This might be my most Catholic post yet, but I've been recently thinking about the value of studying Church History and the lives of various old Christian thinkers.
It struck me that no one's faith exists outside of the historical heritage that Christianity bears. While many people might not know much about the Early Church Fathers we all know of Peter, who made the first decision to believe Jesus was the Jewish Messiah (Mt 16:13-20; Mk 8:27–30; Lk 9:18–20).
But Peter's faith didn't stop at that point. He continued to believe and convinced other people of Jesus' divinity. Those people in turn shared their faith with others, and so on and so forth, until today, where any new Christian owes his/her faith to that long tradition.
A stained glass window depicting
Peter's confession of Christ
Therefore faith must trust to some extent that Peter got it right about Jesus. Luckily, however, Peter isn't the only one we have to trust. We can also trust the other disciples who made the same claims about Jesus, and the fact that they died for their faith (according to Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica almost all the early disciples were martyred).
Yet there is another level of trust, and that is that those who recorded the events in the various books that make up the New Testament were correct about what they described. We cannot verify a lot of the details in the New Testament, because there is little external attestation (there are some references in writers such as Josephus, Tacitus, and Seutonius). Indeed, Nazareth was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and a wandering Rabbi was nothing to take note of, so we must question the legitimacy of expecting a large amount of external evidence.
But we can trust the sheer volume of their recordings. We have 10 copies of Caesar's Gallic Wars, the earliest copy of which was written around 1,000 years after the original, and this is largely seen as a historical document and worth trusting. With the New Testament, however, we have thousands of manuscripts written in many different languages, the earliest of which was copied out 30 years the original was written (I've taken this information from the Alpha Course booklet).
And while there are other levels of trust (such as, that I am not insane or having hallucinations etc.), there is one more I would like to outline here. Faith must trust that the manuscripts that survived and consequently were gathered together by the Early Church Fathers in the 3rd Century are genuinely worthy of the term scripture. We cannot be completely certain that all the letters and books were written by who they say they're written by, which means that we have to trust to some extent in the proximity that the early Christian community had to the original authors. They were certainly a mobile community, frequently visiting each other and traveling to new places, and they seem to have been very close judging by the greetings at the end of Paul's letters. They also would have spoken Greek as their first language. Therefore we have to trust that the early community kept the right letters and books based on their sound judgement of what was good for teaching and captured something of God's nature.
Athanasius of Alexandria (296-373CE) played an important
role in the process of deciding the Biblical Canon
Therefore, faith must rest on the faith of others to some extent, and not just faith in God, but faith in anything. If I trust that my lecturer knows a topic then I can believe that what he says is true without researching it for myself. In the same way, if someone of scientific authority tells me that the Big Bang happened, I have to trust that they are right because I cannot research that myself (I might be able to, but I don't have time to research everything). Furthermore, if I want to enjoy my life I have to trust that what I see happening around me is genuinely what is happening and not a dream, because I cannot prove that it isn't. A married man could never prove that his wife loved him, so he must trust that she does and that she is 'faithful'.
Thus faith does not start at 0. Faith has a communal and a historical aspect to it, as well as an 'irrational' aspect that goes beyond objective factual information (but not necessarily against it). It must trust and make assumptions, and anyone who thinks they do not have faith in anything is mistaken.
(I have used the words faith and trust interchangeably, and I have done so because I think that faith must include and element of trust. I do think that faith carries deeper meaning that simply 'trust', but that would require a separate blog post).
