#823 Is Faith a Gift of the Holy Spirit?
February 19, 2023I have really enjoyed your Defenders Class 3 Excursus on Natural Theology. Truly both a spiritual blessing and an intellectually rigorous exercise. When you are discussing how the great truths of the Gospel can be known as a properly basic belief by the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit which is unmistakable for him who has it, the verse that came to my mind was Hebrews 11:1 "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." I don't think I recall you referring to this verse in the presentations, but is it applicable here? Your discussion of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit fairly well described my Wesleyan salvation experience. On some spiritual plane, God witnessed to my soul/spirit the truth of the Gospel. My faith, based on this inner witness of the Spirit, is my substance and evidence of/for the Gospel (King James Version) . It truly is a built in defeater for all doubts, atheistic arguments, etc. Would it be going too far to say that this faith was supernaturally given by the Holy Spirit? He wrought that faith in me as I repented and opened myself up to receive it? An old gospel hymn that comes to mind is "I know not how this saving faith to me He did impart, , nor how believing in His word wrought peace within my heart. I know not how the Spirit moves, convincing us of sin, revealing Jesus through the word, creating faith in Him." Thank you, as a pastor I am able to refer to a lot of your apologetic work in my Sunday School and Bible Studies. So not only have you blessed me, but you have been a channel of blessing to many, many others.
John
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Thank you for your wonderful testimonial, Pastor! I am so gratified that the Defenders class has blessed you personally and helped you in your ministry.
I, too, belong to the Wesleyan tradition, with its strong emphasis on the witness and work of the Holy Spirit, which is why I find so-called Reformed epistemology so attractive. It seems to me that the New Testament teaches that the witness of God’s Spirit grounds Christian belief in a properly basic way and is an intrinsic defeater of the ostensible defeaters brought against it.
I don’t see the immediate relevance of Hebrews 11.1 to the proper basicality of Christian belief, however, since it doesn’t address the grounding of faith so much as it offers a definition of faith. We could have an assurance of things’ happening in the future (e.g., Christ’s return) or of things that are not presently available to the senses (e.g., creatio ex nihilo) on the basis of good evidence (e.g., Christ’s teaching ratified by his resurrection), as the evidentialist claims.
So is faith “supernaturally given by the Holy Spirit?” That’s difficult to say. Clearly, Scripture speaks of faith (pistis) as one of the many “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5.22). But pistis here probably does not refer to saving faith but to a Christian virtue and may even mean faithfulness. Ephesians 2.8-9 might seem more relevant to saving faith: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not because of works, lest any man should boast.” But since touto (this) is neuter and pistis (faith) is feminine, the antecedent of “this” cannot be “faith;” rather it is the process or arrangement of salvation-by-grace-through-faith that is the gift of God.
Since we should not think, with our Reformed brethren, that saving faith is the result of unilateral divine determinism, the act of saving faith must involve the free response of the human will to the Holy Spirit’s conviction and drawing. This understanding does not make saving faith a work that we perform, as our Reformed brethren allege. As I emphasize in my Defenders lectures on Doctrine of Salvation, Paul consistently opposes faith to works; he does not think of faith as a kind of meritorious work. The Christian philosopher Eleanore Stump has given a good account of the relationship between human free will and the work of the Holy Spirit in producing saving faith. On her account faith is not even a positive act of our will to accept God’s grace in response to the convicting and drawing of the Holy Spirit. Rather it is the purely negative act of ceasing to resist the Holy Spirit and so allowing Him to produce saving faith in our hearts. On this view saving faith is wrought by God, a gift of the Holy Spirit, but it is not something that overrides human free will.
So I think that we can take faith to be something that is supernaturally given by the Holy Spirit without falling into the clutches of the Charybdis of universalism or of the Scylla of a less than all-loving God.
- William Lane Craig