If there’s one word or concept that you would say is at the very centre of the Christian life, it’s the idea of faith. In fact, sometimes we describe the whole of Christianity as simply “the faith”.
Yet for something that’s so central and so foundational, it’s surprising how often people are confused or have misunderstandings about the nature and meaning of faith. In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast, we’re going to seek to dispel that confusion and sharpen our understanding of faith and its place at the foundation of the Christian life.
Links referred to:
- Peter Orr’s 2025 Annual Moore College Lectures on “A biblical theology of faith”.
- Next CCL event: The smartphone disciple (Mon 27 Oct)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 33:57 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: If there’s one word or concept that you would say is at the very centre of the Christian life, you’d say it’s the idea of faith. In fact, sometimes we describe the whole of Christianity as simply “the faith”. And yet for something that’s so central and so foundational, it’s surprising how often people are confused or have misunderstandings about the nature and meaning of faith.
[00:00:29] In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast, we’re going to seek to dispel that confusion and sharpen our understanding of faith and its place at the foundation of the Christian life.
[Music]
[00:00:56] Tony Payne: Well, hello again. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. Tony Payne here. Great to be with you again. And on today’s episode, I’m really glad to welcome to the microphone my immediate predecessor, I guess you could say, in this podcast. Is that right, Pete?
[00:01:12] Peter Orr: That’s right. Nice to be on this side of the microphone, Tony, and yeah, nice to be back on the CCL podcast.
[00:01:18] Tony Payne: And let me say on behalf of all of listeners, thank you so much for minding the chair—well, more than minding it; for very ablely driving the bus for the 15 months or so in between Chase and me, being Director of the CCL. But now it’s your turn to be grilled.
[00:01:30] Peter Orr: That’s right. Yeah.
[00:01:31] Tony Payne: And most people will know who you are, but you should just remind us: what’s your role here at Moore College, Pete?
[00:01:35] Peter Orr: So I’ve been on the faculty at Moore College for the last 11 years or so, and I am in the New Testament Department, teaching New Testament and Greek.
[00:01:44] Tony Payne: Right. Tremendous. But it’s for a particular reason that I’ve asked you to come in and have a chat, because you recently had the privilege of delivering the Annual Moore College Lectures. And for those listeners who might not be familiar with those, they’re annual, they’re a feature. They’ve been going for some years: maybe 30, 40 years?
[00:02:00] Peter Orr: ‘77 was the first one.
[00:02:01] Tony Payne: ‘77. FF Bruce in 1977. That’s right. I remember that now. And they’re an opportunity for either a visiting speaker or one of the faculty to address a topic of real theological import at a fairly significant level. Like, those lectures you gave, you spent a long time preparing those. I think.
[00:02:15] Peter Orr: I did.
[00:02:17] Tony Payne: But the topic you addressed was really important, and it’s why I’ve asked you to come on and talk on the podcast, because your topic was faith and in particular, a biblical theology of faith. And we’ll come, as our conversation goes along, as to why this is such an important topic for us as Christians and for our Christian lives.
Why “a biblical theology of faith”?
[00:02:35] Tony Payne: But can I start by asking you what does that mean to say “a biblical theology”? Why don’t just say, “My topic is faith”? Why say “a biblical theology of faith”? What does that mean?
[00:02:44] Peter Orr: So biblical theology is a way of considering how a theme, for example, might develop across the Bible. And it’s a recognition that the Bible is all God’s word. It’s a unity. But there is development. And there are aspects that might be begun to be revealed in Genesis, and then in the prophets, we might find out more about it, and then we get into the New Testament, we have that kind of full and final revelation. You can do a biblical theology of all sorts of themes.
[00:03:16] And what it does is it just helps you to think about what each different part of the Bible says about the theme and how it unfolds across Scripture. There are other ways of analysing topics: so you could just kind of do a word search and just see what every part of the Bible says about a particular topic. But by tracing the unfolding nature of the revelation, you sort of see how the Bible itself presents a topic. And it’s a helpful way to look at a theme.
[00:03:43] Tony Payne: I guess ‘cause it’s how the Bible itself is organised, right? It doesn’t come as a sort of textbook with a set of chapters on different topics. It’s an unfolding story centred on Christ.
