The gift of faith

Listed as something given to some and not to others, so it is not about whether you believe. These statements look only for a habit of staying sure, and saying so, after other people have stopped expecting a thing to come right, and for people coming to ask whether you still are. Paul elsewhere writes of “all faith, so as to remove mountains” (1 Corinthians 13:2). Paul names this in the same sentence as healing, miracles and tongues (1 Corinthians 12:8-10), and Christians disagree about which of the gifts in that sentence God still gives today.

In an ordinary week it is whoever keeps praying for the building fund after the figures have said no. It is the person who says this one will come good about somebody everybody else has written off, and is still saying it three years later, and has been right often enough that people remember.

People notice it in themselves by what others ask them. When a thing has gone quiet, somebody comes and asks whether you still think it will happen. You find yourself saying so out loud in a room that has given up. You are rarely the first to say stop.

The two things it is most often confused with are saving faith, which every Christian has and which no list of gifts would single out, and optimism, which is a temperament rather than a gift and does not need a subject. Paul’s own measure is deliberately extreme and then deliberately deflated: all faith, enough to remove mountains, and without love it is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:2). The Romans list opens with the same warning against making any gift a rank, telling everyone to think of themselves reasonably, “as God has apportioned to each person a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3).