The Virtue of Faith

Abstract

It is a prominent and very well-known feature of the Christian tradition that faith is regarded as a virtue, and unbelief (at least in many cases) as a sin.This seemed puzzling to me as long ago as I can remember thinking about it all, for two reasons:(1) Belief and unbelief seem to be mainly involuntary states, and it is thought that the involuntary cannot be ethically praised or blamed.(2) If belief is to be praised at all, we are accustomed to think that its praiseworthiness depends on its rationality, but the virtuousness of faith for Christians seems to be based on its correctness and independent of the strength of the evidence for it.I shall try to deal with these issues in the flrst two sections of this paper, arguing in the flrst section that many cognitive failures, though not voluntary, are ethically blameworthy, and in the second section that there are many cases in which it is rightness rather than rationality that ought to be praised in beliefs.I approach this topic with some hesitancy because in addition to being puzzling, for the reasons I have mentioned, it might be felt to be offensive.Fears may be raised that the stigmatization of unbelief as sin will feed the flames of persecution.We may reply, correctly, that persecution does not spring from the virtue of faith, but from a deceptively faithless fear of other people and their opinions.But it cannot be denied that the Christian Church, as a concrete community of sinners, has much to be embarrassed about in this regard.I think it will be best to concentrate our attention, as far as possible, on our own sins of unbelief.This essay is addressed therefore to Christians.It is intended as a rather roughand-ready sketch for family discussion.And it is not my aim here to justify Christian belief, either to those who are in it or to those who are out of it.The question we shall be concerned with is "What is virtuous about faith, given that it is true?"I see two motives that Christians have for studying the idea of faith as a virtue.The flrst, which will concern us especially in the third section of the paper, is that we are conscious of unbelief as a sin in ourselves-indeed as one of the most fundamental sins in ourselves.The second motive is that the Bible presents God as prizing faith so highly as to make it one of the principal goals of His dealings with the human race.This motive will be central to the fourth and flnal section of the paper.

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