“Abraham believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness”
[00:03:52] Tony Payne: I did notice—one of the striking things about your presentation, you mentioned Genesis. You started there, strangely enough. And in particular, with a verse in Genesis 15. It’s a famous biblical verse about faith, and I didn’t really quite realise, I don’t think, just how central it was in the Bible story until you traced its influence. Tell us about that verse and why you kind of almost started there.
[00:04:14] Peter Orr: Yeah, so the story of Abraham really starts with chapter 12: the famous promise that God makes to Abraham—that he will be blessed, God will make his name great. And the Abraham narrative continues. There’s kind of problems in his life. He’s not particularly always behaving in the best way, particularly towards Sarah. But it gets to chapter 15 and God’s promised that he’d make him a great nation, and yet he doesn’t have a child. And so, he’s wrestling with this before God and says, “I don’t have an heir, and so a member of my household, one of my slaves, will be my heir.” And God takes him outside, makes him look at the heaven and number the stars. Then he says, “So shall your offspring be.” So there’s a promise that God makes.
[00:04:59] And then we’re told, verse 6, “Abraham believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness.” That’s significant for a number of reasons. It’s significant in the narrative of Abraham already, in that Abraham has actually done some what we might call “good works”, if you like. He obeyed God when God called him to leave his homeland: he just went. And yet it is this point at which the narrator says, “God credited to him as righteousness.” It was just the simple act of believing a promise from God.
[00:05:32] So it’s significant in the Abraham narrative, but it’s also significant, particularly for Paul later when he discusses justification by faith—this idea that God declares us to be right with him, not on the basis of what we have done, but on the basis of our faith in Christ. And Paul’s doctrine of justification finds its foundation in this interaction between God and Abraham. So it’s a very significant verse, I think, in Genesis and it’s very significant verse for the whole Bible.
Credited/counted
[00:06:00] Tony Payne: So when it says that “he believed God”—we’ll talk a bit more about what does it mean to believe God and what faith is in a second. But the result was that it was credited to him or countered to him as righteousness. What does that really mean—to be credited? Does God say, “Okay, I’ll reckon that you’re righteous, even though you’re not.” ‘Cause he’s not an altogether attractive character. Sometimes Abraham, he does some terrible things to Sarah, making her go into the household of Abimelech and all this kind of stuff. What does it mean that “God counted it to him as righteousness”?
[00:06:30] Peter Orr: So that word “counted” is used in a few different ways in Scripture. Sometimes you count something that actually is. I might count Tony as an Australian, which he is. But for example, Rachel and Leah, at one point, say that their father counts them as foreigners—kind of regards them as foreigners, as something that they’re not. Is God counting Abraham’s faith as something that it really is—righteousness? Or is he counting it as something that it’s not?
[00:06:57] But actually in Scripture, there is another way that this language of counting is used, particularly in the context of forgiveness and guilt and counting someone as guilty, or counting someone as forgiven, and that is on the basis of God’s declaration. So there’s a sense in which God is sovereignly responding to Abraham’s faith and declaring him righteous—not because he is a faithful person, not even because his faith is righteousness, but God is sovereignly declaring him righteous.
[00:07:30] And we think, “Well, how can God do that? Is that just God being random?” And that’s where our biblical theology comes in, because, again, in Romans, Paul reflects how it is on the basis of Christ that this declaration finds its fulfillment. So it’s not just a kind of random declaration by God; it is a declaration that anticipates the work of Christ and the believer’s response to that work.
[00:07:54] Tony Payne: So that by having faith or by believing, you genuinely are declared righteous. It’s not just you’re not righteous, but God pretends you are. It’s that he declares you to be righteous on the basis of your trust in his promise.
What does “faith” mean?
[00:08:09] Tony Payne: So we need to find out more about the trust and the promise, then, ‘cause I’m assuming that faith means trust by saying that. But what does faith mean actually? ‘Cause it’s a word that’s—certainly in our culture and even in our Christian culture—we use it all the time to mean a bunch of different things. It’s a bit of a floppy kind of word. What do you take it to mean?
[00:08:24] Peter Orr: So I think faith in Scripture can have a few different dimensions. So it can be trust, as you said, and that’s the sort of more personal dimension of trusting a—you can trust a person, or you can trust God.
[00:08:37] But it can also have the sense of assent: we might say, “believing that”. So that’s believing truth about God. So those two ideas are in, for example, John’s Gospel, where John can talk about believing that Jesus is the Christ, but he can also talk about believing in Jesus. So trust and assent.
