Faith is probably one of the important but often misunderstood concept in Christianity.  And throughout my Christian life I’ve heard many different definitions/descriptions of what faith is, so I guess I’ll compile them here.

What is NOT faith? Faith is obviously not what the Hollywood movies portray, where the main character is put into an awkward situation and some mysterious voice (**cough** Obewan **cough**) says something along the line of “have faith,” then the main character does something stupid but it all magically works out.  No, that is not faith, because it essentially tells you to abandon the reasoning ability that God gave you in the first place.

What is faith?

C.S. Lewis describe faith as “Faith is unconditionally believing in what you believe, disregarding the circumstances you’re in.”  (in his book Mere Christianity btw).  Sounds confusing/strange, what does he exactly mean?

Let’s have an example.  Say you studied for your physics final and you totally know your stuffs in and out.  You walk into the testing room confidently.  you KNOW you’re acing this test.  In fact you know the material so well you’re probably not even planning to check your answers.

Then you sit down, and find out that the final is a 100-question multiple choice.  No problem, you said to yourself, nothing will scare me because I’m so prepared for this test.  Then you zoom through the questions with lightning speed, answering every question in a fraction of a second, because they’re all so easy.

Then you only find that at the end of the test, you bubbled in 100 As.  Yes, ALL As.  you never fill in any of the B, C, or Ds.

At this point, are you still confident that you got every question right? Probably not, you’re going to go back and look at each and every question, and perhaps erase some of the As you fill in, and choose those B, C, and Ds although you don’t think they’re right.

So what is faith?  Faith is believing in something without relying on circumstances.  In this case, you believe in your knowledge without relying on the fact of whether you filled in straight 100 As or not.  You believe in your knowledge with the same certainty before and after you bubble in those 100 As.  The circumstance doesn’t change your belief.

So what’s important about this formulation of faith? This defintion of faith shows that faith is not just believing something in thin air, but rather faith has a basis.  In this example, the basis of your faith is in your hours of studying before the final.  If you did not study before the final, you cannot even have faith, as you have no basis or reason to believe in your knowledge of the materials.

So this is C.S. Lewis’s formulation of faith.  However, this definition lacks in some details:

1) Where does the basis of faith come from?

2) How can we truly know that the basis is true? (in our example, how do you know that you didn’t grab the wrong book to study from?)

So obviously there’s more juicy stuff to faith.  I’ll get back to it later.

P.S.: This test example actually happened to me.  My high school comp sci teacher pulled a prank, and the correct answer on the test is over 80% As.  On that test NO ONE turned in early and everyone paniced (even I paniced a little).