Hebrews 11:1 is Not a Definition of Faith

 The following is by H. C. G. Moule as recorded in The Fundamentals (compiled by R. A. Torrey and others):

"It seems well to remark here on that great sentence, Hebrews 11:1, sometimes quoted as a definition of Faith: 'Now faith is certainty of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.' [But] . . . the simple definition of Faith . . . is reliance.

". . .  What many religious thinkers have held, [is] that Faith is as it were a mysterious spiritual sense, a subtle power of touching and feeling the unseen and eternal, a 'vision and a faculty divine,' almost a 'second-sight' in the soul.

"We on the contrary maintain that it is always the same thing in itself, whether concerned with common or with spiritual things, namely, reliance, reposed on a trustworthy object, and exercised more or less in the dark.

"The other view would look on Faith (in things spiritual) rather as a faculty in itself than as an attitude towards an Object. The thought is thus more engaged with Faith’s own latent power than with the power and truth of a Promiser.

"Now on this I remark, first,that the words of Hebrews 11:1 scarcely read like a definition at all. For a definition is a description which fits the thing defined and it alone, so that the thing is fixed and settled by the description.

"But the words 'certainty of things hoped for, proof of things not seen,' are not exclusively applicable to Faith. They would be equally fit to describe, for example, God’s promises in their power. For THEY are able to make the hoped-for certain and the unseen visible.

"And this is just what we take the words to mean as a description of Faith.  They do not define Faith in itself; they describe it in its power. They are the sort of statement we make when we say, Knowledge is power. That is not a definition of knowledge, by any means. It is a description of it in one of its great effects.

"The whole chapter, Hebrews 11, illustrates this, and, as it seems to me, confirms our simple definition of Faith [i.e., reliance]. Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses--they all treated the hoped-for and the unseen as solid and certain because they all relied upon the faithful Promiser. Their victories were mysteriously great, their lives were related vitally to the Unseen. But the action to this end was on their part sublimely simple. It was reliance on the Promiser. It was taking God at His Word."