Understanding Faith Formation

Theological, Congregational, and Global Dimensions

Mark A. Maddix, Jonathan H. Kim, James Riley Estep

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781540960382
• eBook ISBN: 9781493427291
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Three leading Christian educators offer a survey of faith formation from various perspectives: biblical, theological, pastoral, practical, and global. They present a biblical theology of faith formation for individual and congregational life and show how faith can be formed through the life and mission of the local church through practices such as communal worship, Bible study, and mission. They also explore the faces of faith formation in multicultural and global contexts. The book includes practical exercises for those beginning in ministry and reflection questions.

Part 1: Theological Dimensions of Faith Formation

1
Faith Formation in the Bible

One of the authors remembers going shopping with his daughter. After wandering through countless similar stores for a couple of hours, he finally broke down and asked, “Have you found anything?” She replied, “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.” Faith is like that. Faith is a word often used but rarely defined. We recognize it when we encounter it but find it difficult to explain. In fact, most would be hard-pressed to express a coherent or encompassing description of faith. When asked about faith or faith formation, believers often react with a list of synonyms, like trust, fidelity, growth, or maturing, or they quickly quote Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” However, as a concept, faith usually remains more ill-defined and elusive than often realized.

For example, faith is what we believe—that is, the faith (Jude 3, 20)—but we are also saved by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8), walk by faith (2 Cor. 5:7), and live by faith (Rom. 1:17, citing Hab. 2:4). In fact, the author of Hebrews asserts, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (11:6). Faith is the identifying mark of a Christ follower (Acts 10:45; 1 Thess. 1:6–7), but how is faith formed? How do believers grow in Christ?

To ascertain the biblical concept of faith formation, one has to sift through the vocabulary of Scripture as well as through all the passages on faith, belief, and faithfulness so as to filter out irrelevant passages and concentrate on those passages that provide insight into the process of faith formation in the life of the believer. It is not enough to do a lexical or grammatical study of faith in the Old and New Testaments; we also have to study their contexts so as to determine the processes, contributing factors, and even deterrents to faith formation.

Likewise, the theological traditions that comprise the heritage of Christianity often reflect the church’s wrestling with questions surrounding the nature of faith and its formation, and hence the biblical and the theological must be engaged in concert with each other. This chapter draws a portrait of faith and its formation as it occurs in the Old and New Testaments, providing a picture or snapshot of the subject, while chapter 2 presents a moving picture, a film, of how the church’s theological traditions have addressed central issues in understanding the germination of faith and how it forms.

Faith in the Old Testament

When one reads the Hebrew Bible, perhaps one of the first observations that can be made regarding faith is that there is an apparent absence of faith as one may recognize it. While the word most often translated “believe” or “faith” (ēmūnah) occurs ninety-six times throughout the Old Testament, it most frequently is not used to describe the Hebrews’ relationship with God. Rather, it is most often about human relations. The word ēmūn has a much broader meaning and occurs in a wide variety of contexts, requiring more contextualized translations. It basically means “to be firm, endure, be faithful, be true, stand fast, trust, have belief, believe,” with similar parallels in Aramaic, Arabic, and Syriac. For this reason, the translations of the Old Testament rarely translate it as religious faith. For example, the King James Version translates ēmūn as “faith” only twice, and the Revised Standard Version translates it this way only eighteen times. This is because the term ēmūn is rarely placed in a religious or personal context, more often being used in a legal context regarding covenants—that is, breaking or keeping faith between two people or nations (see Lev. 5:15; Deut. 32:51; Judg. 9:15–21).1

But if faith is not the basic description of a relationship with God in the Old Testament, what is? The Old Testament describes humans’ relationship with God as one of fear and trust.2 Joseph P. Healey also correctly observes that “faith is described rather than defined in the Hebrew Bible. The description tends to be used in two ways, one where the relationship of Israel to Yahweh is described and the other where the relationship of certain key figures to Yahweh is described [e.g., Abraham, David, and the prophets]. The common characteristic of the two are their unswerving loyalty to Yahweh even in the face of what appear to be insurmountable obstacles, and second is the purely gratuitous character of their chosenness.”3

