Christian Faith

I wanted to briefly write a bit about what the virtue of faith is supposed to be all about.

Essentially, to have faith is to totally accept the word of God, to have the disposition to see the world in light of this acceptance and to completely surrender oneself to God. So there is a cognitive aspect of faith which is to believe in the Christian doctrine as well as internalizing Christian values so that one sees actions and states of affairs in those terms. Moreover, there is a connative aspect of faith which is to want to be (literally) God's servant.

There can be no doubt that faith, so conceived, is no virtue if Christianity is false. Imagine, however, if one were to hang on to the idea that faith were a virtue without the Christian framework. What would that look like? The sort of thing I am imagining is someone claiming that faith is the disposition to believe those propositions that can not be proven yet without which one would fall into global external world skepticism. And this character trait is a virtue because skeptics, being unsure that other people exist, turn out to always be egoists and so having faith is required to get morality off the ground. (Or something like this, I am just thinking of a simple example. Maybe I am being foolish but I think that this is something that someone could say.) At any rate, something has gone wrong here. I would argue that the person making this claim has hijacked the term. Faith originally meant one thing and now it is being used to refer to something else. The problem here is that the original intuition or feeling that faith is a virtue was a result of its being so under the Christian description. Under the new anti-skeptic description it is something totally different yet it still maintains the emotive or intuitive appeal of the old one. (This is poorly worded, but I hope the idea has been conveyed. We can talk about this in our meeting.)

What has happened to faith in my silly example is what I think has happened to modesty in recent times with the modern characterizations. Many people, myself included, have the gut-feeling or intuition that modesty is a virtue and (I would guess) this is a result of Christian values which have been internalized in Western culture. We still to some degree, whether we believe the doctrine or not, are stuck with the Christian conceptual scheme. [I would need to argue for this point no doubt, though I feel that it is to some degree self-evident.] So we have this intuition (whose basis is in Christian thought) but we have dropped the Christian framework which means that we need a new characterization of modesty because we think the Christian one is false and so we make a new description of modesty. And yet we have gone awry because the intuition we are holding on to is a result of the framework we are rejecting. Modesty being a virtue is only plausible within that framework of Christianity but because we feel that modesty is a virtue and that Christianity is false we go on about modesty anyway.

My thought and point is that without Christianity modesty is not a virtue and that any attempt to make it so must fail as what is really occurring is the hijacking of the term and putting it under a new description. If Driver thinks that what she has described is a virtue that that is all well and good but she should not give it the name modesty because what she has described is not. The same, I would say, goes for your account which calls modesty the exact opposite of what the framework in which it gained the status of a virtue understood it to mean.

All this needs refinement and clarification but it is the basic thought that I have been having on this subject.