Religious affections

NB: So Steve, how can one know the difference between 'saving faith' and 'nominal faith?'

Do you have saving faith?

If so, how do you know this?

(not trying to beat a dead horse...I'm just trying to understand whats makes your 'faith' different than what I had, or other former-believers I know).

SH: There’s no simple answer to this question. It’s really several questions bundled into one.

1.Nominal faith may have the emotional element, but not the intellectual element—or it may have the intellectual element, but not the emotional element.

For example, a nominal Christian may be formally orthodox, but lack any emotional investment in the articles of faith.

On the other hand, a nominal Christian may have a deep emotional investment, but be superficial in his grasp of the truth, or heretical in one respect or another.

2.Jonathan Edwards wrote a classic analysis on this subject: “A Treatise concerning religious affections.”

3.It is a necessary, if insufficient condition, of saving faith that both elements be present.

4.As far as apostasy is concerned, one basic problem with your question is that you want a generic answer to a very individual phenomenon.

I don’t know you. I don’t know your apostate friends. I don’t know anything about your religious experience. About your religious upbringing, if any. About your conversion experience, if any. I don’t know the theological tradition to which you once belonged. And I don’t know what considerations induced you to leave the faith.

And even if you could fill me in on the details, there may also have been some subliminal factors in your apostasy.

5.I only know my experience. I can only speak for my experience because I can only speak from my own experience.

6.I can’t speak for you. I don’t know what makes my faith different from what you once entertained for the simple reason that I’m not you. I’m not privy to your inner experience. Subjective, personal experience is intransitive.

7.Could I be self-deluded? Well, if I were self-deluded, then I’d be the wrong person to ask.

8.At the same time, there is a material difference between someone who is self-deluded and someone who is in his right mind. They are not in the same state of mind.

But the self-deluded cannot enter into the psychological state of the right-minded, while the right-minded cannot enter into the psychological state of the self-deluded.

That’s why, if you’re looking for some intersubjectival standard, you’re not going to find it. In the nature of the case, these two mental states are incommensurable and mutually exclusive.

9.I’m justified in believing that I exercise saving faith as long as I meet the Scriptural conditions of saving faith.

If I cease to meet the conditions, then my assurance is unwarranted.

10.Because of this, it’s possible for a true believer to work himself into a vicious cycle of self-doubt.

His self-induced uncertainty is the result of treating the hypothetical prospect of delusive belief as, itself, a grounds for doubting his assurance of salvation.

But this is an unhealthy and irrational state of mind, like Kafka’s existential nightmare about a character to went to bed a man and woke up a beetle.

Should this hypothetical prospect induce insomnia? Should I lie awake at night fearing that I might turn into a beetle in my sleep?

Do I need some Cartesian sleeping pill to put my mind at ease?

11.Remember moviegoers who saw the Matrix, and then began to ask themselves if they, too, were imprisoned in the Matrix?

And, at one level, their dilemma is insoluble, for the whole point of the Matrix is that its simulation of reality is indetectible.

12.We can pose these foolproof thought-experiments, but we need to remember who thought them up on the first-place.

The way of escaping a thought experience is not from within, but by reminding ourselves that that we are starring into a house of mirrors of our own making. The trap is illusory because we set the trap for ourselves.

The truly self-deluded lack this objectivity. The only reason that sane men can question their sanity is because they can still distinguish between sanity and insanity, whereas the insane have lost this capacity. They have lost touch with reality precisely because they no longer distinguish between illusion and reality.

13.Whether or not you were once deluded about your Christian identity depends, in part, on your definition of Christian identity.

You could have been very true to your conception of Christian identity. If so, then in that respect you were never self-deceived, for your subjective experience was consistent with your concept of saving faith.

14.There’s a difference between deception and self-deception. Your faith may have been deceptive because it was at odds with the objective definition of saving faith, but that is perfectly compatible with a state of mind in which your subjective beliefs and your subjective experience exactly coincide.

A man may think that what makes him a Christian is that he responded to the altar call. That belief is objectively deceptive.

Yet, if he acts in accordance with a deceptive belief, then his experience is at one with his belief.

And, by the same token, deceptive belief is correctible. Because the belief is objectively false, it is possible to become aware of its falsity.

We’ve been talking about nominal Christians who commit apostasy. But there are nominal Christians who go in the other direction.

They are exposed to an authentic version of Christianity. They compare and contrast their preconception with their discovery, and, as a result, they convert to the true faith.

Incidentally, not everyone who loses his faith is an apostate. He may be a backslider.

And for some men and women, backsliding is a necessary stage in the transition from nominal faith to saving faith.

15.This is different from someone who is truly self-deluded in the sense that his experience is delusive. Where both his subjective belief and his subjective experience are objectively false, but because his experience reinforces his belief, he is unable to detect the discrepancy between illusion and reality.