Why is faith considered to be such a great virtue?

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ASimon said:
That God ultimately chose to spare Isaac says nothing about what his intent was prior to that choice. If Abraham had refused the test outright, why couldn’t God have killed him for disobeying Him?

If the point was to create an object lesson on the virtues of faith, striking down Abraham for insufficient faith could’ve easily done the job.
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I think Gods’ action spoke for His intent more eloquently than any speculation we could have on the matter.
 
Godmachine said:
Wait a sec…why would an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful God have to test someone’s faith this way? Why couldn’t he just look into Abraham’s heart/mind/whatever and see how faithful he was? Why torment the poor man the way he did? This is the same god that tells us what is “moral” and “good”? Then why does he act so immoral and evil?
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God doesn’t test our faith for His sake but rather for our own. It challenges and stretches us so that we’ll know-along with anyone else hearing the story afterwards in this case-just how faithful we are-and just what real faith is made of. Abraham trusted God to the nth degree-believing that in spite of all odds anything He did would have* good* as its’ ultimate purpose.
 
Poseidon said:
I’d have to disagree with you there. You may see plenty of evidence of design, but I don’t.
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I would just like to share an evidence for design. Consider the motion of our solar system. Things move in a very predictable fashion and have for at the very least all of recorded history and presumably for the 4 billion years of Earths history. We are not slowing down in our orbit despite very complex gravitational interactions with all of the other celestial bodies in the system. We are simply held in one very predictable, unchanging path.

This is problematic since thermodynamics tells us that there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Stated another way, all natural processes move from being ordered to being disordered. Something will invariably slow any moving object down. In this case, you have a complex web of gravitational interaction between the sun, the moons and the planets.

There must be something opposing the fundamental tendency toward disorder. Since it is above the natural law it is by definition supernatural. Either this can merely be labeled as one more in a long sequence of “happy accidents” that provides us with exactly what we need for life, or you can start to see that all of these accidents have a ridiculously small probability of being accidents.

God Bless

Jack Handy
 
tonyrey said:
That was not due to the Will of God but folly on the part of Jephthah.
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So for Jephthah’s folly, his daughter paid with her life. The fact is, God accepted Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter and no angel came to stay his hand.
 
Godmachine said:
That was not due to the Will of God but folly on the part of Jephthah. So for Jephthah’s folly, his daughter paid with her life. The fact is, God accepted Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter and no angel came to stay his hand.
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  1. God did not accept his sacrifice.
  2. Jephthah was not asked to sacrifice his daughter.
  3. It is unreasonable to demand that human folly is rectified by God because it would defeat the purpose of creating us as autonomous beings.
 
tonyrey said:
Non sequitur
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It’s a non sequitur to duck the question of God’s character by asserting that you’re not a fundamentalist, as though that answers anything. Even if the Noah’s ark story was meant to be a metaphor, you’re still responsible for explaining what it’s a metaphor for, and how it supports your assertion that God is never anything but a Creator.
 
tonyrey said:
  1. God did not accept his sacrifice.
  2. Jephthah was not asked to sacrifice his daughter.
  3. It is unreasonable to demand that human folly is rectified by God because it would defeat the purpose of creating us as autonomous beings.
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Jephthah was an outcast, a man of perhaps questionable character. But he was also apparently a man of faith who made a deal with God. The deal was that if God granted him victory over the Ammonites he would sacrifice the first person that came out of his house to greet him. So Jephthah and his men slaughtered the Ammonites, men, women and children and God granted him his victory. And when Jephthah went home, his only daughter came out of the house to greet him playing a tambourine.

Now, Jephthah was not asked to sacrifice his daughter but neither did God command him not to. If God did not want the sacrifice, why did he grant Jephthah victory (another bloody affair)? And after granting the victory, why did he not command Jephthah’s daughter to stay inside when he came home?

It seems to me God is as much (or more) to blame here as Jephthah.
 
Godmachine said:
Jephthah was an outcast, a man of perhaps questionable character. But he was also apparently a man of faith who made a deal with God. The deal was that if God granted him victory over the Ammonites he would sacrifice the first person that came out of his house to greet him. So Jephthah and his men slaughtered the Ammonites, men, women and children and God granted him his victory. And when Jephthah went home, his only daughter came out of the house to greet him playing a tambourine.

Now, Jephthah was not asked to sacrifice his daughter but neither did God command him not to. If God did not want the sacrifice, why did he grant Jephthah victory (another bloody affair)? And after granting the victory, why did he not command Jephthah’s daughter to stay inside when he came home?

It seems to me God is as much (or more) to blame here as Jephthah.
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It seems like your’re just asking why doesn’t God stop people from doing bad things or why doesn’t he prevent suffering. That’s a fine question, but it’s just the old problem of evil. Worth discussing, but not the topic of this thread, which was if and how faith can be reasonable and meritorious. I suppose we’ve answered that, but now have gotten side-tracked into the old testament and problem of evil. Maybe those would be better for a new thread.
 
