Faith and belief

Malcolm Ruel, again in the Blackwell Reader in the anthropology of religion, traces the changing meanings of “faith.” For the Hebrew Bible, ‘mn “denotes . . . a quality of relationship: it was used of the reliability or trustworthiness of a servant, a witness, messenger, or a prophet, but is also served to characterize the relationship between God and his people, reciprocally trusted and trusting, bound by covenant to each other.”

So too the Greek pist- group had to do with “conduct that honoured an agreement or bond. It has a social orientation, and its use indicated misconduct by implication” (Ruel is here quoting the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology ). In ancient Greek, ” pistis means the trust that a man may place in other men, or gods; credibility, credit in business, guarantee, proof or something to be trusted. Similarly, pisteuo means to trust something or someone.”

Over the course of Christian history, “faith” came to denote “an interior state, a psychological condition,” and this particular notion of faith/belief underlies much of the anthropology of religion.

Beyond Ruel’s concerns, we might ask what happens to the biblical teaching concerning justification by faith when “faith” is reduced from a quality of a relationship and right conduct in a bond to an interior condition.