Faith Is Faith

Let’s clarify something: What we here at Kiln of the Soul call “heart-led” is synonymous with genuine faith. The problem is that most Christians use the word “faith” with a different meaning, different from what we mean and different from how the Bible uses the word.

You can spout all kinds of definitions for the word “faith” and still have a false image in your mind. Regardless of what people say, they tend to act as if faith is a matter of what’s in your head. That’s just plain wrong. Faith requires your mind to implement, but faith itself is a synonym for commitment, trust and confidence to act. The Bible says faith is a matter of what’s in your heart, and in biblical terms, “heart” is synonymous with your will, not your emotions or some reservoir of sentiment. Heart is the repository of convictions and faith. That meaning is present in English speaking cultures, but it’s muddied by the often unconscious assumption that it includes sentiment or emotion.

Sometimes American Christians can stumble into genuine faith, and miracles happen. The whole point is that faith is what drives you to face God and make bold requests. It drives you to seize His promises and act, which is where your mind comes in. Your brain organizes and implements what faith asserts is so. Most believers can do that some of the time.

We here at Kiln of the Soul parish do not claim to be the only believers with genuine faith. We do claim to have a better grasp on the biblical meaning of the word, simply because we consciously dismiss Western thinking about such things. We start from a different set of assumptions about reality and what words mean. We try to pull the process out into the open, make it conscious, by digging into the details of how Hebrew epistemology in the Bible is radically different from what is underlying the West. And we see strong evidence that the Western part of “Western Christianity” is a deep corruption of Christianity.

If there is any good thing we can do to help Western believers, it is teaching them to stop relying on human reason and to fully jump onto faith and conviction. That task is a lot easier if you take the time to become conscious of what’s involved in creating this false reliance on human reason. The Western churches are loaded with references to making faith reasonable, and that is a primary mistake, a lie from Satan. Faith is inherently unreasonable, and makes preposterous demands of you.

You hold your opinions; your convictions hold you. Your opinions are the product of reason. Convictions and faith are a divine gift lodged in your heart. This is our job: Helping people who have some faith to put their full trust in it. We are promoting Biblical Mysticism, because “mysticism” in the Bible is a distrust in human reason.