Faith as a basis for relating to God is not readily found in the Hebrew Bible, but several instances do stand out in which faith is indeed a response to God and hence does occur in a more religious context than is typical. For example:

• “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” (Gen. 15:6)
• “And Israel saw the great power that the LORD used against the Egyptians, so the people feared the LORD, and they believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses.” (Exod. 14:31)
• “And he said, ‘I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness.’” (Deut. 32:20)
• “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.” (Hab. 2:4)

However, such passages are relatively few, especially in comparison to the New Testament’s treatment of faith. While ēmūn and its derivatives occur throughout the Old Testament, “with at least ten distinct categories in which the noun is used in Scripture,” eventually it “moves almost entirely to the use of the word in connection with God or those related to God” and primarily to describe God himself.4 The use of ēmūn applied only to God is further borne out by the fact that when God is the subject or the object of the verb, the Septuagint (LXX) translates it with pisteuō (“believe”) exclusively, with the exception of Proverbs 26:25.

In short, a study of faith in the Old Testament reveals more about God than it does about the faith of the Hebrew people. Therefore, while the Old Testament does serve as a background for better understanding Christian faith, to understand the nature, function, and formation of faith, we have to rely on the New Testament.

Faith in the New Testament

Faith is a more prominent topic and frequently occurring theme in the New Testament than in the Old Testament. Both the noun pistis, translated “faith,” and its verb form pisteuō, translated “believe,” are more prevalent, occurring over 240 times, with the adjective pistos (“faithful”) occurring 67 times. This word occurs in a variety of contexts, with each New Testament author nuancing its use; for example, the noun faith never occurs in John’s Gospel, whereas it is frequently used in Paul’s writings. However, its use as the principle means of describing our response to and relationship with God is indeed consistent throughout the New Testament, and this use is unique in the ancient world. Dieter Lührmann notes that this notion of faith, the religious idea of faith, is almost exclusively a Christian concept, not even occurring in Hellenistic texts.5 Hence, while the word faith is nuanced differently throughout the New Testament,6 the use of faith in a religious context is distinctive to early Christian beliefs.

Faith conveys the idea of being persuaded and living a life consistent with a newfound truth—that is, the gospel.7 The New Testament word for faith, unlike its Old Testament antecedent, especially brings out “the main elements in faith in its relation to the invisible God, as distinct from faith in man.”8 Most times in the New Testament, faith is used in the context of trust and confidence in God.9 It is the process of coming to faith, perhaps the verb form, pisteuō, that occurs ninety-eight times in the Gospel of John alone. Given his purpose in writing, this is understandable: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–31).10

Toward a Biblical Model of Faith

Based on the concept of faith in the New Testament and in the Old, a composite picture of faith, a snapshot, can be formed. A common idea of faith used throughout the centuries has been a threefold faith centered on Christ through the mind, the will, and action. While faith is indeed a gift of God (John 3:3; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 4:4–6; Eph. 2:1–4) and not merely a human attainment, as will be discussed in the next chapter, the biblical witness shows that faith has these three dimensions. While numerous sources affirm this view, Gregg R. Allison provides a recent and thorough treatment of faith in the Bible. He describes our “holistic response” to God in faith as a matter of “rightly affirming the truth (orthodoxy), rightly feeling the truth (orthopatheia), and rightly practicing the faith (orthopraxis).”11 Figure 1.1 depicts his idea.

Along the same line, Healey notes that in the Old Testament, faith is connected to remembrance (cognition), overcoming fear (affection), and doing (volition).12 In the New Testament, when Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:14–17, he reminds him that Scripture’s formative influence includes the mind (“acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation,” v. 15); will (“all Scripture is breathed out by God,” v. 16); and life transformation (“profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” v. 16), so “that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (v. 17).

Here is a breakdown of Paul’s threefold model of faith in Christ.

“Believe that . . .”: faith as cognition. Sometimes the noun pistis denotes the content or object of our faith, what we believe (Rom. 1:5; Gal. 1:23; 1 Tim. 4...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Theological Dimensions of Faith Formation
• Part 2: Congregational Dimensions of Faith Formation
• Part 3: Global Dimensions of Faith Formation
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover