Faith is a pivotal point in Evangelicalism. Recently, I was working on a client website, an Evangelical organization I have personal experience with from my time as a pastor. In one of their documents, they discussed their purpose as helping people grow in Jesus and share “God’s saving grace with those who don’t know Him.”

Understanding Evangelical Lingo

For those unfamiliar with Evangelical lingo, “God’s saving grace” refers to the gospel they share: that God loves you enough to forgive your sins so you can be saved from the eternal consequences of them. It’s a bit more than that. Here’s a breakdown of the Evangelical understanding:

• You are a sinner, doomed for eternal punishment and incapable of good.
• Sin must be punished by God.
• God worked it out to offer Himself/Jesus as a replacement offering for you.
• You accept that forgiveness for sins,
  • by believing Jesus rose from the dead
  • confessing your sins to God
  • accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior
• A public expression: This could be baptism, a testimony, a church membership class, tithing, or a Facebook status with a matching Christian shirt.

Depending on your exact religious bent, you may have some issues with that outline, but the essence is there for 93.4% of Evangelicals. If you’ve been in church, you’ve heard that message hundreds of times; sometimes your eyes glaze over a bit while you smile and nod at it. Evangelicals will steer most sermons to this gospel presentation, sometimes called the Sinners Prayer.

The Gospel and American Christianity

In Evangelicalism, Ephesians 2:8-9, along with the rest of the Roman’s Road, provides a central backbone of their understanding of salvation (“salvation” may or may not be a word Drunk Pastor comes back to…mostly may). For the American Christian, to have saving faith means the above outline but doesn’t stop there – it means living a certain way and agreeing with certain doctrines that were not included in the gospel they heard. To be included in the group that one just found salvation in, one must act (and vote) in a particular way. You must believe in a lot of oddly specific doctrines. For one denomination, I had to sign on to an idea that there was a second salvation – the first one happens above, freeing us from the guilt and consequences* of sin, while the second frees us from the power of sin in our lives.

This unusual dichotomy is not unique to that denomination, the Christian & Missionary Alliance. It came from Wesleyians and charismatic movements, and a “second working of grace” had been debated for more than a century before the Christian & Missionary Alliance decided it had to be a core doctrine. This dichotomy is exemplary of the divide American Christians don’t see in their own faith. They receive the gift of salvation for a distant, disembodied future while the peace and serenity, the “on earth as it is in heaven,” is not available. Phrases like “Now but not yet” (usually reserved for topics of sanctification), teach us that our salvation is not complete yet because it is not for here or today. We have to have faith in this for that gospel to work.

Re-evaluating Faith

So, let’s talk about faith.

For one, “faith” for the Evangelical is not faith. The biblical concept of faith, pistis in Greek, is not what is often preached in the four white walls of church buildings today. Faith is Hebrews 11 – a bunch of ugly, screwed up, and definitely not doctrinally sound people trying to live more than just what their present reality seemed to suggest. Faith is not agreeing with things – it’s disagreeing with the norm. It’s wrestling with God all night because you were running for years and facing your brother the next day. It’s facing yourself wholly and not accepting a Jesus bandaid to cover your sins. Jesus wasn’t trying to make it easy for you to avoid your ignored issues. That is not salvation.

“Faith is being faithful to something other than just the narrative I’ve been holding on to.”

Faith is Not Blind Acceptance

Faith is not blind acceptance – it’s telling God to His face that He should never destroy a city if He were the kind of God He said He was (look it up – it was Abraham). Faith is doubting everyone when the social mindset seems off and being willing to risk rejection by questioning it – we celebrate the Reformers and others for such things while discouraging the same in our communities of “faith.” Perhaps we discourage it so we can burn more of our children on the shame of our mistakes? Have you been in the Evangelical Church long enough to feel it?

Faith is Not Ignoring Facts and Reason

Faith is not ignoring facts and reason – Martin Luther would smack churches today (and we should smack him a bit too). He had faith when he said, “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God.” Some of us can say something similar,

“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of Evangelical orthodoxy and denominations, for they have contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

One of Kierkegaard’s big soap boxes was the false faith of the typical Christian in his day. He said, “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.” He also said, 200 years ago, “Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.” I think he wouldn’t change much of his core evaluation of the American Evangelical faith conception.

Understanding Pistis

Pistis is not that hard of a word to understand. It was used in partnerships and business arrangements, including marriage covenants. Think of trust and belief. We trust things that are trustworthy over ourselves. We believe things over our beliefs because they’ve been believable. What is it to have faith then? Faith is being faithful to something other than just the narrative I’ve been holding on to. Faith is what you have with your partner and they with you. It’s what you have with your employees and children, or should have. It’s risk and cooperation, it’s wrestling and sticking to something. Faith is not agreeing with something to be true because I don’t believe it. Faith is not a black-and-white posture, a formula, or step work – it is you actually sticking to the work, a different formula, and taking different steps than you have before.

We all know what faith means. Catch it in films and shows and books – you’ll hear it. People will talk about having faith to stick with their plans, faith in a person so we don’t give up, faith in the strength of our partner, faith in what we do know and are able to do, faith in those we’ve built relationships with and already trust, faith in our kids’ abilities, faith in the changes we make in our personal lives that are difficult and cut us deeply. Faith is the act of being faithful to a different narrative than the one we are playing out in our head.

The Evolution of Faith in the Church

This confusion over such a simple word as faith is not entirely Evangelicalism’s fault, but Truth is there for them to find. Churches have been teaching a different kind of faith well before our parents took over the churches we are taking over now. Within a couple of hundred years of Jesus, we already begin to see confusion and debate among the church fathers on this. Once we get to Constantine and Augustine (they were working with what they had), “faith” had become both more Greek and more State. Faith was becoming more about an intellectual agreement, a cognitive dissonance in a pre-organized worldview. Once they were no longer being killed by others, Christians would start killing each other over ideas about doctrine, ideas we still don’t agree on today. Love is a hard thing to get down.

By Grace Through Faith

Sure, “by grace you have been saved through faith.” I don’t disagree with that at all. In fact, my understanding of it is much more weightier and implicative than what the Gospel Chic Track inclusion and camp t-shirt mean. For the Evangelical, faith falls apart because there is more to have faith in than just Jesus. Faith is put into a distant heaven, removed from this life. It’s faith in a specific type of Jesus, with His words pre-filtered and interpreted through the entropic generational in-breeding of doctrines, and with a predefined kind of way of living that faith. People, if they want to belong, have to fit into the church they were saved by. Modern people are expected to fall backward into a system without examination. It creates a bifurcated life and makes enemies out of everyone else.

The Disconnect Within Evangelical Faith

What’s fascinating is that Evangelicals, typical church people, already see and feel the dissonance in their faith: board members, pastors, middle-aged, former church elders, and the average church attended can all vocalize that something is wrong with the Evangelical church. Many have no issue with people with zodiacs or reading Eastern wisdom, they act like real humans with their non-Christians, comfortable with pre-marital sex (gasp), but the “Praise Jesus!” mask goes on at church. With human communication and information so freely available, the ignorance and arrogance of Evangelical churches are often overlooked for the sake of the experience, for feeling like they belong and are included in something more.

Some Christian leaders, like Doug Wilson, can build an entire human kingdom to feel safe and secure, for themselves and those willing to tribute for position. You must comply with a lot more than just Jesus to belong in their Church. They force their message out about how the world and people should be while controlling their local group. It’s all, of course, justified by their theology. These kingdoms will fall, just as humans are like blades of grass. Their faith is not “in Christ alone.” Faith, in such churches, looks a lot more like Babylon, Rome, and Pharisees than Jesus. They scream “fight” and “retaliate” when shot at, not “Father, forgive them…”