Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?
Deconstructing Christianity: Faith is not what you think it is. Faith is engaging in a spiritual practice, not believing in the impossible.
Empiricism is the idea, associated with the rise of experimental science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that knowledge can be derived from experience informed by our physical senses. A ‘fact’ is a single unit of this type of knowledge. The important thing concerning religion is that human consciousness also includes abstract, subjective experiences that cannot be verified factually. Knowledge about this subjective facet of our consciousness relies on metaphors to symbolize it.
Myths are not false, but true when they function as metaphors for what is true in the subjective realm of our consciousness. Myths in their truest sense are metaphorical stories told in conjunction with rituals enacted to address the abstract and subjective facets of conscious and unconscious reality. Religion is the organized, systematic pursuit of such a process. Superstition is the irrationally literal belief in, and fear of, supernatural characters or forces found in religious stories. Since explicit empiricism has become part of our reality, confusion has reigned. Factuality for understanding the concrete, physical world has been misapplied to religious metaphors symbolizing the abstract, subjective realities of inner consciousness.
Factuality is irrelevant to religious narrative as a vehicle of intra-subjective truth, and to faith itself. Facts and evidence are the underpinnings of belief in the modern sense, but not of faith in a timeless, spiritual sense. Remember that faith is a conscious choice to presuppose something irrespective of evidence. Faith connects not with the observable material world, but with the hope of individual and collective transformation through practices that bring alive the intra-subjective truths conveyed by religious narratives, and the deep psychological realities connoted by these metaphors.
The epistles and gospels alike have much to say about faith, belief, and believing. Jesus tells people he has healed that their faith has made them whole. He berates his disciples for their lack of faith and praises the superior faith of gentiles. The epistle to the Romans sets great store by faith and belief.
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It is the modern understanding of ‘belief’ developed in the late seventeenth century that has resulted in such a crisis of confusion over the sayings of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles regarding the importance of ‘believing’. A look at the Greek and Latin terms—their usage of and meanings for early Christians—can help clear up some of this confusion. So can understanding the meaning of ‘belief’ and ‘believe’ at the time those terms were translated into English.
The English word ‘faith’ is a noun only. There is no verb form. One can ‘have’ faith, or ‘exercise’ faith, but one doesn’t just ‘faith’. The Greek noun in the New Testament translated as faith is pístis. This term aims at trust, loyalty, and engagement. It is ‘belief’ only in the sense of exercising faith presupposition or having been persuaded to accept something.
In speaking of faith (pístis in the Greek of the gospels), Jesus does not refer to fact-based belief in theological propositions; he wants commitment. He wants engagement with his impoverished, self-effacing, reject-serving, proclamatory mission. That way of life exposed the injustice and hypocrisy of the established religious and social order and got him into the kind of trouble that fulfilled his destiny most violently.
The thing about pístis in Jesus’ sayings and teachings as rendered in Greek, is that it does have a verb form: pisteúō. When the New Testament was translated into Latin in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the Greek noun πίστις was rendered as fides (faithfulness, loyalty), from which the English word ‘faith’ comes. Like ‘faith’, fides lacks a verb form. So, the Greek verb πιστεύω was translated using the Latin verb credo, from which comes the English terms ‘creed’, ‘credible’, ‘credit’, and so forth.
The Latin verb opínor (I hold an opinion) would not have even been considered for pisteúō. That would have involved a meaning aimed at adopting a certain view or judgment. The etymological roots of credo, on the other hand, are to ‘give the heart to’, or ‘set the heart upon’. Like pisteúō, it indicates trusting, placing confidence, and commitment and is only ‘believe’ in the sense of exercising faith presupposition.
The Greek verb pisteúō and Latin verb credo would both be translated into English as “I believe,” but the meaning of ‘believe’ has since changed. Its earlier senses are to love, esteem, trust, or value and are suggestive of loyalty. This is reflected in its usage in both Chaucer and Shakespeare. This earlier usage does not denote intellectual assent to a hypothetical or empirical proposition. A better understanding of its meaning is, “I belove.” The Creed would be closer to its original meaning if we could say something like, “We love the idea of one God...”
The corresponding Hebrew verb ‘aman means to support, confirm, be faithful to, or to trust. Again, the modern sense of mental assent to proposed fact does not apply. As with the English translation of the Greek and Latin terms, ‘aman is often translated as “believe” or “believe in.” Its biblical meanings also include the belief of people and experiences, as well as being faithful, establishing, physically supporting, rearing children, and even nursing infants.
The Hebrew term ‘aman appears a modest number of times, compared to the many instances of Greek pístis and its various forms in the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible hardly discusses faith as a thing unto itself; it simply depicts people exercising it. In Genesis 15, Abram ‘believes’—supports, or is faithful to—YHVH’s assertion that his descendants would be as the stars, and it is reckoned to him as righteousness. In Exodus 14, after crossing the Red Sea on dry land the people believe—support, or are faithful to—YHVH and his servant Moses. This word also appears in the Psalms, in terms of being faithful, being steadfast, or believing.
By contrast, early Christianity is filled with the mention of faith, as expressed by pístis, pisteúō, and their various forms in what would become the New Testament. Faith—not belief in the modern sense—became a core concern and defining practice by which people imitated Christ, sought oneness with—adoptive child-ship of—God, and identified themselves as Christians. We, likewise, should understand faith as the ongoing, conscious practice of belovedly presupposing—as the giving of our hearts to—the mythic stories of our religion, central to the experience of inward oneness with ultimate reality, found through the ongoing exercise of meditative prayer.