Although I’ve already explained in broad terms how I once understood faith, I think it’s worth spending more time looking at it in detail. I don’t just want to describe the basic form it took in my life but also examine where that form came from. When I look back, it’s clear that my view of faith wasn’t something I pieced together carefully over time. It arrived already defined, already explained, already packaged. I grew up assuming this was the way Christians had always understood faith, and I never thought to ask whether there was a history behind it, or whether Christians in other places and times had understood it differently. It wasn’t until much later that I began to learn how recent this definition of faith really was, and how it came to be the dominant one in my part of the Christian world.
These later discoveries didn’t just change my personal understanding of faith, they also showed me why this particular way of defining it had become so widespread, and why I had accepted it without even thinking twice. If I had to sum up this version of faith in one word, it would be “belief.” Not in the more ancient and broader sense of personal trust or commitment, but in the narrower, more modern sense of agreeing in my mind that a given set of statements were factually correct. In this view, faith was mainly about mental assent to a list of doctrines. It could have emotional or practical implications, but at its core it was about holding the right ideas in your head.
What’s interesting to me now is how unquestioned this definition was in my circles. It wasn’t debated, defended, or even explained – it was simply assumed. Whether it was the way an evangelistic tract ended with “Do you believe this?” or how testimonies focused on the moment someone “came to believe,” the idea that faith equals belief was the water I swam in, yet I didn’t notice it. And so I never thought to ask where it came from or if there was another way.
This way of defining faith as primarily intellectual agreement wasn’t just one part of my theological upbringing – it was presented as the foundation of Christianity itself. Nobody sat me down and said directly, “Faith is mainly about thinking the right thoughts,” but that message came through in almost every setting: Sunday school lessons, youth group teachings, altar calls, and church membership classes. Being a Christian meant believing the correct things about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, heaven, hell, etc. If you doubted any of those core points, your faith itself was considered weak or in danger. But then I began to see that this belief-centered approach wasn’t universal throughout Christian history, and that it was the result of particular set of historical developments over the last several centuries.
Realizing that my view of faith had a history was eye-opening, to say the least. It was like thinking I had been reading a source in its original language, only to find out I had actually been reading a heavily edited and modernized version. Faith, it turns out, had not always meant “agreeing with a list of propositions.” Earlier Christians had understood it in both broader and deeper ways – ways that emphasized trust, loyalty, and relationship more than mental agreement. But, as I came to find out, that ancient approach to faith was gradually replaced by a more belief-centered one, and a transition that occurred in large part through two major historical shifts: the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The Reformation was the first major turning point. Many people today know it through slogans like sola fide (“faith alone”), which became rallying cries for reformers such as Martin Luther. These words were aimed at what reformers saw as corruption in the medieval Catholic Church, especially the idea that salvation could be earned or purchased through good works, indulgences, or participation in church rituals. The reformers wanted to return to the idea that salvation came through God’s grace, received by faith. But as these new Protestant movements began to take shape, they had to define themselves against the Catholic Church and against each other. The result was a wave of creeds, confessions, and doctrinal statements that spelled out in (sometimes great) detail what each group believed.
This process, I discovered, changed the focus of faith. Before the Reformation, “orthodoxy” – a word meaning “right praise” – was more about worship and shared participation in the life of the church than about detailed doctrinal agreement. To be orthodox was to join in the ancient practices of prayer, the sacraments, and the liturgy. But after the Reformation, orthodoxy became increasingly defined as “right belief.” Each denomination distinguished itself by the precision of its doctrines and its rejection of other interpretations. A Presbyterian was not a Lutheran, and a Lutheran was not an Anglican, largely because each group had its own set of carefully worded theological positions.
And this shift had serious consequences. Once faith was defined in terms of correct belief, disagreement was seen as a threat to salvation itself. The time period around the Reformation saw fierce conflicts, sometimes escalating into violence – and even war – between groups of Christians who followed the same Jesus but explained their beliefs about him differently. Disputes over theology led to executions, excommunications, and deep divisions that remain today. And so the habit of equating faith with doctrinal agreement became deeply ingrained in Western Christianity.