[00:08:58] But there’s also the idea that faith is knowledge. So I think faith has these three aspects of knowledge, assent and trust, and particular instances, one will be highlighted, and in other instances, one or more will be highlighted.
[00:09:17] So I wouldn’t want to reduce it just to trust, because I think trust is very important. But I think there are these other aspects that are related, but not quite the same as trust.
Faith and knowledge
[00:09:27] Tony Payne: How does the knowledge part of faith fit in? ‘Cause that’s very interesting to me. I’m certainly used to thinking of faith as being an assent: “I do believe that something is true” and a more personal “I’m going to act on that and really place my trust in that—that it is true—or in the person who’s saying it’s true”. What do you mean by saying that faith is very similar to knowledge, or it’s a kind of knowledge?
[00:09:46] Peter Orr: I think it’s a kind of knowledge. If I was to ask you, “Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?”, I’m very confident you would say “Yes.”
[00:09:54] Tony Payne: Yes, I would.
[00:09:56] Peter Orr: If I said to you, “Do you know that Jesus rose from the dead?”, that may make you pause and think, “Do I know that Jesus rose from the dead, or do I only believe that Jesus rose from the dead?” And I think that’s where we unhelpfully separate the two.
[00:10:09] But for instance, Paul can say both. Paul can say that he believes that Jesus rose from the dead, and he says that in multiple places, obviously. But he can also say that he knows that Jesus rose from the dead, and he says that in Romans 6: knowing that Jesus rose from the dead.
[00:10:28] And certainly in the prophets—well, throughout the Bible, really—you have the language of “knowing that”. Rahab might say that, “I know that Yahweh, the Lord, is the true God.” And you might say, “Well, that’s not the same as knowing that the chair that I’m sitting on is blue.” It’s a different type of knowledge. It’s a faith knowledge. But it is still coached in the terms of knowledge.
[00:10:51] When we say faith is a type of knowledge, we’re not saying that all knowledge is faith, but we’re saying that faith itself is a Spirit-given conviction of the truth. And that’s where it overlaps a little bit with the idea of faith as assent. But we know that Jesus rose from the dead. We believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Those two statements are essentially the same.
[00:11:11] Tony Payne: And that kind of conflicts, in some ways, with how our culture often talks about faith as the kind of belief you have when you can’t possibly know it. Which is, which is not the kind of faith you’re meeting in Scripture, right?
[00:11:24] Peter Orr: Correct. Correct.
[00:11:25] Tony Payne: It’s why we tend to think of faith and knowledge as quite separate. Faith being kind of knowledge that you just take on trust and has no evidence or it’s uncertain in some way or right.
[00:11:35] Peter Orr: Even a light kind of knowledge, if we do think it’s that—it’s something, yeah, different in knowledge. Yeah.
[00:11:39] Tony Payne: Whereas in the Bible, a trust, or an assent and a trust in the word of God brings us knowledge of God. Like, it is a knowledge. I see what you’re saying. That’s really useful.
Believing that vs believing in
[00:11:48] Tony Payne: How does that relate to the idea then that it’s possible to believe that, but not necessarily believe in? Or can these things be separated? Is it possible to have one without the other? How do they relate to each other, these different aspects?
[00:12:01] Peter Orr: So James talks about the demons believing that there is one God. And you see that in the Gospels: you see the demons recognising Jesus: “You’re the holy one of God.” But their faith, it’s not a saving faith. It’s very defective.
[00:12:16] We’ve just mentioned Rahab. Interestingly, Rahab believes that the Lord is the true God, and so that leads her to act in the way that she welcomes and protects the spies. But she also says that all of her fellow countrymen are trembling, because they know what God did in Egypt. And so, there’s a sense in which they also believe some kind of truth about God, but it’s not leading to an appropriate response in their life.
[00:12:43] So there’s an overlap, but it’s defective in these examples. Whether it’s demons or whether it’s the people of Jericho, it’s not actually leading onto something concrete in their lives.
[00:12:55] Tony Payne: And so would you say that the kind of faith that the Bible calls for, that God calls for, or that is the kind of response to him and to his word, is a combination of all three of those things, and needs to be a combination of all three of those things?
