What Does Faith Really Mean?

 

I’ve never been a Genesis literalist. I think it flies in the face of the whole point of the Scriptures and how they were viewed up until the nineteenth bleeding century. Before a certain point, the Scriptures were taken literally for lack of an alternative, and even people with no great love of God or virtue believed that cosmology and in the existence and deity of Christ. For them, it wasn’t a package deal, belief alongside virtue, nor did it require any great leaps. It’s a cosmology, an operational context, and not the be-all end-all of what man can know.

If it’s not meant to be taken on faith, why on earth should we do so?

I’m studying medieval religion right now, and that’s pretty much the case; you’re average European, at least, for centuries had little from which to derive a view of the world apart from the Scriptures. George Eliot deals with this as recently in the mid-1800’s in The Mill on the Floss, wherein she describes the basic lower-class Christianity as a belief that God created the world and England; there was no consideration of the origin of things apart from God’s creation of it, no faith needed in that area because there was no doubt.

Basically if you had never even heard otherwise, how much faith would it take to believe Genesis literally? Wouldn’t it simply be a fact you believe as much as you believe that, say, Ulaanbataar is the capital of Mongolia?

Go and read, for instance, The Imitation of Christ. Writing in an ostensibly Christian society, Thomas a Kempis deals with something called conversion, and at no point relates it to believing in the Scriptures; the assumption already is that the Scriptures are true and faith is not needed to believe them. The question, then, is how one responds, which is what the book deals with — conversion of the heart to follow with fidelity the words of Christ. You can find similar content in the writing of John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi. There is no sense of conversion meaning a sudden acceptance of a cosmology previously rejected, of God as creator, because it was, as I said, already assumed.

If it’s that recent, you can take it back farther to ancient Israel, around the time of the composition of the texts in question. Was the account of the creation meant to be taken on faith? Was it seen as a divinely revealed truth, or simply how the community understood history? Was it something strange and difficult to comprehend? I posit that it was not; the world is, after all, full of creation stories. Not to raise them all to the level of the Scriptures, but people clearly had the means to believe such things.

Since they were accounts of creation already widely accepted, why on earth should we assume they needed to be taken on faith, or were intended as such? And if they weren’t, why do we assume they must be? 

And what does “faith” really mean anyway?

The word has an interesting history. It’s from Latin fides via Old French feid, it meant “the duty of fulfilling trust,” as in a “faithless elector” being someone who votes for someone other than the person he has been entrusted to vote for, and it is in that form that the word fides appears in Latin translations from the Vulgate, third or fourth century, onward. When the Scriptures exhort someone to have faith, at least in the Latin translations (I can’t speak to Hebrew or Greek; my specialty is in English and its relation to romance languages), the sense heard by the audience is “Trust God to fulfill his promises.” 

Around roughly the 1400’s, generally taken to be 1382, the word “faith” took on connotations of believing things in a religious sense. It was during this period that the first modern English bibles appeared, particularly Wycliff, who translated from the Vulgate, which uses fides, which he translated “faith” (or, m.E. feith, i.e. Vulgate Sic et fides, si non habeat opera, mortua est in semetipsa, Wycliff Feith, if it haue not werkes, is deed in it silf, and in another example, Wycliff He shal be tormetid with euel that doth feith [Vulg. fidem facit] for a strange) to an audience for which it no longer meant the same thing as fides which is closer to modern “fidelity.”

Wycliff had a seminal impact on English bible translation, being one of the principal sources for the King James, which was one of the texts that standardized the English language, cementing the use of “faith” in the sense described above.

At some point, around the mid-nineteenth century according to Marcus Borg (who, nota bene, is not a linguist, and whose date I cannot substantiate, but it’s clearly within around a century of that), the word further declined into “believing things inevident,” which goes beyond “belief in things not seen” as used in the Scriptures to expand far beyond the message of the Gospel, i.e. the Resurrection, to the entire history of the Old Testament which had not before been challenged. “Faith” in the Scriptures is used, as far as I can tell, in the sense of trust, that is, trust in God’s promises, the same sense as fides when Jerome studiously compiled the Vulgate, and not the sense which we generally give it.

In short, the word has been dramatically altered, attained numerous connotations which have disrupted our interpretation of the Scriptures, and we have forgotten how the worldview of someone as recently as the nineteenth century pre-Darwin would have affected how they understood the means by which they should relate to God.

So does “faith in Christ” mean you believe he died and was resurrected, or does it mean trust in him to fulfill his promises and your response to that? Does faith mean “believing things inevident,” and is that the sense in which it’s used in the Scriptures? What I’ve presented is my argument against that based on my studies in the history of the word, it’s derivation and evolution. 

Further, from there, when Scripture demands faith, is it asking us to believe in Balaam’s donkey as much as it’s asking us to believe in God’s goodness?

sources: The Online Etymological Dictionary, Wikipedia (for some stuff on Wycliff), and the Oxford English Dictionary (to which I thankfully have a subscription), and the Biblia Clerus.