Why should faith be considered a virtue? Do you value faith as applied to other areas of life, such as medical practice or the postal system?

This is the question I had for the AAF / Cru panel and I thought I'd post my answer on here--I'm curious to hear any thoughts that you guys have on this topic, or anything about my answer. Here it is:

The main text I want to work out of for answering this question is Hebrews 11. The first thing I think I need to do here is give a biblical definition of faith, as well as a definition of virtue.
Hebrews 11:1 says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Biblical faith is not a vague hope grounded in imaginary, wishful thinking, but rather a settled confidence that something in the future—something that is not yet seen but has been promised by God—will actually happen because God will bring it about.” This faith is not a leap in the dark, instead it focuses on how God has continually kept his promises from generation to generation in Israel, as the Old Testament attests. We see God continually acting in a way that fulfills his promises to his people, specifically some of his covenants are in Genesis 12:2, to Abraham, Genesis 28:12-15, to Jacob, Exodus 19-24, to Moses, 2 Samuel 7, to David, and Jeremiah 31’s “New Covenant” fulfilled in Christ.

As Christians, we base our faith on God’s fulfillment of these promises he has made throughout human history—he made Abraham the father of a great nation, the ancestors of David were kings of Israel, culminating in Jesus, God gave Jacob the land he promised.
And Hebrews 11 touches on this in great detail. It focuses on major people within the historical narratives of the Old Testament, such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, Gideon, David, and Samuel, who heard the word of God, responded to it, and through faith did amazing things.
Abraham, for example: Verses 8-10 say, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” Now Abraham messed up a bunch of times along the way: He told the Pharaoh that Sarah, his wife, was his sister, and slept with his wife’s servant to conceive a child, thinking this was the way of achieving God’s promise. So he wasn’t perfect, and faith doesn’t mean a person will be perfect. But he is still remembered so much for his faith in God and in what God promised him.

Whether or not you’re a Christian, you should read Hebrews 11 because it describes what it looks like to place your faith in God.

I couldn’t find nearly as concrete a definition for virtue in the Bible, other than that the Greek word for virtue is also translated to mean “excellence”. So I went to the next best thing to the Bible, Wikipedia. It said that a virtue is a characteristic valued as promoting individual and collective well-being, and thus is good by definition, but someone may have changed that definition by now.

So, based on this, I think the Bible demonstrates that faith is good by definition; heroes of the Jewish faith before Christ all had faith in God and God’s promises. This faith that is virtuous is assurance of things hoped for, conviction of things not seen.

It is here where I’ll address the second part of the question—I think there’s a little bit of a difference in the kind of “faith” that is being talked about in regard to the postal system, or medical practice, or getting on a plane. I think this more falls along the lines of the synonym “confidence”, meaning we are confident our letter will reach its destination but we also assume that we are subject to the errors of the system. Placing faith, “assurance of things hoped for, conviction of things not seen” in the postal system is setting oneself up for failure, because we have seen the system work, and sometimes not work. The same goes for medical practice or boarding a plane, we can have confidence that our surgery will go well, but we are aware of situations where it has not, and we can get on a plane confident that it will not crash, but we are all subject to failures in the system. Sometimes these things fail. Maybe only .01% of the time, but it happens. And it is seen.

Placing faith, “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” in something that you have seen fail is foolish, because in doing so, we claim assurance in something unsure. We claim conviction of something that is proven not to be foolproof. People often say they believe in themselves, rather than believing in God. If only people were as sure a thing as medical practice or the postal service! As people, we fail over and over again, letting our friends down, choosing the worse of two options, saying things that hurt others. And much worse.

But Hebrews is not done after defining faith and giving us examples of people with faith. Hebrews 12:2 calls Jesus “the founder and perfecter of our faith”. This means he is the origin of our faith—he is the origin of Christianity, and he is the perfecter in that he is the fulfillment of all things in Scripture. Jesus, and the life of Jesus, is what we place our faith in. Through the Bible, we have not seen him fail. He calls himself the Son of Man, a claim to be God, and we have faith in this.

So what does this faith look like?? I believe that Hebrews has an answer for us as well in this: 12:1 tells us to lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and run with endurance the race that is before us, looking to Jesus. This is a challenge to live a changed life—1 John 2:5-6 says By this we may know that we are in Christ: whoever says he abides in Christ ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. How did Jesus walk? In holiness, in faith in God’s plan for him, in incredible love. It is to this which we are called. And we can’t do it perfectly, as the Bible tells us repeatedly, but through our faith we can continue to grow in these. This kind of faith, I think, is a virtue.

So our faith in God comes from seeing him repeatedly faithful to his promises throughout history. We can have this “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” because of who God has been and will continue to be, unfailing and unfaltering in his promises. This is a little different than the confidence we have in everyday mechanisms like the postal service or medical practice. These things can fail, but we can put our ultimate faith in God and in Jesus Christ because God is faithful.