[00:13:09] Peter Orr: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Even though we might say that, in some places, one aspect is more emphasised. But I think they go together. You can’t believe in God unless you know truths about him. You can’t believe in God unless you believe that he is real. So they do go together.
[00:13:24] Particularly in John’s Gospel, the three aspects, they just kind of weave in and out. And you’ll—Jesus will call for people to believe that he was sent by the Father, and then immediately John said, “And many believed in him”. And so, he’ll switch between the two. But we’re meant to see them as interconnected. Yeah.
Trust in … what?
[00:13:40] Tony Payne: So when we put our trust or put our faith in God or in Christ, or in his word, is there any difference between those kinds of things? So in terms of the faith that the Bible calls for as a response to God and his revelation and his salvation, to what extent are we trusting in—I think I know the answer to this, but it’d be good to tease it out. To what extent is it good to trust in God—that is, trust in God the Father, or trust in Jesus? Is that where our faith is primarily directed? Or is it a trust in the promise? Is that the—how do those things relate to each other?
[00:14:10] Peter Orr: Yeah, absolutely interconnected, and that’s something that I tried to tease out in the lectures so that, particularly in the history in the Old Testament, Genesis through to 2 Kings, the emphasis there is on Israel being called to trust the promises of God and frequently their failure to trust those promises. So that’s really held out as the object of the faith. But again, can you really separate God from his word? And so, to fail to trust God’s word is to fail to trust him.
[00:14:39] But when you turn to the prophets and the Psalms, the emphasis—again, we’re not sort of saying exclusively—but the emphasis is more on that personal dimension. So the psalmist will often reflect on his kind of own personal trust in God, and the prophets call on God’s people to trust in God and not in idols. So they’re both there in Scripture. Different parts of Scripture might highlight one over the other. But again, like we were just sort of saying about knowledge, assent and trust, they’re connected. Trusting in God is to trust in the God who speaks, and so it is to trust in his word.
[Music]
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[00:17:01] Tony Payne: And now let’s get back to our program.
Faith and salvation
[00:17:04] Tony Payne: So as Christians, one of the main things we think about when it comes to faith or trusting God is that this is the means by which we’re saved. We’re saved by grace through faith. It’s our trust in God, almost as heirs of the faith of Abraham, we trust in God and in what Jesus has done, and that brings us righteousness and justification and salvation.
[00:17:22] Can you tease out for us what the connection is there? How does my trusting in Jesus, or trusting in the promise—what do I trust in and how does that lead me to be saved? Because it seems like this is a crucial issue in the New Testament, and often in Christian lives and in churches and in talking with our friends, is how faith relates to our relationship with God and our salvation.
[00:17:42] Peter Orr: Yeah. I mean, the important thing to say is it’s not our faith in and of itself that saves us, and sometimes we get this sort of view of faith as a virtue in and of itself. And you get that idea in George Michael’s song: “You gotta have faith” or The Prince of Egypt —you know, it’s just about believing, as if this is purely just a virtue that God regards as a good thing and then rewards us.
[00:18:05] Tony Payne: Like, like a disposition or a capability that we’ve developed. We’ve got it. We have it.
[00:18:11] Peter Orr: And so, that’s why people sort of say, “I wish I had your faith.” Whereas, really, by saying that, it’s like, “I wish I could trust God’s word.” You know? Like, it’s sort of saying something about God.
[00:18:22] So God’s word comes to us. God’s promises come to us all the way through the Old Testament. It’s God’s promises, and it is people trusting in God’s promises or trusting in the God who makes the promises. That is how they’re saved. And it’s striking—I explored this in the lectures—how it is that which is the reason that people don’t enter the Promised Land—the generation that falls in the desert—is because they didn’t believe God’s promises. Even Moses and Aaron are told that it’s because they didn’t believe God.
[00:18:50] So what’s the difference with the New Testament? And this is where we explore the idea of continuity all the way through the Bible. It is faith: salvation is by faith. In the New Testament, it’s quite interesting, Paul in Galatians 3 can use the language of “faith has come” and you kind of think, but faith—
[00:19:06] Tony Payne: Didn’t they have faith in the past?
[00:19:07] Peter Orr: Exactly. But it’s almost with the coming of Christ, there is something so new and significant that Paul can say, “It’s faith in Christ has come.” And it’s the faith in its fullness. And it is Christ, and it is the fact that we are saved because Jesus died and rose again. In the language of Romans 3, God put him forward as a propitiation of one who bore God’s wrath by his blood. But then he says, “to be received by faith”. So it is the work of Christ that secures our salvation. But the way that we benefit from that is we receive it by faith.
