Attempted Scam
This week I received a call from a man who wanted to warn me that there had been some suspicious transactions on my account. He wanted to help me secure my account against fraud. Of course I was suspicious from the start, but the fact that he knew my name and account number made the call feel plausible. However, as the discussion continued, I was able to recognize his insistence that I had to act immediately as a scammer tactic, and when his proposal for securing my account was walking me down the path of making a transfer to an IBAN that he would supply... “Dieu voit ce que vous faites,” I said (God sees what you do), and that was the end of the conversation.
This experience is a reminder how faith is such a profound part of human nature. The definition of faith given by Geerhardus Vos is “an acceptance as true by which we do not rest in ourselves but in the testimony of another.” By God's design, we human beings have a natural tendency to believe one another. If I talk to a stranger on the bus who tells me his name, profession, number of children, etc., my natural response is to accept what he says as true. And although I managed to avoid being scammed, the fact that he tried it on me proves that it succeeds all too often. Despite the weirdness of the proposed procedure to “secure the account,” the fact that we naturally believe what people tell us results in people being deceived.
I'm not saying that this tendency to believe is a bad thing. What is bad is the wickedness of men who abuse the trust of others, and this wickedness does make it necessary for our faith to be accompanied by discernment. But faith in itself is not only beautiful but absolutely necessary for human existence. Vos continues :
With some reflection it will be apparent that our entire human society, all spiritual communion with others, and by far the greater part of our thinking and acting rests on faith. Faith is the warp and woof in the fabric of human life. Without faith no one could exist in society. Life is a large ocean of which only a small segment falls within our horizon, and this small segment is nearly endlessly suffused with what we can know only by faith. […] Cooperation with others would be completely impossible if God had not given us the capacity to accept as true the testimony of others and rely on it, if He had not so curbed the deceitfulness inherent in all men by nature, at least on its external side, that a reality corresponds to this faith. However often our trust may be disappointed, without faith we cannot live at all, and every day we trust, more or less, most people with whom we come into contact.1
In my opinion, Vos' observations explode the myth that we can dispense with faith and believe only the things which we verify empirically. Our ability to form a minimal conception of the real world requires that we depend on each other, and if we can’t get along without believing each other, should we really think it strange if God expects us to exercise this faith towards him too?
Vos, Geerhardus. Reformed Dogmatics. Edited & translated by Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 4, Lexham Press, 2012–2016, p. 89.