Faith #3

Pistis carried the ordinary sense of trust, confidence, or reliability in classical Greek — the kind of word used for trusting a person’s word or a ship’s captain. The New Testament writers adopt it as their standard term for trust placed in God and in Christ, and Hebrews 11:1 gives the closest thing the Bible offers to a formal definition: “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Biblical Usage

Paul roots New Testament faith in the Old Testament by quoting Genesis 15:6 — “Abraham believed [he’emin, the Hebrew equivalent of pistis] God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3) — making Abraham the paradigm of faith centuries before the word pistis existed. Romans 1:17 states that in the gospel, “the righteous shall live by faith,” a line that became the touchstone of Reformation theology.

Theological Significance

Because pistis in the New Testament is trust in a person (God, Christ) rather than mere intellectual assent to a set of claims, faith functions relationally rather than just cognitively — closer to “entrusting oneself to” than “believing that.” This relational sense is what later theology distinguishes from “blind faith,” since New Testament faith is consistently grounded in what God has said and done, not asserted without basis.