[00:19:42] And so, by receiving it by faith, we’re acknowledging that we are not doing anything. We’re not contributing to our salvation. God has done it all in Christ. But we receive that gift of salvation.
[00:19:54] And there’s a sense in which Abraham entrusting God’s promises was anticipating that and looking forward to it. We, this side of the cross and resurrection, look back to it. And Paul has this really interesting line in Romans 3:25, where it says that Christ dying and then salvation by faith shows God’s righteousness so that “God might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus”. In other words, it is Christ’s death that means that this is not just some sort of game. It’s not God play acting or pretending and just randomly picking faith, as you said, as the disposition or virtue. It is because of Christ’s death and resurrection. And faith is the way that we ourselves are connected to that and benefit from it.
Faith and receiving
[00:20:40] Tony Payne: Is faith then almost the same as receiving something?
[00:20:43] Peter Orr: Yeah. Receiving.
[00:20:44] Tony Payne: Or receiving something.
[00:20:45] Peter Orr: Yeah, it is. It’s receiving the gift of God’s grace. Even faith itself, it’s not something we do in the same way that a work is. It’s a receptive idea.
Faith and growth
[00:20:57] Tony Payne: Can faith grow, then? What does it mean to say that faith grows? If it’s not a disposition, and I agree: there’s an interesting tradition—theological tradition—that describes faith as one of the theological virtues, along with love and hope. And I’m not entirely sure that’s correct—that it’s best to see it as a virtue. But can it grow?
[00:21:16] Peter Orr: I think we need to distinguish faith at the point of salvation, which is just its very existence. We receive Christ and that we are saved. But after we’re saved, the Christian life is meant to be a life of growth. And Matthew’s Gospel is really interesting, because, in Matthew, we have Jesus rebuking the disciples for having little faith. They still have faith, but they panic. You know, when Peter’s walking on the water or they’re in the storm, or he tells them in the Sermon on the Mount not to be anxious, “you of little faith.” So there’s a sense in which they have an understanding of God. They have an understanding of Jesus. But they’re not necessarily acting it out consistently. They have little faith.
[00:21:57] But he also commends in Matthew’s Gospel the Centurion and the Canaanite woman for having great faith. So obviously little faith is still faith, but great faith is better.
[00:22:10] Tony Payne: It’s better!
[00:22:11] Peter Orr: It’s better. But interestingly, Jesus says, you know, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, go throw yourself into the sea.” And that’s the kind of metaphor drawn from the Old Testament about the power of God: God is the one who can destroy the mountain. So the point is that if you have faith, even the smallest amount of faith, it connects you to the power of God. So in a sense, it’s good to have great faith. But the point is, is having faith connects you to God.
[00:22:38] Now, even that little illustration, though—Jesus saying faith is small as a mustard seed—perhaps even in that illustration is the implication that we want faith to grow, because a mustard seed seed is meant to grow.
[00:22:49] Tony Payne: And mustard seeds are pretty small.
[00:22:51] Peter Orr: They’re pretty small, but they grow into—you know, Matthew 13 talks about them growing into one of the biggest trees in the garden or plants in the garden.
[00:22:58] Tony Payne: That makes sense to me—that faith can be a kind of thing that, in one sense, you either trusting, with knowledge, assent and trust, in the word and person of Christ, or not.
[00:23:08] Peter Orr: Yeah. You either have it or you don’t have it.
[00:23:09] Tony Payne: You either—you’re either trusting him or you’re not. But, and that being the case, that’s what secures our salvation. ‘Cause in that trust, we receive that gift. But then in the circumstances of life, especially when that trust is tested, as many as sermon as kind of tried to put it: “as the storms and winds of life are blowing on you, have you got faith like the disciples or not?” In one sense, as faith is tested, it grows in its power and its trust and how tightly it clings to the promise in the face of forces that might seek to prise us from it. Yeah, that’s really useful, Peter. Thanks.
