One of the most misunderstood scriptures in the New Testament is Romans chapter 7. It does not matter what brand of Christian you are talking to, if the subject of holiness arises and with it the commands to walk in the image of Christ, free from sin, the automatic retort is to fire off a few choice verses of Romans chapter 7. Poor old Paul, it seems, just couldn't help himself, “The good that I wish, I do not do, but I commit the very evil that I do not wish” and the church delights in his imagined frailty - to their collective ruin. For in this, as in much of their understanding of scripture, they fulfill Peter's statement concerning Paul, “in his letters… are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort as they do all the scriptures, to their own destruction.”

From the church's understanding of scripture Paul is a tragic figure stumbling in all of his ways (just as they the church do), a hypocrite not living what he preached; but this is not what Paul is revealing in this chapter. As is so often the case, people take a text out of context to justify their own crooked walk. To get to the heart of what Paul is talking about we have to go back to the previous chapter. In Chapter 6 Paul says, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? May it never be! How shall we who died still live in it?” Then he explains how we have been baptized into Christ's death that “we too might walk in newness of life.” For “our old man was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be destroyed, that we should no longer be slaves of sin” Paul continues by saying, “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts,”… “for sin shall not be master over you for you are not under law but under grace.” From such a beginning it seems inconceivable that Paul is now saying, in the very next chapter, “but hey don't worry about it, none of us are perfect!” But this is exactly what the church believes that he is saying!

Christianity is categorized as a faith based religion. Before the Reformation this really was not the case because everyone was baptized at birth and you simply were part of the church. But ever since the Reformation and the questioning of church authority saw Luther highlighting the text in Romans 3:28 “… a man is justified by faith”, by adding to it the word “only”, the fixation of the church has been upon faith. That is faith as opposed to works. What this has resulted in has been an eruption of men who claim to have faith but reveal nothing of the works that necessarily flow from real faith. We have the spectacle of members of different denominations joining themselves together, in a spirit of ecumenicalism, proclaiming themselves to be fellow Christians but living divided because of doctrinal differences. We see the arguments between so called fundamentalists and so called liberal Christians over what is essential belief. We see the secular argument that you can either have reason or faith but not both. We see street preachers literally stand on a bible and say they are standing on the word of God. There is so much confusion, so much hokum, that for there to be any such thing as true faith it must be, by and large, hidden from the hearts and minds of those who profess themselves to be Christian. This then is an exploration into what it means to have faith.