Two Kinds Of Faith Ew Kenyon

Understanding The Two Kinds Of Faith

E.W. Kenyon wrote about two distinct types of faith in his theological work, and it comes up constantly in pastoral training and Bible study groups. The first kind is what he called "dead faith" or merely intellectual assent. The second is what he termed "living faith" — an active, operative trust that actually moves in a specific direction. Kenyon's framework shows up in most fundamentalist and charismatic circles that deal with the book of James, specifically James 2:14-26 where James asks what good it is to have faith without works. Kenyon took that passage and built a practical distinction around it. The dead kind of faith is the kind where someone says they believe something but their life demonstrates nothing has changed. The living kind is faith that produces observable action. I've run into this in practice more times than I can count, usually when someone comes to me after reading Kenyon's "Stir Up Your Faith" or his letters collection and tries to apply it literally. Here's the thing nobody tells you: Kenyon himself was somewhat inconsistent about where exactly he drew the line. In some writings he seems to classify faith into two categories. In others he talks about growth stages within a single type of faith. When I was working through this material for a study group, I spent about three weeks cross-referencing his publications to reconcile the apparent contradictions. The workaround I ended up using was treating his core idea as the useful part — distinguishing between belief that sits in the head and belief that moves through the hands — and setting aside the rigid taxonomy as secondary.

The practical application is straightforward enough. If you want to move from the first kind to the second, you start by identifying a specific situation where you've been intellectually agreeing with a biblical promise without actually acting on it. Kenyon would have you take a concrete step of obedience, however small, to activate that faith. For example, if someone claims to believe God will provide financially but hasn't tithed or given anything, Kenyon would point to that as dead faith in action. The fix isn't theological debate. It's behavioral change followed by reflection on the result. There are a few things beginners miss. First, Kenyon wasn't operating in a vacuum here. His ideas about faith were heavily influenced by the early twentieth century New Thought movement and later critics accused him of crossing into word-of-faith territory that bordered on prosperity teaching. That doesn't invalidate the two faiths distinction, but it does mean you should read him critically rather than uncritically. Second, the model has a real limitation: it can easily be turned into a works-based performance metric where people measure their spiritual health by whether their actions produced visible results. That's not what Kenyon intended, but it's where a lot of people end up after studying this framework. When this breaks down is in situations involving chronic illness, grief, or circumstances that don't respond to behavioral intervention. I've seen people use Kenyon's two faiths framework to blame themselves or others for outcomes that had nothing to do with insufficient faith. That's a genuine problem with the model. For those cases, I usually recommend pairing Kenyon's distinction with a more nuanced theological framework like Augustine's developed sense of hope or even a simple pastoral counseling approach that doesn't reduce complex suffering to a faith deficit.

The original texts by Kenyon can be found in public domain collections online. His most accessible compiled works are available through various Christian publishing outlets and free archival sites. You'll also find discussions of his faith framework in books about the history of American evangelical theology, particularly any text covering the period between 1900 and 1930 when his teachings were most influential.