Is Faith a Feeling?
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Last year I conducted an informal poll of nearly a hundred Christians at a variety of different events and gatherings in the St. Louis area for The Humble Skeptic podcast. I was asking questions related to the nature of faith, and the majority of those I interviewed described faith as a “blind leap”—it’s not cognitive, but rather something you feel deep down inside. But is this really the case? Does the Bible support this view that faith is related to our feelings?
Well, as I began to study this issue closely, I wasn’t able to find a single occurrence of the word “feelings” anywhere near the word “faith” in the ESV, NIV, NRSV, NASB, KJV, NKJV, and a host of other respected translations. Even when I searched for different versions of the verb “to feel,” and substituted alternatives for the word “faith,” such as “faithful,” “belief,” “believer,” etc., I still couldn’t find a single passage in which “faith” and “feelings” were within 200 words of each other.
Doubting Thomas responds to visible and tangible facts related to the external world, rather than to his own interior feelings and intuitions.
Even in some of the very loose paraphrase translations, nowhere do we find the idea that faith rests on a person’s internal feelings. The only passage I found that actually came close was a rendering of a verse from John 20:27, which relates to the famous scene of doubting Thomas. According to a translation by Richard Weymouth, Jesus says, “Bring your finger here and feel my hands; bring your hand and put it into my side; and do not be ready to disbelieve but to believe.”
Yet, in this passage, it’s clear that faith didn’t come as a result of some kind of internal feeling or intuition. Rather, for Thomas, it came as the result of seeing Jesus with his eyes, hearing him with his ears, and touching him with his hands. In other words, in this famous scene, faith isn’t blind at all. Thomas put his faith in Jesus after responding to visible and tangible facts related to the real world.
Some texts outside of the world of Christianity do teach that faith is confirmed by our feelings.
Now as it turns out, there are a few sacred texts, outside of the world of Christianity, which do support the idea that faith is confirmed by feelings. The most famous is the Mormon claim that true believers will experience a burning in the bosom. This is rooted in a revelation that Joseph Smith supposedly received back in 1829, and which can be found in a portion of the Mormon scriptures known as Doctrine & Covenants. In sections 6 and 9 of this text, Smith claims that God spoke to him saying:
Cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things; did I not speak peace to your mind concerning the matter? What greater witness can you have than from God?… Behold, I say unto you that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you: therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings…[1]
According to Joseph Smith, God promised to confirm the truth of his latter-day revelations through internal and subjective means. Every believer could know the truth of Mormonism through their own personal experience of peace or the “burning in the bosom.” Now, of course, it could be argued that both of these ideas are found in the Bible. In John 15, Jesus does promise to give his followers “peace,” and in Luke 24:32, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus said to one other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while [Jesus] spoke with us…” Yet, it must be pointed out that experiences of this kind are never presented as a kind of test for truth or a justification for faith itself. In other words, our feelings can be thought of as a fruit of faith, but not the root. Facts about the real world can generate feelings, but those feelings should never be thought of as a kind of proof of the facts themselves. In the past, I’ve had good feelings about plenty of things that later turned out to be bad ideas.
When Jesus appeared to all his disciples in Luke 24, he said, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:38-39). In this scene, just as we saw earlier with Thomas, Jesus resolved his disciples’ doubts, not by internal subjective means, but an objective, physical manifestation. In fact, this is precisely the kind of language that John uses in the opening of his first epistle: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.” (1 John 1:1-3; emphasis added).
Now, there also happens to be a verse in the Koran that is similar to the Mormon idea of “the burning in the bosom.” According to one translation, “Believersare those who, when Allah is mentioned, feel a tremor in their hearts, and when His revelations are recited, find their faith strengthened.”[2] Also, when Muhammad requested external signs to confirm the inspiration of his revelations, Allah simply instructs the prophet to say, “I am but a plain warner. Is it not enough that we have given them the Book that is recited to them?”[3]
In 1995 a man by the name of Neale Donald Walsch wrote a book titled Conversations with God in which he claimed that God had actually communicated with him directly. Here’s an excerpt of one of his “conversations”:
God: I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.
Walsch: But my truth about God comes from You.
God: Who said so?…
Walsch: Leaders. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Books. The Bible, for heaven's sake!
God: Those are not authoritative sources…
Walsch: Then what is?
God: Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differs from what you've been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.[4]
The irony of course is that this entire conversation was itself expressed through words and became part of a best-selling book. But the key idea is that none of us should trust the things we learn about God from external sources. Rather, we simply need to rely on our own subjective feelings.
Listening to one’s own internal voice has become the “test for truth” for many people over any external authority.
