FEATURE

Luke 7:9 (part): "I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."

A while ago I heard a sermon which seemed to me at the time to be the worst sermon that I had ever heard—unless a man can be said to "hear" the sermons that he preaches himself. It was a bad sermon, not because it was badly preached, or because it did not hold the attention of the congregation. On the contrary, it was most effectively preached and the large congregation was evidently impressed. But it was a bad sermon because the things that were said in it were not true.

The subject of the sermon was the incident that we have read today—the healing of the centurion's servant. That centurion, the preacher said in effect, knew nothing about theology; he knew nothing about the Nicene or Chalcedonian doctrine of the Person of Christ; he knew nothing about the creeds. But he simply trusted Jesus. So we, it was said, may be quite indifferent to the theological controversy now raging in the Church and like the centurion may simply take Jesus at His word and do what Jesus says.

From the point of view of commonsense reading of the Bible it was quite absurd. It was a rather extreme instance of that anti-historical forcing of the plain words of the Biblical books which has become so common within the last few years. Where is it said in this narrative that the centurion did anything; where is it said that he obeyed Jesus' commands? The point of the narrative is not that he did anything but rather that he did nothing; he simply believed that Jesus could do something, and he accepted that thing at Jesus' hands; he simply believed that Jesus could work the stupendous miracle of healing at a distance. In other words, the centurion is presented as one who had faith; and faith, as distinguished from the effects of faith, consists not in doing something but in receiving something. Faith may result in action, and certainly true faith in Jesus always will result in action, but faith itself is not doing but receiving.

That sermon was not particularly important in itself, and since you do not know who the preacher was it does not even make much difference whether I am reporting him correctly or not. But the sermon was important because it was like some tens of thousands of sermons that are being preached every Sunday. It was characteristic of the whole religious teaching of the present time. It was characteristic of the religious teaching of our time in the crassly erroneous opposition which it set up between faith and knowledge. The centurion, it was said, knew nothing about the Christology of the creeds; yet he believed in Jesus. Clearly the inference which was intended to be drawn was that opinions about Jesus are matter of indifference to faith in Jesus. No matter what a man thinks about the Person of Christ, it was maintained in effect, he may still trust Christ.

But surely such opposition to the use of the intellect in religion involves a totally false notion of what faith is. Will it really be held that I can trust a person irrespective of the opinions that I hold about the person Let us take an example from ordinary life. Suppose I have a sum of money to invest. It is rather a wild supposition, but let us just suppose. I have a sum of money to invest, and not knowing much about the stock market I go to an acquaintance of mine and ask him to invest my savings for me. But another friend of mine hears of it and injects a word of caution. "You are certainly taking a great risk," he says to me. "What do you know about that man to whom you are entrusting your hard-earned savings? Are you sure that he is the kind of man whom you ought to trust?" In reply I say that I do know certain things about the man. "A while ago, he came to this town and succeeded in selling to the unwary inhabitants of it many shares of utterly worthless oil stock; and if he is not in jail, he certainly ought to be there." "But," I continue, "opinions about a person may differ—that is an intellectual matter—and yet one may have faith in the person; faith is quite distinct from knowledge. Consequently, I can avoid the unpleasant duty of raking up the past of the speculative gentleman in question; I can avoid unseemly controversy as to whether he is a rascal or not; and can simply trust him all the same."

If I talked in that way about so serious a thing as money, I should probably be regarded as needing a guardian; yet it is in exactly that way that men talk with regard to the subject of religion; it is just in that way that they talk with regard to Jesus. Do you not see, my friends, that it is absolutely impossible to trust a person whom you hold to be untrustworthy? Yet if so, we cannot possibly be indifferent to what is called the "theological" controversy of the present day; for that controversy concerns just exactly the question whether Jesus is trustworthy or not. By one party in the church Jesus is presented as one in whom men can have confidence in this world and the next; by the other party He is so presented as that trust in Him would be ignoble if not absurd.

Yet there may be an objection. "Faith," it may be said, "seems to be such a wonderfully simple thing. What has the simple trust which that centurion reposed in Jesus to do with the subtleties of the Chalcedonian creed? What has it to do even with a question of fact like the question of the Virgin Birth? And may we not return from our theology or from our discussion of details of the New Testament presentation to the simplicity of the centurion's faith?" Of course there is one obvious answer to this objection. The plain fact is that we are not in the same situation as the centurion was with reference to Jesus. The centurion saw Jesus; we are separated from Him by nineteen centuries. That we should trust Him is a much more surprising thing than that the centurion should do so. How can we trust a person who died some eighteen or nineteen hundred years before we were born? Theology (or what opponents call "theology" and believers call the gospel) has an answer to that question—and it is an answer which is absolutely necessary if we are now to trust Jesus. If we did not know anything more about Jesus than the centurion knew, it is quite possible that we might have trusted Him if we had met Him in His wanderings in Galilee. But it is hardly possible that we could trust Him today.

