What Does It Mean to Believe in Christ? — Edwards on True Belief
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What Does It Mean to Believe in Christ? — Edwards on True Belief
You have said the prayer. Probably more than once. At fourteen, in the back row of a youth retreat. At twenty-two, on a kitchen floor. At thirty-six, in a Tuesday-morning chair when something had shifted and you wanted to make sure. You have signed the cards. You have walked the aisles. You have agreed with everything in the creed.
And yet, somewhere in the quiet of the chair time, the question keeps coming back — do I actually believe, or do I just know what I am supposed to say? You do not ask it out loud, because the people in your life would reassure you in the wrong direction. They would say of course you believe. They would point to the years of church attendance, the children you have raised in the faith, the way you reach for prayer without thinking. They would not be wrong about any of that. They would also not be answering the question you are actually asking.
The question is whether the believing has reached the parts of you that, by your own watching, it does not seem to have reached. The believing in your head is steady. The believing in your behaviour is mostly there. The believing in your affections — in the quiet middle of your chest where the response to God lives — is the part you are not sure of. The part that should warm and does not. The part that should rest and does not. The part that should be quietly thrilled at the sound of His name and instead behaves like nothing has been said.
This is a slow reading of Jonathan Edwards — the eighteenth-century New England pastor who spent his life watching the difference between what looked like belief and what was belief — on the question of what believing in Christ actually means. The slow practice this essay walks has its 140-day form in the Bible Study Workbook for Women, built around the daily rhythm in which the affections Edwards is describing are quietly fed rather than rushed.
Edwards’s answer, kept short, is this: real belief moves the body and the affections, not only the head. The mental signing-on is one of its parts. It is not its whole. If the affections have not been engaged — if the believing has produced no warming, no tasting, no spiritual sight of any kind — then what is sitting in your head is probably not yet faith in the full New Testament sense. Edwards is not interested in scaring you. He is interested in helping you tell the difference between what looks like belief and what is, so the believing you actually have can grow into the kind that quietly holds.
The diagnosis — the believer who has the words but not the seeing
Edwards spent his pastoral life among people who had every external mark of belief. New England, in his lifetime, was thoroughly churched. The catechism was known. The sermons were attended. The forms of devotion were practised. And yet Edwards became, slowly, the most careful diagnostician in American religious history of the difference between the form of belief and the thing itself.
He named the gap with a kind of unembarrassed plainness. People could have all the right doctrines and none of the inner response that, in scripture, accompanies real believing. They could repeat the gospel and remain, in the quiet of their own affections, unmoved. This was not, for Edwards, evidence that the gospel had failed. It was evidence that what they had received was the information about the gospel and not the gospel itself — that the eye of the soul had not been opened to see the One the information was about. Here is the first line from him worth keeping near the page:
“I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me, should not abide in darkness.” Their believing in Christ, and spiritually seeing him, are spoken of as running parallel.
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read that twice. Believing in Christ, and spiritually seeing him, are spoken of as running parallel. This is the diagnostic line. In Edwards’s reading of scripture, believing and seeing are not two different things; they are the same activity from two angles. To believe in Christ is to spiritually see Him. To spiritually see Him is to believe. If the seeing is absent — if the soul has been told about Christ but has never had its eye opened to Him — then the believing the scripture is describing has not yet begun.
This is the diagnostic most modern Christians have not been offered. We tend to ask people do you agree with these statements about Christ? When they say yes, we declare them believers. Edwards would not have disagreed in the legal sense. He would have noticed, gently, that the question we asked was about information, and that scripture’s word for faith does heavier work than that. The information is the necessary first part. The seeing is what comes when the information is no longer merely held but has, by the Spirit’s quiet work, become something the soul beholds.
The reason you are still asking yourself whether you really believe, in spite of decades of church involvement, is most likely this: the seeing has been intermittent. There have been moments when it was clear — a service, a verse, a long walk after a hard week — when Christ was not an idea but a Presence. And there have been long stretches in between when the information has been all you had, and the soul has gone hungry without being able to name what it was hungry for. The hungry stretches are not evidence of un-belief. They are evidence that the seeing, in your particular history, has not yet been fed steadily enough to be reliable.
The somatic moment — feeling for the seeing in the body
Pause for a breath. Set the screen down for a moment. Close the eyes if it helps. Bring the attention to the chest — not to think about it, just to feel where the chest is. Ask, slowly, when I say the name of Jesus inside my chest right now, what happens? Stay with whatever the body offers. Sometimes there is a small warming, a soft opening, a quiet yes that the body registers before the mind has caught up. Sometimes there is nothing — a neutral hum, the same chest as five seconds ago. Both are honest. Neither is a moral verdict. They are pieces of information about how steady the seeing has been in this particular season of your believing. The body is the early indicator. The slow practice the rest of this essay describes is the slow feeding of whatever the body just registered. If there was nothing, that is the place to begin. If there was a small warming, that is the place to deepen.
The second line — what the seeing actually produces
Edwards, having diagnosed the gap between informed belief and the seeing kind, spends the rest of his work describing what the seeing produces in a soul. Not the dramatic things — though dramatic things can happen. The quiet things. The slow things. The things that, over a lifetime, distinguish a believer who has been merely informed from a believer whose affections have been brought into the room. Here is the second passage worth keeping near the page:
The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read what he is doing. He is not pitting rational knowledge of divine things against spiritual seeing. He is putting them in order. The knowledge is the opportunity. The knowledge is the surface the seeing rests on. When the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart — note the unhurried passive verb, shall be breathed, not you shall breathe — the soul that has the knowledge has a surface for the seeing to land on. The soul that does not have the knowledge has nothing for the Spirit’s work to attach to.