Verbum_Caro said:
Poseidon, here is the beginning of Chapter 11, Book 3, of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis:

Interested in finding out where he goes with that?

VC
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That book’s been on my reading list for a few months now - I’ll hopefully be getting around to it sometime this summer 🙂
 
Godmachine said:
Jephthah was an outcast, a man of perhaps questionable character. But he was also apparently a man of faith who made a deal with God. The deal was that if God granted him victory over the Ammonites he would sacrifice the first person that came out of his house to greet him. So Jephthah and his men slaughtered the Ammonites, men, women and children and God granted him his victory. And when Jephthah went home, his only daughter came out of the house to greet him playing a tambourine.

Now, Jephthah was not asked to sacrifice his daughter but neither did God command him not to. If God did not want the sacrifice, why did he grant Jephthah victory (another bloody affair)? And after granting the victory, why did he not command Jephthah’s daughter to stay inside when he came home?

It seems to me God is as much (or more) to blame here as Jephthah.
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  1. A man of faith doesn’t make deals with God.
  2. God didn’t grant him the victory.
  3. Jephthah imagined God granted him the victory.
  4. Jephthah was to blame but there is one mitigating circumstance:
  5. Jephthah had a primitive concept of God - like many other Jews of that era.
  6. It is absurd to expect God to intervene whenever we make mistakes.
  7. Trust in God is a virtue but it doesn’t exclude folly!
 
ASimon said:
It’s a non sequitur to duck the question of God’s character by asserting that you’re not a fundamentalist, as though that answers anything. Even if the Noah’s ark story was meant to be a metaphor, you’re still responsible for explaining what it’s a metaphor for, and how it supports your assertion that God is never anything but a Creator.
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  1. Not being a fundamentalist is sufficient because it means not interpreting everything in the Old Testament literally.
  2. Not everything in the Old Testament is a metaphor or allegory.
  3. Opinions differ as to the precise significance of Noah’s ark.
  4. I do not claim to be a theologian or Old Testament scholar.
  5. It is Christian doctrine that God is the Creator.
  6. In the creeds we do not say “I believe in God the Creator and the Destroyer”…
  7. The term “the Destroyer” is associated with Satan!
 
danserr said:
God had previously promised Abraham that God would make a great nation from Abraham through Isaac. Hence, for God’s promise to hold, Isaac would have to live and become the father of “a great nation.” God promised this repeatedly through himself.

Thus God’s test of Abraham was a test of his faith in God and God’s promise, and that God would keep his promise to make a great nation through Isaac. For this to happen God would have to either stop Abraham or raise Isaac or some other solution that involved Isaac coming through the affair alive.

Hence, it is reasonable to think that Abraham believed that God would either stop him or else raise Isaac afterwards.
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But what does God say afterwards?
By my own self have I sworn, saith the Lord: because thou hast done this thing, and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake: I will bless thee
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God does not say: “Because you had faith in my promise I will bless you.” In other words, the only way Abraham would have “not spared” Isaac would be to have been willing to sacrifice him to God. If Abraham had been unwilling to sacrifice Isaac, and only followed along because he thought God wouldn’t go through with it, then God would have commended him for having faith in the covenant instead.
 
TheTrueCentrist said:
But what does God say afterwards?

By my own self have I sworn, saith the Lord: because thou hast done this thing, and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake: I will bless thee

God does not say: “Because you had faith in my promise I will bless you.” In other words, the only way Abraham would have “not spared” Isaac would be to have been willing to sacrifice him to God. If Abraham had been unwilling to sacrifice Isaac, and only followed along because he thought God wouldn’t go through with it, then God would have commended him for having faith in the covenant instead.
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Abraham was willing to go through with it, either because he thought God would stop him or else God would restore Isaac to him afterwards.

The passage you cite is perfectly consistent with the idea that Abraham believed that God would either restore Isaac to him or order Abraham not to go through with it. Why would Abraham have done this thing? As the scripture implies, because he had faith in God’s covenant which required that Isaac live.

God praised Abraham for doing this thing because in doing so Abraham showed his faith in God and God’s covenant (the promise to make a great nation though Isaac).
 
ASimon said:
It’s a non sequitur to duck the question of God’s character by asserting that you’re not a fundamentalist, as though that answers anything. Even if the Noah’s ark story was meant to be a metaphor, you’re still responsible for explaining what it’s a metaphor for, and how it supports your assertion that God is never anything but a Creator.
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God is the Creator of the immortal soul, Simon. And thus, even in Genesis 6-7 souls were not destroyed.
 
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