The deepest problem that faces the church today is what is meant by faith. Salvation by faith was the catch cry that came out of the Reformation and, to this day, it is supposedly the Gospel that is preached the length and the breadth of the land. Luther is the man that most claim to be responsible for steering Christianity back to where it ought to be, anchored on scripture, preaching a gospel of faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins. But what we must ask ourselves however is, "Is this really the case?" Did Luther really steer the church back from where it had strayed? Has the church through his reforming zeal arrived back to mirror the faith that was visible in the early church? Do we look back at the Protestant beginnings and feel a sense of awe because of the mighty working of the power of God, or do we see a man bravely standing against the might of a powerful corrupt church, giving others the courage to break free from the chains of oppression and to begin to look again at what is contained in scripture. A bit like King Josiah in the Old Testament rediscovering the books of the Law and then needing to consult the prophet as to what they meant.

Faith is that which links us to those things upon which we are necessarily dependent. I would like to say that faith is that which links us in our understanding to those thing upon which we are necessarily dependent but this is not always the case for many do not consciously register that they even have faith. Before any of us could reason we had faith. Faith precedes all reason. It is apparent that a child has to put faith in another to survive. We were once completely dependent on others to meet all of our needs. The process of growing to adulthood is the process of being able to function in the world independently of our parents and our teachers. Whatever we have come to know, or think we have come to know, is entirely dependent on others than ourselves. How much of what we come to believe or actively put our trust (faith) in is dependent on how faithful we have come to know those things to be. Our reasoning about the world is directly related to our experiences in it. Once we have been weaned from our parents we are entirely dependent on the wider world for our sustenance, for our companionship, in fact for all of our social, intellectual, and emotional needs. Hence how we relate to the world is fundamental to how we fare in it.

The birth of our knowledge of our own faith is linked to this process of independence. The things upon which we were necessarily dependent (hence that which we trusted to fulfill our real needs) have changed. Our situation has really been in a state of flux from the time when we were born. Those things upon which we thought we could trust have a built in use by date so it is inevitable that we have a need to reason our way forward from one step to the next. Very much like a child taking its first steps the process though new and adventuress proves successful. In other words there is an inbuilt trustworthiness (faithfulness) built into the process. A child doesn't have an intellectual-philosophical reasoning process that leads it to take its first step. The child simply feels some desire, at the appropriate time in its development, to begin to walk and so it takes it first faltering steps. Before it begins to have conscious faith in its ability to walk the child has already responded in faith. We invariably confuse our reasoning about things with the truth of the thing.