What faith is to outsiders, knowledge is to insiders. In a 1959 BBC interview, Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God, to which he quickly replied, “I don’t need to believe; I know.” Faith is often misunderstood and criticized because it is usually a topic of discussion among atheists, that is, people who have never experienced God and who have never had any existential experiences of the supernatural. They do not actually know how the supernatural works, so they either reject it altogether or group it with superstition and the occult.
Existential Experience versus Blind Belief
The supernatural has nothing to do with superstition. The supernatural comprises miraculous events that go far beyond the so-called laws of nature, thereby transcending the laws of physics. They are spectacular events which defy what is possible, while altering our perception of reality, prompting us to redefine and question the established “facts” of science.
A long time ago, when I had my first encounter with the supernatural, I was a university-trained skeptic who did not believe in miracles. Nevertheless, after my experiences——which, btw, are still ongoing——not only did I accept miracles as factual but they also taught me that so many things that we hold to be true are really not true at all. A new world of possibilities began to open up for me at that time. And I tested the miracles repeatedly using rigorous scientific methods. They proved to be authentic. The phenomena are repeatable, replicable, reliable, and authentic. By contrast, I've never seen a miracle of science!
Besides the miraculous happenings that were taking place, which defied scientific explanations, there was also a briefing during which sensitive information was revealed by God that no one could have possibly known apart from divine revelation. And I came to realize that what God had revealed to me he had also revealed to many others, thus authenticating and verifying his Word by providing multiple attestations. No one could have known various personal details unless a supernatural being had revealed them. Typically, God does not reveal his messages to a single individual but rather disseminates it to a host of people. Through this process of multiple attestation there is a "shared knowledge" so that we don't have to rely on any single individual or assume that their interpretation is correct. There is a "mutual knowledge" that is known by all participatory agents, which is given at different times and in different places. Therefore, God grants the elect intimate knowledge.
These experiences provide evidence for the world beyond the senses, which many philosophers have acknowledged since the time of Plato. It is, perhaps, the world that only quantum mechanics can investigate, where impossible things are possible. In short, someone who has never ever had such veridical experiences would naturally be skeptical, as I was at first. That is perfectly reasonable. It’s understandable. But for me, that's not even a debatable topic anymore. Like Carl Jung, I don’t have blind faith. I know that what I know is a fact! I'm convinced that it's categorically and unequivocally true!
Therefore, as far as outsiders are concerned, it could be called “faith”. However, given everything I know, everything I’ve seen, and everything I’ve experienced, this is knowledge, not belief. Interestingly enough, Plato famously defined knowledge as “justified true belief”! So what faith is to outsiders, knowledge is to insiders.
Widespread myths have created a distorted view of what faith truly means. For example, nominal Christians have no firsthand knowledge of Christ because they have never had any existential experiences of him. So their belief can be described as blind faith (i.e. trust without evidence). They refer to themselves as Christians because they either prayed the sinner’s prayer, answered an altar call, or made a public profession of faith. They think that simply believing in Christ is enough to get saved. However, these are fake conversions. Thus, the myth of blind faith is perpetuated by these types of people who identify as Christians but who have never had any supernatural experiences. Many of them eventually give up on God and end up talking on social media about how they deconstructed their faith. But they were never Christians to begin with.
This myth is further perpetuated by many inexperienced pastors who are teaching that only belief in Jesus is necessary for salvation. They claim that nothing else is required in order to be saved. It is certainly very appealing, allowing you to indulge your carnal desires to your heart’s content!
But this is contrary to scripture. Paul never says “it doesn’t matter if you keep sinning as long as you believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Paul never says “don’t worry if you’re having an adulterous relationship with someone’s wife, or if you keep burglarizing people’s homes, or if you keep molesting little children, as long as you believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ.” That’s like saying that the mafia godfather is saved simply because he believes that Jesus is the Christ. How crazy is that?
Ego Death versus Armchair faith
Romans 8.14 implies that if you’re not “led by the Spirit” you’re NOT a child of God. The phrase “led by the Spirit” implies an actual “existential experience” (cf. Mt. 4.1), not mere belief (i.e. an idea presumed, but not known). What is more, Romans 8.9 makes it absolutely clear that without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we are not saved. In John 3.3, Jesus explains that you cannot have knowledge of the kingdom of God unless you are born again. The need for an existential transformation via the Holy Spirit is backed by psychological research like Jung’s work on individuation, which suggests personal transformation requires confronting the unconscious.
That’s why the Epistle to the Ephesians (4.22-24) instructs us to put away the “old self” and to put on a new identity, namely, “the new self,” which is made in the image of God. This process begins during the dark night of the soul. As Carl Jung famously quipped: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” In reference to self-transcendence, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die.” Therefore, salvation is not an act of the will or the intellect. Rather, it’s a transformation of the mind: a rebirth! And it is not within human control. It is an act of God! Carl Jung once wrote, "No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell".
Notice that faith is not described in Hebrews 11:1 as a leap in the dark, a roll of the dice, a gamble, or an emotional reaction, but rather as an expectation (ἐλπίζω) that is grounded in evidence or proof (ἔλεγχος) of things that cannot be seen or known with the human senses. In summary, true faith is based on knowledge, not mere belief. It is an encounter with the supernatural that is established in existential experience, and has nothing whatsoever to do with a naive faith that is based on speculation, conjecture, or guesswork. We don’t just believe. We know!
“The difference between a theist and an atheist is the degree to which God has revealed himself to them.”
—— Eli of Kittim, The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days
