A few posts back, I shared the view of faith that shaped my life for many years, the one that eventually became a source of struggle. In that view, faith was almost entirely bound up with “belief,” and belief meant thinking a statement or doctrine was true. Truth, in turn, was measured largely by whether something could be taken as literal, factual reality. My faith was built on that framework, which felt solid for a long time – solid enough to give me confidence, but also rigid enough to become brittle when pressure mounted. I have already traced the contours of that view, exploring some of its history and offering alternative ways of seeing faith that I discovered later. Yet I want to return to the relationship between faith and belief again. Partly because my thinking has continued to shift, and partly because the change was not just about faith but also about belief. I discovered that just as there are multiple ways of understanding faith, so too with belief. The surprise for me was realizing that faith and belief, far from being separate, are deeply connected – so much so that I can now speak of “faith as belief” again, albeit in a different way.

That realization felt like opening a long-locked door in a familiar hallway. I had been walking past it for years, assuming I already knew what was inside. When the lock gave way, what I found was not a smaller, more confined room, but an open landscape stretching far beyond the walls I had been living within. The idea that belief could be more than a mental checklist was both surprising and liberating. It was as if the previously stale air of belief was suddenly fresher, its once cold light now warmer, and I could finally see paths I hadn’t realized were there. In that moment, I sensed that belief might have room for more wonder, more trust, and more life than I had dared to hope.

For much of my life, I used the word “belief” in a narrow, propositional sense. To believe meant to think a statement was true. I was convinced that the strength of my faith depended on how many of these correct statements I could gather and defend. One of the most freeing discoveries of my journey was realizing that not only are there other ways of approaching the concept of belief, but that the one I had clung to was relatively recent in history. I learned that my definition would have sounded strange to most Christians who lived before the modern era. The Bible, after all, speaks often of belief, but my modern reading of that word was far removed from the original meaning. In the New Testament, the Greek word usually translated “believe” is pisteuo or pisteuein. It is simply the verbal form of the noun pistis, which is most often translated “faith.” Since English has no direct verb form of “faith,” translators use “believe” as the closest substitute. Realizing that faith and belief were two forms of the same word in Scripture began to loosen my rigid definitions and hinted that the two concepts were far more alike than I had previously thought.

This mattered deeply because by the time I learned it, I had already uncovered older, richer meanings of “faith.” Faith, in those older senses, could mean trust, loyalty, or allegiance rather than mental agreement with a list of statements. Seeing that the Bible’s “belief” was simply another form of the same word meant those older meanings applied to belief as well. I began to see that my earlier habit of defining faith through a modern idea of belief had put the cart before the horse. I had taken an intellectualized definition of belief and forced faith to fit it, so that faith became just another way of describing correct thinking. Now, I was reversing the process. By starting with the ancient meaning of faith, I could reinterpret belief through that same lens. Ironically, I ended up circling back to “faith as belief,” but now both words carried a deeper, older weight. Since I have explored the older meaning of faith at length already, I want to use the rest of this post to do the same for belief. What I found may surprise you as much as it surprised me.

Before modern times, belief meant something far more relational and embodied than it often does now. Its history, both in Latin and in English, points to a richer understanding. In its Latin heritage, the word draws from the verb credo, the root of “creed.” Credo is the opening word of both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed. In English translations, it is rendered “I believe.” This was familiar to me, but the surprise came when I explored what “I believe” actually meant in its original context. Today, the phrase usually suggests mental assent – “I agree this is true.” But in Latin, credo combines words that mean “I give my heart to.” It is the language of devotion and trust, not agreement. It is a way of saying “I commit myself” or “I entrust myself,” rather than “I think this is correct.” Seen in this light, the opening of the creeds is not a checklist of approved ideas. It is a declaration of loyalty: “I give my heart to God,” The rest of the creed names the One to whom the speaker belongs, offering relationship rather than mere recitation.

