus has to command us to “Have faith in God.” Mk 11.22 So if faith is certainty, be certain.

But of course how Christians choose to exercise certainty, is not by analyzing the facts or learning the truth; it’s by pure stubborn denial. So when people want faith really really bad, we reckon if we have any doubts in our minds whatsoever, it suggests we don’t actually have faith… so we gotta blot these doubts out. Shove ’em into the darkest recesses of our psyches and bury ’em under other things, and hope they never crawl their way out like a zombie. (Even when they’re wholly legitimate, reasonable doubts which the Holy Spirit himself put in us. Seems we never considered that possibility.) Have you eliminated your doubts by dealing with them or denying them? Too many Christians don’t care there’s a real difference… and that denial’s just gonna come back and bite us.

False accusations, false beliefs; you know, as the devil does.

1 Thessalonians 2.17-20.

Added to the Thessalonians’ hardships was the fact the apostles couldn’t get to them. We don’t know the specifics; we only know Paul really wanted to, and tried, but couldn’t. Maybe it was logistics; they tried to find a boat headed for Thessaloniki and just couldn’t. Maybe they were officially banned from Thessaloniki. Or maybe they were unofficially banned, and warned that if they set foot in town they’d be murdered. I point out that a lot of foolhardy Christian missionaries nowadays will ignore death threats and go to such towns anyway; I’m not claiming they had more guts than Paul (which is why I call ’em foolhardy), but I am pointing out that Paul darn near got murdered, more than once, which tends to make you take death threats more seriously. The criminal justice system in the Roman Empire was a joke, so death threats weren’t always just talk.

And Paul did eventually get to see them—sorta. After Paul and Silas were rushed out of town, Ac 17.5-10 Paul and Timothy returned to Macedon some five years later, Ac 20.1-2 and if they couldn’t make it to Thessaloniki, they at least ran into two Thessalonians: Arístarhos and Sekúndos. Ac 20.4

Anywho here’s where they express that desire to return.

1 Thessalonians 2.17-20 KWL

17 Fellow Christians, being separated from you for a length of time—

out of sight, not out of mind—we all the more tried our best to see you in person.

It was our great desire 18 because I, Paul, wanted to come to you

and once or twice Satan hindered us.

19 For what is our hope, joy, or crown—our boast, if not you?

—which we make before our Master Jesus at his second coming,

20 for you are our glory and joy.

The Golden Rule.

Matthew 7.12, Luke 6.31.

“Do as you’d be done by.”

That’s C.S. Lewis’s wording. It’s probably the briefest form I’ve found of the “Golden Rule,” as it’s called. I grew up hearing it as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—and it actually doesn’t come from the King James Version, which has it, “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Lk 6.31 KJV I tried tracking down the other wording, and the earliest I’ve found it is 1790.

My translation of the two different ways Jesus taught it:

Matthew 7.12 KWL

“So as much as you want people doing for you, you do that for them:

That’s a summary of the Law and the Prophets.”

Luke 6.31 KWL

“Same as you want

that people might do for you,

do likewise for them.”

It’s “the Law and the Prophets,” as Jesus put it—meaning the bible of his day, the Old Testament. (Yes the OT consists of Law, Prophets, and Writings. But back then, when Sadducees and Samaritans insisted the bible only consisted of the Law, you only had to suggest there were more books in it than just those of Moses, and people understood you meant Prophets and Writings were included.) The entire moral teaching of the scriptures could be distilled into this one concept.