Christian Faith versus Secular Faith: The Concrete versus the Imaginary

Faith as understood in a biblical frame, as Calvin, for example, understood so well, isn’t an abstract secular imaginary, but instead it is a living knowledge of God grounded in the faith of Christ for us. For the secularist faith is as subjective as the center of their own in-turned navel; a wishful thing that they can only hope might be the case. This is not the Christian ground for thinking faith. Faith isn’t a magic wand waved in order to bring nothing into something of our own fantastical imaginations. Faith is what the vicarious Man, Jesus Christ, has for us towards the Father in such a way that it entwines us, with Him, in the security and hiddenness of the bosom of the Father. I don’t let secularists impose their defeated notions of a fluttering wishfulness, which they consider faith to be, to be the way I must think faith. I think the faith of Christ from the victory of Christ as the primordial basis for knowledge of all reality; which is to say: knowledge of the triune God. The secularist often thinks that the God Christians know is someone they can know apart from Christ; as if there is some sort of common nature of continuity between the God they might try to imagine as the Christian God, and the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. But they have no access into the throne room of Grace; that is, until they come into the presence of God through the veil torn, Christ’s body, as the mediation that brings God to humanity and humanity to God. It is a special, familial and filial knowledge of God that is unique to the Son of God and all those in participation with Him, by the Spirit, come into union with Him, through the faith of Christ and His union with us in His humanity from Nazareth. Christians have a faith, a knowledge of God, a trust of the Father, that comes through the wood, blood and water of the cross and body of Jesus Christ. It is a re-created world wherein the faith of Christ comes to have grounding, as that has always already and eternally been the reality shared between the Father and the Son in and through the bond of love provided for by the Holy Spirit. The secularist and the Christian notion of faith are worlds apart; to the point that the former’s has already been put to death, in the old world, and the latter’s based on the new creation of Christ’s resurrected, ascended, and advent-ious humanity come and coming and coming again.