Understanding this changed the way I saw the creeds entirely. They are not just summaries of doctrine; they are acts of devotion. Their statements are not lifeless propositions but the naming of a trusted relationship. This also means they have always been more than historical artifacts of theological agreement. They function sacramentally, as a way of entering into communion with God. Even in their sometimes archaic language, they can still become doorways into mystery. They are like weathered signposts pointing into a fog. The point is not to examine the signposts endlessly, measuring their dimensions and shape or the color of their paint, but to step onto the path they indicate and follow it into the unknown. I realized that for centuries, Christians reciting “I believe” were not primarily making a statement about their mental conclusions. They were pledging themselves to the One they named, letting those words carry them deeper into trust. That vision felt not only richer but truer to the spirit of the earliest believers, who seemed far less concerned with guarding abstract definitions and far more concerned with living in allegiance to a person.

This shift in meaning is not limited to Latin roots, however. I came to learn that even the English word “belief” has changed over time. Before the seventeenth century, belief did not primarily refer to accepting a statement as true. It usually referred to a person. This was striking, especially because I had already learned that in the Greek of the New Testament, words for faith and belief overwhelmingly refer to trust in a person rather than assent to an idea. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of biblical uses are tied directly to propositions. English followed a similar path. The word “believe” originally meant “to hold dear” or “to love.” Its German relative belieben still carries this meaning today. You can find examples of this older sense in English literature from the thirteenth century onward. Even in Shakespeare’s plays, the word had not yet fully shifted. In All’s Well That Ends Well, when the king says to Bertram, “Believe not thy disdain,” he is not saying “Do not think you have disdain,” but “Do not cling to or cherish your disdain.” In this older sense, belief was bound to affection and loyalty, not simply agreement in thought.

Tracing these threads across languages and centuries revealed a consistent pattern. In biblical Greek, in Latin, and in pre-modern English, belief had less to do with abstract thought and far more to do with affection, loyalty, and commitment. In the modern world, belief is often imagined as a matter of the mind alone. In the ancient world, it was also a matter of the heart. To believe was to belove. What you believed was what you gave your heart to, what you valued and trusted. This realization overturned my assumptions. It restored a sense of unity between faith and belief, not as two ways of thinking, but as two ways of loving. Understanding this history also softened my view of others. If belief is about where we give our heart, then it is less about catching someone in a wrong idea and more about noticing the direction of their trust. This does not mean ideas are unimportant. What we think shapes how we live. But the more ancient meaning reminds me that love and loyalty are the deeper currents beneath our beliefs.

This reorientation also reshaped how I read Scripture. When Jesus calls people to believe in him, the invitation is not to hold the right mental opinion, but to entrust themselves to him, to follow him. When the early church recited the creeds, they were not simply giving their mental assent the truth of a list of doctrinal statements; they were pledging allegiance to the One whom those statements described. Even the English reformers, for all their theological debates, lived in a linguistic world where belief meant devotion as much as agreement. That changes how I hear those words. It changes how I think about them in the church today, where “belief” is often seen as a set of positions one must first affirm before being considered faithful, where faith is “belief plus.” In the older vision, belief wasn’t the foundation or core of faith, but faith itself. Something lived out. An ongoing act of trust, rooted in love, and expressed in loyalty.

All of this has brought me to a place where I can once again speak of “faith as belief,” but without returning to the narrowness that once bound me. Faith and belief, in their deepest sense, both point toward a relationship of trust and devotion. They are two forms of the same word, two sides of the same coin. The tragedy of the modern shift is not that we have added a propositional dimension to belief, but that we have often reduced it to that alone. We have taken something meant to be lived and cherished and confined it to an intellectual category. The recovery of the older meaning does not erase the value of right thinking. It simply restores belief to its fuller, more life-giving shape, where it makes belief something that can be seen in the way we live, not simply in the thoughts we think.

In the next few posts, I want to push further into the modern, propositional understanding of belief. I want to do this because it still matters. While it has been overemphasized in many contexts, I still believe it has a place in the life of faith. The things we believe in the modern sense – our intellectual convictions – shape our imagination, our ethics, and our communities. They can build trust or break it. They can heal or harm. I also want to share how my own struggles with propositional belief exposed certain fault lines, both in myself and in the way belief is often handled in faith communities. Those fault lines, I think, can help explain why the older meaning of belief as love and loyalty is worth recovering. My hope is that as we explore this together, you will see not only why the modern meaning is incomplete on its own, but also how it can be integrated with the older meaning into something more whole.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.