But there is another answer to the objection. Men say that faith is a simple thing, and has nothing to do with theological controversy. But is faith really so simple a thing? The answer is not so obvious as many people think that it is. Many things which seem to be simple are really highly complex. And such is the case with respect to trust in a person. Why is it that I trust one man and do not trust another? Sometimes it may seem to be a simple thing; sometimes I trust a man at first sight; trust in these cases seems to be instinctive. But surely "instinct," in human beings, is not so simple as it seems. It really depends upon a host of observations about the personal bearing of men who are trustworthy and those who are untrustworthy. And usually trust is not even apparently instinctive; usually it is built up by long years of observation of the person who is trusted. Why do I trust this man or that? Surely it is because I know him; I have seen him tried again and again, and he has rung true. The result seems to be very simple; at the end a look or a tone of the voice is sufficient to give me as in a flash an impression of the whole person. But that impression is really the result of many things that I know. And I can never be indifferent to what is said about the one whom I trust; I am indignant about slanders directed against him, and I seek to defend my high opinion of him by an appeal to the facts.

So it is in the case of our relation to Jesus. We are committing to Him the most precious thing that we possess—our immortal souls. We are committing to Him the destinies of society. It is a stupendous act of trust. And it can be justified only by an appeal to facts.

The facts which justify our appeal to Jesus concern not only His goodness but also His power. We might believe in His goodness and yet not trust Him with these eternal concerns of the soul. He might have the will to help and not the power. We might be in the position of the child in the touching story who when all on shipboard were in terror because of an awful storm learned that his father was on the bridge and went calmly to sleep. The confidence of the child very probably was misplaced; but it was misplaced not because the captain was not faithful and good, but because the best of men has no power to command the wind and the sea that they should obey him. Is our confidence in Jesus equally misplaced? It is misplaced if Jesus be the poor, weak enthusiast that He is represented as being by naturalistic Modernism. But very different is the case if Jesus was the mighty Person presented to us in the Word of God. The question as to which was the real Jesus may be decided in one way or it may be decided in the other. But at any rate it cannot be ignored. You ought not to trust Jesus if Jesus be unworthy of your trust.

Why then do those who reduce Jesus to the level of humanity, who regard Him—when traditional language is stripped off—simply as a Jewish teacher of long ago, the initiator of the "Christ-life" —why do such persons speak of having faith in Jesus? They do so, I think, because they are slipping insensibly into a false use of terms; when they say "faith in Jesus" they mean not faith in Jesus but merely faith in the teaching of Jesus. And that is a very different thing. It is one thing to hold that the ethical principles which Jesus enunciated will solve the problems of society, and quite another thing to come into that intimate, present relation to Jesus which we call faith; it is one thing to follow the example of Jesus and quite a different thing to trust Him. A man can admire General Washington and accept the principles of his life; yet one cannot be said to trust him, for the simple reason that he died over a hundred years ago. His soldiers could trust him; for in their day he was alive: but we cannot trust him because now he is dead. And when persons who believe that Jesus was simply a great teacher of long ago, and are not particularly interested in any personal identity between that mystic experience which they call Christ in the soul and the historic person Jesus of Nazareth—when such persons speak of "faith in Jesus" the term is merely a survival, now meaningless, of a usage which had meaning only when Jesus was regarded as what He is said in the New Testament to be. Real faith in Jesus can exist only when the lofty claims of Jesus are regarded as sober fact and when He is regarded as the eternal Son of God come voluntarily to earth for our redemption, manifesting His glory even in the days of His flesh, and now risen from the dead and holding communion with those who commit their lives to Him.

What is our decision? Shall we regard Jesus, with the Modernist Church, as the fairest flower of humanity; or shall we regard Him as the Lord of Glory? Shall we accept only His teaching, or shall we trust Him as our Savior and Lord?

After a long struggle against modernism in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the late Dr. Machen guided the formation of Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936). This sermon was preached on November 11, 1923 at First Presbyterian Church, Princeton, New Jersey.

Reprinted from the Presbyterian Guardian, Volume 15, No 19, October 25, 1946. The OPC Committee for the Historian has made the archives of the Presbyterian Guardian available online!