In his book, God in the Whirlwind, David Wells notes that today, a “person’s own interior reality is all that counts, and it is untouched by any obligation to community, or understanding from the past, or even by the intrusions of God from the outside.”[5] He then went on to say,
[T]he new therapeutic preoccupations of the Me Generation would, of course, seep into the church, although in less glaring and more sanitized versions. Looking back on this time, Wade Clark Roof said that one of the defining marks of the Boomer generation was its distinction between the inward and outward aspects of religion…Credence was given…to [that which] is internal. Not to church doctrine, which others had formulated. Not to church authority. Indeed, not to any external authority at all. Rather, it is in private intuitions that God is found.[6]
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, this spirit has actually been with us for quite a long time. In his book Democracy in America, first published in 1835, de Tocqueville highlighted some of the traits that distinguished Americans from their European counterparts. Here’s how he describes the American approach to intellectual pursuits:
To escape from imposed systems…to treat tradition as valuable for information only and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them...such are the principal characteristics of what I would call the American philosophical method.[7]
As a result of this approach, de Tocqueville says that Americans are “continually brought back to their own judgment as the most apparent and accessible test of truth.”[8] “Americans,” he says, “have needed no books to teach them philosophic method, having found it in themselves….Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is in danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”[9]
The narcissistic spirituality of “Sheilaism” is active within the walls of both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches today.
In their 1985 book Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues traced the outlines of this distinctively American outlook, particularly as it related to contemporary views of religion and spirituality. And at one point they interviewed a nurse by the name of Sheila Larson who described her faith as “Sheilaism.” “I am not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” When she was asked to define her faith, Sheila simply said: “It's just, try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other.”[10]
The following year, Robert Bellah elaborated on this point about Sheilaism during an address he gave in Southern California:
The case of Sheila is not confined to people who haven't been to church in a long time. On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition.[11]
The point Bellah seemed to be making was that the kind of narcissistic spirituality that Sheila Larson personified so well, isn’t something that is merely going on “out there” in the world at large. Rather, he’s saying that it is actually happening within the walls of both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.
The great need of the hour is for Christians to re-examine the true foundations of their faith.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the interviews I recently recorded for The Humble Skeptic podcast were conducted at a variety of Christian events and gatherings, and these polls represent a random sampling of the views of contemporary Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds. And if you take the time to listen to these interviews, you’ll soon discover that Sheilaism is a major force to be reckoned with, including within the walls of many churches.
The overwhelming majority of the Christians I spoke with saw faith as a blind leap—it’s not something that can be proved but is an internal feeling of some kind. That’s not Christianity, but Sheilaism. This is the view, not of the Bible, but of the Koran and the Book of Mormon.The great need of the hour is for Christians to re-examine the true foundations of their faith. How did the Israelites come to believe that Moses was an inspired prophet? Did they feel it in their hearts or did the entire nation hear God speaking with Moses audibly?[12] What persuaded so many people in the first century to believe that Jesus was Israel’s promised Messiah?[13] How did the Apostles encourage others to become Christians?[14] It’s time for us to dust off our Bibles, and to rediscover the God who interrupted the course of human history and revealed himself through “many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3).
This article was originally published at Beautiful Christian Life on May 16, 2023.
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Notes:
[1] Doctrine & Covenants (6:22-23): https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/6?lang=eng; and 9:8-9 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/9?lang=eng.
[2] Q8:2, 1946, Ali edition.
[3] Q29:50-51, 1974 Shakir edition. In other words, in contrast to the God of the Bible, Allah never promised to give external proof of his revelation. For more information on this point, see my article, “Why Should We Believe The Bible?”
[4] Neale Donald Walsh, Conversations With God, Book 1 (New York: Penguin, 1995), 8.
[5] David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 26.
[6] Ibid., 27.
[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966; originally written in 1948), 429; see section 2.1.1, “Concerning The Philosophical Approach of The Americans.”
[8] Ibid., 430.
[9] Ibid., 508.
[10] Robert N. Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Harper and Row: New York, 1985), 221.
[11] http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_5.htm.
[12] Ex. 19:9 (cf. Ex. 4:1-31, 7:9, 8:22, 9:14, 10:1-2.
[13] Recall Nicodemus’ comment in Jn 3:2 when he said to Jesus, “No one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him.” We can also think of the words of Jesus himself when he healed the paralytic in Mark 2:10-11 saying, “So that you may know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.”
[14] See, for example the sermons recorded throughout the book of Acts. In particular, take a look at Acts 2:22-36 in which Peter says that Jesus has been “attested” by many signs and wonders, and fulfilled numerous OT prophecies which is why the house of Israel could “know for certain” that he was the promised Messiah.