Even the word “believe” underwent a change, as I came to learn. In its older English and Germanic roots, “to believe” meant “to hold dear” or “to love.” It expressed personal trust and commitment. And so when early Christians said they believed in Jesus, they were saying they entrusted themselves to him – not simply that they agreed with factual statements about him. Yet, over time, this relational meaning faded, and was eventually replaced by the modern sense of belief as intellectual agreement. That shift then reshaped the way faith itself was taught and practiced.
The Enlightenment, beginning shortly thereafter, reinforced this shift. It was an era of rapid scientific progress, exploration, and philosophical change. Enlightenment thinkers emphasized reason, observation, and evidence. Truth came to be defined as that which could be proven by facts, tested by experiment, and verified by reason. Ideas that could not be proven in this way – including religious claims – were thus treated with suspicion. The Bible, once read mainly as sacred story and moral guide, came to be analyzed like any other historical document, and its accounts of miracles, creation, and events like the exodus or resurrection were increasingly scrutinized for factual accuracy.
As a result, the Christian faith became even more tightly bound to factual claims. Believing in Jesus now meant affirming that certain historical events really happened in exactly the way described in Scripture, and faith was seen as holding these beliefs in spite of the challenges from science, history, or philosophy. Doubt became an intellectual problem, a failure to hold onto the facts. Faith became, in some sense, the act of maintaining certainty about increasingly disputed claims. An act that made faith fragile: if one fact seemed doubtful, the whole system felt at risk.
During this period, apologetics – the defense of the faith through arguments and evidence – became a major focus for many Christians. The goal was to prove that Christian beliefs were historically and scientifically credible. In my own upbringing, apologetics was presented as a way to strengthen faith and answer skeptics. Looking back, I see that it also reflected how much the church had accepted the Enlightenment’s rules of debate. By placing so much weight on factual arguments, we reinforced the idea that faith stood or fell on the strength of our intellectual case.
Although learning this history didn’t immediately solve my struggles with faith, it did give me a new framework for understanding them. The version of faith I had inherited, the one that saw faith as mental agreement with specific propositions, was not the only way Christians had understood it. Nor was it the most ancient way. It was shaped by the Reformation’s battles over doctrine and the Enlightenment’s demand for factual proof. Once I realized this, I began to also realize that I could start asking different questions. What if faith didn’t have to be defined this way? What if there were older, more ancient, and more relational ways of understanding faith that could be recovered?
For most of Christian history, faith was understood as trust – personal reliance on God’s character and promises – and as loyalty – a commitment to live according to God’s ways. Beliefs mattered, but they flowed out of this deeper relationship rather than serving as its foundation. In this older framework, a person could have questions or uncertainties about certain doctrines without being seen as faithless, as long as they continued to trust God and live in faithfulness. This was a more resilient kind of faith, because it was not so easily shaken by intellectual doubt.
Seeing faith this way became an attractive option for me, and has been incredibly freeing for me ever since. It shifts the emphasis from defending a set of propositions to following a person, and from maintaining certainty about facts to maintaining trust in God. It allows for growth, for honest questions, for times when beliefs change without the whole structure collapsing. And it also aligns better with the biblical emphasis on faith as trust and faithfulness. After all, Abraham, Moses, Ruth, and others weren’t remembered for passing a doctrinal exam, but for their trust in God.
In the next part of this series, I plan to explore more of these older understandings of faith and how they can speak to people today. But before doing that, I want to pause and look at how the belief-centered model I grew up with shaped the way I thought about apologetics. For years, I saw apologetics as essential – almost the backbone of my faith – because if faith meant believing the right things, then I needed to be able to prove those things were true. I devoured books, memorized arguments, and felt a quiet panic when I didn’t have a good answer to a skeptic’s question. Looking back, I can see how much that approach was shaped by the idea that my faith stood or fell on my ability to defend certain facts. Before I can talk about a broader, more relational vision of faith, I think it’s worth telling that part of the story – how apologetics became such a big part of my spiritual life, and how my view of it has changed.
Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.
