FAITH Trusting commitment of one person to another, particularly of a person to God. Faith is the central concept of Christianity. One may be called a Christian only if one has faith.
Our English word “faith” comes from the Latin fides, as developed through the Old French words fei and feid. In Middle English (1150-1475) “faith” replaced a word that eventually evolved into “belief.” “Faith” came to mean “loyalty to a person to whom one is bound by promise or duty.” Faith was fidelity. “Belief” came to be distinguished from faith as an intellectual process having to do with the acceptance of a proposition. The verb form of “faith” dropped out of English usage toward the end of the sixteenth century.
Faith as the Way to Salvation The concept of faith is primarily that of a personal relationship with God that determines the priorities of one’s life . This relationship is one of love that is built on trust and dependence. We receive it by trusting the saving work of Jesus . Faith is the basic Christian experience, the decision for Christ Jesus. It is the acceptance of Christ’s lordship (i.e., His God-given, absolute authority ). In this sense faith is doubly a break from the past: it is one’s removal from sin , and it is one’s removal from all other religious allegiances (1 Thess. 1:9 ). As a break from the past, faith is the beginning of relation to God and not an end. It is, especially in Paul’s letters, the inauguration of incorporation “in Christ,” in which one continues to grow and develop.
If faith is primarily a relationship into which one enters through acceptance of Jesus’ authority, it also includes a certain amount of “belief.” As a derived use, then, “faith” may also denote the content of what is believed. In this sense faith is the conviction that God acted in the history of Israel and “that God was in Christ , reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19 ). In theological usage “the faith” may refer to many more doctrines and dogmas that have been developed since New Testament times, but in the New Testament “that which must be believed” was more limited as Romans 10:9-10 may demonstrate.
Conclusion Faith is what we believe, it is Christianity itself, but primarily it is the relationship we have with God through what Jesus accomplished in His death and resurrection .
William L. Self
