As we sat at my kitchen table having a drink, I asked him, “What do you think the word believe means?" He set his cup down and stared off into the ether for a long moment. We had just played about an hour of our favorite video game and were letting our eyes take a break. I was sitting with a friend the other day. They were familiar words used in everyday language. They were not words that only had to do with salvation, or God, or saintly stuff. Faith and belief were not primarily religious words. 1īasically what he’s saying is: In the same way that we find the word faith used in a secular way, the words faith and believe in Greek were used in secular ways in the ancient world. Even its Greek parallels, πίστις and πιστεύω were in common secular usage. In his article about faith and belief, William Walden Howard opens by saying:įaith is one of many English words which appears profusely in secular literature without any soteriological implications. Anyway, I was looking through it a while back, and I found an interesting quote from an article published in 1941. I know, I know, I'm a total nerd, but I find it interesting to see how ideas have developed over the last couple centuries. I recently bought copies of the entire collection from 1844 to 2014. There is this scholarly Bible journal that I like. For that, we’ll have to talk a bit about Greek. So, you ought to be doing like my friend and asking me, “Now, what do you mean by the word believe?” To answer that, we’ve got to know a little bit about the way believe was used in the world in which the Bible was written. In fact, It's a good reminder for me that the meanings of words matter. Anytime we talk about anything important, he says, "Now what do you mean by the word _." He likes to lock in definitions because he's big on understanding the person he's talking to. I have this friend who always is asking for definitions.
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