Is belief the same as faith?
Belief is used synonymously with faith throughout the Bible, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into the word “believe” just in case it reveals any further insights to us. Remember from my previous post, titled “What Is Faith,” that faith has the essence of combining both trust and responsibility. So the word believe is going to carry these same implications, but what else might it mean?
The English word believe is actually a compound word - at least it was when it first came about. It’s a combination of the words “be” and “love.” The root of the word was not spelled “love”, but was actually an old germanic kind of word - leubh. The root word “leubh” meant “to care, desire, love.” The word believe originally had a more romantic meaning - “to hold dear, esteem, trust.” Over time it’s meaning shifted from that to something more akin to what it implies today - an intellectual confidence in the truth about something.
To me, it makes a lot more sense that God would want us to believe in him in the old, romantic sense of belief (love, trust) - not just in the modern, intellectual sense (know). To be sure, we, as modern people, are challenged to believe in God in the intellectual sense, but the great commandment is to love God with all we’ve got, not just “know about” Him.
With that, we get a better sense of why “believe” is such an appropriate word for what God requires of us, and that is exactly the reason why I’m so keen to dig into the meaning of the words that God uses to direct us to Him. It’s not that I enjoy studying and analyzing words - although I don’t not like it - but I feel that it is vitally important to understand these critical words in order to truly grasp what the Bible is saying to us. Otherwise we just gloss right over them and then criticize the Bible for being “too hard to understand.”
Now let’s dig into the Hebrew and Greek words in the Bible that are translated as “believe.”
The Hebrew word ‘aman is translated as both faith and believe in different places in the Old Testament. It’s definition uses words like nurse, bring up, support, trust; as well as assurance, believe, establish, and be faithful. It has a moral element to it, but also an essence of the kind of responsibilities that parents have to their children.
The Greek word pistis is translated as both faith and believe in different places in the New Testament. It’s definition uses words like assurance, believe, faith, moral conviction, and reliance on Christ for salvation. It has the same moral element to it that the Hebrew word has, but it is more explicit in defining a reliance on Christ for salvation.
It appears that, in terms of their definitions, the Greek and Hebrew words have much in common. They have similar moral definitions - namely those relating to belief and faith - and they both have an element of dependence. The difference between their definitions is the object of their dependence. The Hebrew word implies a dependence on parents for sustenance and direction, whereas the Greek word is explicit in defining it’s dependence on Christ for salvation.
Both languages have a single root word (with their respective variations) that is translated into both believe and faith in English, so I think it’s safe to say that belief is the same as faith, biblically speaking.
Now, if we look at the words faith and believe together, we can see that trust is at the heart of both words, as they are used in the Bible. The word faith carries with it an essence of responsibility, and the word believe carries with it a sense of love.
To conclude this post, I thought I’d end with some fun facts that may, or may not, be useful to you. I went to blueletterbible.org, selected the NASB translation, and searched for the following words - and this is how many times each of them appears in the Bible. From this we can see that faith occurs more than believe, and that the New Testament (NT) emphasizes both more than the Old Testament (OT).
| word | OT | NT | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| faith | 4 | 246 | 250 |
| faithful | 29 | 46 | 75 |
| Total | 33 | 292 | 325 |
| believe | 26 | 126 | 152 |
| believer | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| believes | 2 | 29 | 31 |
| believing | 0 | 13 | 13 |
| believed | 11 | 73 | 84 |
| belief | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 39 | 245 | 284 |
| All Total | 72 | 537 | 609 |