Faith, Trust, and the Weight of Glory

If faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), then in order to build your relationship with God in faith, you must not only hope in the reality of God, but also be assured of Him. Assurance, or trust, is the first crisis humans face according to Dr. Eric Erikson, who outlined the stages of human development. He believed that an infant who came to innately mistrust the god-like figures of their parents would be hindered in the successive stages of growth, because a person who cannot trust the outside world becomes twisted in on themselves in a terrible way. An inability to trust leaves the soul cynical, afraid, joyless, and completely self-focused. While I don’t agree with all of Erickson’s theories, he has insight into the effects of a lack of trust and how this lack causes the inability to have faith— whether that faith be in the goodness of the surrounding world, or for our purposes, in the goodness of God.

Most people live marked by a lack of trust of who God is, specifically, we live untouched by what the ancient philosophers called the transcendental nature of God. God is real. He is good. He is beautiful. And He is true. Plato believed the good, beautiful, real, and true could essentially be reduced to the same thing— something that for him had no name. Augustine, genius of the patristic era, took this metaphysical conversation that stretched through the ages before him, and thrust it into the heart of the gospel. The triune God, who has revealed Himself, is Plato’s un-named essence of the transcendentals. He is the perfection and judge of what is good, beautiful, real, and true; everything that embodies these attributes is only a shadow that makes our hearts long for His full weight of glory.