What Is Faith and Why Does It Matter?
People often assume they already know what is faith: believing something without evidence, or believing something you secretly suspect is false. That is not what the biblical writers meant, and the gap between the popular definition and the biblical one causes a great deal of unnecessary confusion.
The Definition in Hebrews 11
The closest thing to a formal definition in the New Testament opens Hebrews 11: faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. The chapter then does something revealing. Instead of arguing philosophically, it tells stories. Abraham leaves home. Sarah conceives late in life. Moses turns his back on Egypt. Rahab hides the spies.
The Greek word is pistis, and it appears roughly twenty-six times in this chapter alone. As the Society of Biblical Literature’s article on the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11 notes, this ancestral roll call commemorates the faith of these men and women in order to encourage its audience to imitate them. Faith here is demonstrated in what people did when the outcome was not guaranteed. It is closer to loyalty and trust than to opinion.
Faith Is Not Blind Belief
The biblical writers appeal to reasons. The prophets point to Israel’s history. Paul points to eyewitnesses of the resurrection and names them. Luke tells his reader he has investigated the events carefully. None of this looks like a demand to believe without warrant.
Philosophers who study religious belief make a similar distinction. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on faith surveys the main models and observes that reasonable faith commits itself beyond the evidence but not against it, and that faith characteristically involves a venture of trust rather than the mere holding of propositions. That is a useful description. Faith goes further than proof allows, in the same way that trusting a friend or a surgeon goes further than the available data strictly requires.
This also explains why doubt is not the opposite of faith. The Psalms complain to God at length. A father in Mark’s Gospel says he believes and asks for help with his unbelief. Thomas asks for evidence and receives it. The opposite of faith in Scripture is not doubt but distrust or indifference.
Faith and Works
One of the oldest debates in Christianity concerns how faith relates to behavior. Paul insists people are put right with God through faith and not by works of the law. James insists that faith without works is dead. Readers have argued about this pairing for centuries.
The mainstream Christian resolution is that the two writers are addressing different questions. Paul is asking what makes a person acceptable to God; James is asking what genuine faith looks like once it exists. The Church of England’s Articles of Religion capture this by stating that good works are the fruits of faith and follow after justification, and that they spring necessarily out of a true and lively faith. Catholic and Orthodox traditions place greater emphasis on the transforming work of grace over a lifetime, but no major tradition teaches that a faith producing nothing at all is real faith.
Growing in Faith
If faith is trust rather than certainty, it can grow, and it can be nourished. Christians across traditions have recommended much the same practices:
- Reading Scripture regularly, including the difficult parts
- Praying honestly, complaints included
- Belonging to a community where questions are permitted
- Acting on what you already believe rather than waiting for total clarity
- Remembering past experiences of God’s faithfulness, which is exactly what Hebrews 11 does
Faith matters because relationships run on trust. A God who could be proved the way a theorem is proved would be an object of study rather than someone to know. The Christian claim is that God is worth trusting, and that trusting him is where knowing him begins.