Faith and love
[00:23:42] Tony Payne: Another connection that you drew out really helpfully in the lectures—we’ve talked about faith and its connection to our salvation, but how does faith connect with love? Because we’re kind of talking as if faith is the big thing in the Christian life. You’ve got to have faith. Faith is what it is that brings us salvation. But I thought love was supposed to be the big thing in the Christian life. Isn’t that the first, greatest commandment? And isn’t that what Jesus, et cetera, et cetera? So where does love fit into this?
[00:24:04] Peter Orr: Yeah. So I think a helpful way to think about it is that faith and love are inseparable, but we must distinguish them. So Calvin, in a slightly different context, uses the illustration of the sun, and he says the sun gives off light and it gives off heat. And in a sense, the light and the heat are inseparable, but you can distinguish them. You don’t try to see by the heat or warm yourself by the light.
[00:24:32] And it’s the same with faith and love. Genuine faith will bring with it love. And we’ll maybe touch on, particularly with James talking about defective faith. But love and faith are still different things. And it is faith and faith alone that connects us to Christ. It is faith and faith alone that receives the gift.
[00:24:54] And love follows from faith. It’s inseparable from it, in that sense. And if it doesn’t follow, then there are questions about the reality of that faith. But just because they’re both important, just because they come together, doesn’t mean that we can’t distinguish them. And if we don’t distinguish them and we collapse them into each other, then I think we get confusion about how we’re saved.
[00:25:14] Tony Payne: Hmm. It strikes me in Galatians 5 how he talks about faith being active or working in or through love—faith being almost like a primary principle that connects us with God and opens our eyes, and brings a new knowledge and a new understanding that will drive a new love. And in that sense, although love, in some of the teaching of Scripture, and I’m thinking of 1 Corinthians 13 and other places, there’s a kind of supremacy of love as the kind of great lasting change and attribute in our lives and the great attribute of God, that there’s almost a primacy and an importance—or supremacy of love, but not a primacy. The primacy is, well, the first thing is faith. It’s faith that kicks everything off, not love.
[00:25:55] Peter Orr: Correct. Correct. Yep.
Alternative understandings of faith
[00:25:57] Tony Payne: Pete, this is really useful in clarifying for us what faith really is—how faith really works in the Christian life, what it does or what it receives, how it’s the means by which we grasp onto the promises of God and salvation, how it gives birth to love and so on.
[00:26:11] But faith has been a controversial topic, and one of the things I appreciated in your lectures that on the way through, you kept touching on different alternative understandings of faith, different kind of attacks on the idea of faith, especially salvation by faith. If you’re going to pick one that you think is important or relevant for us to know about and to be aware about an alternative view of understanding faith, what would that be, do you think?
[00:26:32] Peter Orr: I mean, there are different ones. We could talk about how some people collapse faith and love together and don’t sufficiently distinguish them. There’s an author who’s published a number of books named Matthew Bates. He wants to say that faith—rather than thinking of it trust or assent, he wants to put it in terms of allegiance. So if Jesus is King and Jesus is Lord, what’s the appropriate way to respond to a king or a lord? Well, it is to show your loyalty—to show your allegiance. And Matthew Bates will look at the Greek word that we’ve translated as “faith” and say, “Actually, it should be translated as allegiance everywhere.”
[00:27:12] Now, that word can have the sense of allegiance. Absolutely. But by translating it that way pretty much throughout the New Testament, the idea of allegiance puts the emphasis back on us and what we do. So your point earlier about faith being receiving and almost having a passive—it’s a passive thing, with the emphasis on the acting of God and Christ: allegiance sort of makes it much more about what I do. And I think what Matthew Bates has done is, again, confused faith with what it leads to.
[00:27:46] And we’d want to say, “Yes, I show allegiance to Christ. I’m loyal to Christ.” But that’s downstream of my faith. And if you bring it upstream to the point of salvation, it all gets a bit confusing and it all seems like it depends on what I do. And so I think ultimately, it undercuts our assurance.
[00:28:03] Tony Payne: It’s a little bit like confusing faith and repentance. It’s very similar in the sense that they go together: they’re inseparable. If I’m trusting that Jesus is the king and ruler of the universe, and I’m realising in that moment what my life is like, and that doesn’t lead to me repenting before him and submitting to him as the King of the universe—in that sense, showing allegiance to him, well, my faith is probably faulty or inadequate in all sorts of ways. But that’s not to say that it’s the same thing.
[00:28:28] Peter Orr: Correct, correct. Yep, no, absolutely. And it just puts the emphasis very unhelpfully on me and on my activity.
