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 From
“HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT,” Francis A Schaeffer; Tyndale
House Pub., Wheaton, Ill. (pp 99-100)
“One
must analyze the word faith and see that it can mean two
completely opposite things.
Suppose
we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock and
suddenly the fog shuts down. The guide turns to us and says that the
ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all
freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep
warm, the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the
shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour
or so, someone says to the guide: “Suppose I dropped and hit a
ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?” The guide
would say that you might make it till the morning and thus live. So,
with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support his action,
one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one
kind of faith, a leap of faith.
Suppose,
however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of
the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard
a voice which said: “You cannot see me, but I know exactly where
you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in
these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every
foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge.
If you hang and drop, you can make
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it through the night and I will get you in the
morning.”
I
would not hang and drop at once, but would ask questions to try to
ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and if he was
not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask his name. If the
name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the
mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps
there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of
that area. For example, in the area of the Alps where I live,
Avanthey would be such a name. In my desperate situation, even
though time would be running out, I would ask what to me would be
the sufficient questions, and when I became convinced by his
answers, then I would hang and drop.
This
is faith, but obviously it has no relationship to the first
instance. As a matter of fact, if one of these is called faith, the
other should not be designated by the same word symbol. The historic
Christian faith is not a leap of faith in the post-Kierkegaardian
sense because “he is not silent,” and I am invited to ask the
sufficient questions in regard to details but also in regard to the
existence of the universe and its complexity and in regard to the
existence of man. I am invited to ask sufficient questions and then
believe him and bow before him metaphysically in knowing that I
exist because he made man, and bow before him morally as needing his
provision for me in the substitutionary, propitiatory death of
Christ.”
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