So Edwards is not anti-information. He is rigorously pro-information. He simply refuses to let his hearers believe that information by itself is what the New Testament is calling faith. The information is the opportunity. The seeing is the event. Belief, in his definition, is the soul that has both — the rational knowledge of divine things underneath, and the seeing of their excellency, the tasting of their sweetness on top.
Notice his verbs. See the excellency. Taste the sweetness. These are not metaphors borrowed from poetry. They are precise descriptions of what happens in the affections when the believing becomes real. The soul sees — that is, it perceives Christ as actually present, actually beautiful, actually offered. The soul tastes — that is, the sweetness of who Christ is registers in the affections the way the sweetness of fruit registers in the mouth. These are bodily verbs, used carefully. Edwards is describing a faith that has reached the senses of the soul, not just the catalogues of the mind.
This is also why the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built the way it is. The daily 140-day rhythm is the slow stocking of the surface — the rational knowledge of divine things, fed one short page at a time — on which the seeing, when the Spirit gives it, can land. The book is not the seeing itself. The book is the surface. The seeing is what comes, in its own time, when the surface has been faithfully laid down. (For the related question of what is faith according to the Bible — the sister-essay on Owen’s three-part working definition — what is faith according to the Bible — Owen’s working definition walks the knowledge / assent / trust structure that underlies Edwards’s seeing-and-tasting language. And for the practical version when the faith is there but weak in its third part, how to strengthen your faith when it’s weak — Spurgeon’s counsel is the companion piece.)
The third line — what the seeing makes possible
The third passage from Edwards is the one that names what the seeing, once it has come, allows the soul to do. Not effortful religious activity. The opposite. The coming with boldness and confidence and the solacing of the heart that the merely-informed Christian has never experienced as a daily thing:
Behold him admitting them to sweet communion, enabling them with boldness and confidence to come to him, and solacing their hearts.
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Admitting them to sweet communion. Boldness and confidence. Solacing their hearts. These are the marks of a soul that has, finally, been let in — that has had its eye opened, has seen the One it has heard about, and is now living inside the actual relationship rather than the formal account of it.
The reason your believing has felt thin is most likely that you have not yet been given the boldness and confidence to come to him. You have been coming, but the coming has had a hesitation in it — the small backward-leaning posture of a soul that suspects it is not quite welcome. Boldness is a strong word in Edwards’s English. He does not mean swagger. He means the posture of a child who walks into the kitchen at five in the morning because the kitchen is hers and the parents are hers and she has never been told otherwise.
The solacing is the gentler word. Solace is the older English for the slow, steady comfort that comes from a presence — not a sudden cheering up, but the felt sense of being in the company of someone who loves you and knows you and is not going anywhere. Edwards’s account of believing produces solacing. The soul that has been admitted to sweet communion is solaced by the One whose company it has finally been let into.
That is what believing in Christ means, in Edwards’s slow definition. Not the cards signed at fourteen. Not the catechism passed at twenty-two. The seeing, the boldness, the solacing — the whole-person inhabiting of the relationship with Christ that the New Testament keeps describing in its various dialects. The signing was not nothing. It was a doorway. The believing is what happens when the soul walks through the doorway and discovers the room.
(For the wider practice of which this essay is one slow piece — the daily small returns that, over years, feed the seeing — how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin is the gentle on-ramp. If gratitude has been the verb your soul is reaching for and the believing has felt thin underneath it, how to start a gratitude journal you’ll actually keep walks the daily practice in which the tasting the sweetness becomes a regular small thing. For those raising children inside this same question, bible-based journal prompts for kids — 20 simple prompts you can print tonight is the small daily form for the children in your house, and how to start a prayer journal for your future husband is the slow practice in which the believing for someone else gets daily oxygen.)
So — what does it mean to believe in Christ?
The Edwards answer, gathered in one sentence: to believe in Christ is to be the soul that has had its eye opened to see Him, that has the rational knowledge of divine things underneath, that tastes the sweetness when the Spirit breathes into the heart, that comes with boldness and confidence into His presence, and that is solaced — not entertained, not impressed, solaced — by the slow company of the One it has been admitted to communion with.
If most of that sentence describes you, you believe. If only the first part — the rational knowledge — has been present for years and the seeing and tasting and solacing have been intermittent, you also believe; but the believing has not yet been fed steadily, and the steady feeding is the practice the rest of your life is for.
The believing grows. It is not a one-time switch. The believing of fourteen-year-old you and the believing of forty-year-old you should not look the same. The seeing has had more time to land. The tasting has been repeated more often. The solacing has had years to soak. The believing thickens, in Edwards’s account, the way wine thickens in a barrel — slowly, by being left in the company it was put in.
You can trust the slow thickening. It is what God does in souls that keep returning to the room. (If the depleted season has been the obstacle — if the believing has been there but the energy to keep returning has not — self-care ideas for Christian women in hard seasons is the letter to the worn, written in this same contemplative key.)
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