[00:28:35] Tony Payne: I can sort of see, as with so many things that you think, “Oh, that’s probably mistaken”, you can see sometimes how it flows out of a wish or a desire to correct something or to correct emphasis. So an idea that faith might not involve allegiance. Or that you have faith in God and then just continue to live how you like.
[00:28:54] Peter Orr: Yeah, yeah. So I think Matthew Bates is writing an American context, and wonderfully, Christianity’s so widespread in America, but we know that maybe in a lot of places, it’s very nominal, and so perhaps that’s what’s pushing him to make that emphasis.
[00:29:09] Tony Payne: But you can’t trust in Jesus as King without submitting to him as King.
[00:29:12] Peter Orr: Correct, correct.
[00:29:12] Tony Payne: But it’s not to say that those two things are the same thing. Very helpful.
Faith and the Christian life
[00:29:15] Tony Payne: In terms of the Christian life, then, and this is the Centre for Christian Living, so we’re interested in the Christian life, what aspect of your research into faith and the lectures you gave on faith do you think are most relevant to the way we live our Christian lives?
[00:29:28] Peter Orr: I think two aspects: I think faith being what begins the Christian life, but I’d want to even say more than that. Paul’s language of justification by faith. Justification is the end time verdict brought into the present, because faith connects us to Christ. We have been justified. We have been declared righteous. And as one writer put it, “It’s not that we’re out on bail; it’s that the trial has happened, that the verdict has been passed, and we are righteous.”
[00:29:59] And so, the wonderful sense of assurance that that brings us—that we believe in Jesus, we trust in Jesus, we believe that he’s the Christ and we’re justified. We’re justified. And so, Romans 4 is the passage that I spend a lot of time thinking about, and that the language that Paul uses there of God justifying the ungodly. And that’s just a stunning idea: that we are sinful, we are ungodly. But because Christ died for the ungodly, we believe in him, we are declared righteous. And so, thinking about faith should hopefully make us think about Christ more. You know, faith in itself is meant to point us away from ourselves and to Christ. And so the sense of assurance that comes from that was something I find very strong.
[00:30:46] I guess secondly, as we’ve talked about, that faith in Christ, it is meant to lead on to a life of love and a life of good works, and that if it’s not doing that, then there’s something wrong, and then we should go back to see if our faith is in Christ and in Christ alone. Because if it is, it will lead to this life of love and good works.
[00:31:09] Tony Payne: Which is the point of what the Apostle James says as well, right? That faith that doesn’t lead onto that, it’s not in a very good way. In fact, he’d say it hasn’t got a pulse. It’s dead.
[00:31:18] Peter Orr: It’s defective. Yeah, it’s dead. It’s dead.
[00:31:20] Tony Payne: That’s really useful. Pete, thank you so much, because helping us to understand—faith is so central in the Christian life. Faith. Love. Hope. These are the three big virtue-like qualities or the three big things that the New Testament, again and again, says are kind of like the sum of what it means to respond to what God has done in faith, and in the love that comes from that faith, and with the hope of where that will finally lead. We can come back and talk about love and hope some other time. They can be your lectures next year or the year after.
[00:31:46] Peter Orr: Yeah, that’s right!
[00:31:47] Tony Payne: Um, in the meantime, if people want to go back and dig into these lectures, they can be found online. Is that correct or not?
[00:31:52] Peter Orr: Yes, they will be online. Not sure when, but I imagine around the time that this podcast comes out, they’ll be online. So, you know, have a look on the Moore College website and you’ll hopefully find them there.
[00:32:02] Tony Payne: We’ll put the details in the show notes for this podcast. And dear Listener, just to prepare you, these are lectures where you want to get the outline and download the outline that’s going to be there. Get your Bibles out and get ready to think, because Pete put in an enormous amount of work. It basically took you six months to prepare these five lectures. And they’re enormously comprehensive, but there is absolute gold within them. So go and listen to the Moore College Lectures on “A biblical theology of faith”. And Pete, thanks so much for bringing a little taste of them to us today.
[00:32:30] Peter Orr: Thanks for having me.
[Music]
Conclusion
[00:32:45] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website—that’s ccl.moore.edu.au—where [00:33:00] you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre. And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:33:20] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch: you can email us at [email protected] au.
[00:33:40] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:33:55] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
