that saves—faith in God our Savior—has perished. Their position
caused many mistakes to creep into their teachings, as well as many
paradoxes that go against sound reason. In a church, every teaching that
aims to teach and show the way to heaven and salvation depends on its
faith. Since, as I say, many mistakes and paradoxes crept into their faith,
it became necessary for them to proclaim the dogma that the intellect
has to be kept under obedience to faith.
In Paul’s words in Romans 3 :28,“faith” does not mean faith in God
the Father, it means faith in his Son, and “the works of the Law” do not
mean the works of the law of the Ten Commandments, they mean the
works of the Mosaic Law for the Jews (as you can see from the verses that
follow Romans 3 : 28 , as well as from similar words in Paul’s Epistle to the
Galatians 2 : 14 , 15 ). The foundation stone of the modern-day church
crumbles, then, and so does the shrine built on it, like a house sinking
into the ground until only the top of the roof remains visible.
We are to believe or have faith in God our Savior Jesus Christ 339
because this is believing in a God who can be seen, in whom is what can-
not be seen. Faith in a God who can be seen—who is both human and
divine at the same time—goes deep within us. Although faith is earthly
in its form, it is spiritual in its essence. Within us faith becomes both
spiritual and earthly, in that everything spiritual has to be received in
what is earthly to become anything to us. Something purely spiritual
does indeed enter us but we do not accept it. It is like the ether that flows
in and out of us without having any effect. For something to have an
effect, we have to be mentally aware of it and open to it. We have no
such awareness or openness unless something affects our earthly self.
On the other hand, faith that is entirely earthly, meaning faith that is
deprived of its spiritual essence, is a mere persuasion or knowledge, not
faith. A persuasion outwardly imitates faith, but because there is nothing
spiritual inside it, there is nothing in it that saves. This is the type of faith
possessed by all people who deny that the Lord’s human manifestation is
divine. This is what the Arian faith was like and what the Socinian faith
is like. Both of these faiths rejected the Lord’s divinity.
What is a faith that is not directed toward some object? It is like our
eyesight directed into deep space, which falls into a void and perishes. It
is like a bird flying beyond the atmosphere into space, where it dies for
lack of breath as if it were in a vacuum pump.
This type of faith lives in the human mind the way the winds live in
the halls of Aeolus, or the way light lives in a shooting star: it rises into
§339 faith 407