828
FAITH
FAITH
are the object of His people's confidence. God Himself is the ohject to which they believingly tarn, or on whom they rest in assured trust, in some eleven cases. In two of these it is to Him as a faithful witness that faith believingly turns (Dt 9^, Is 43'»). In the remainder of them it 18 upon His very person that faith rests in assured confidence (Gn 15', Ex U»i, Nu 14" 20", Dt P>, 2 K 17", 2 Ch 2020, Ps 782^, Jon 3»). It is in these instances, in which the construction is with 3, together with those in which the word is used absolutely (Ex i", Is 7» 28", Ps 1I6'»), to which may be added Ps 27" where it is construed with the infinitive, that the conception of religious be- lieving comes to its rights. The typical instance is, of course, the great word of Gn 15^, ' And Abram believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness ' ; in which aU subsequent believers, Jewish and Christian alike, have found the primary example of faith. The object of Abram's faith, as here set forth, was not the promise which appears as the occasion of its exercise ; what it rested on was God Himself, and that not merely as the giver of the promise here recorded, but as His servant's shield and exceeding ^eat reward (16'). It is therefore not the assensive but the fiducial element of faith which is here emphasized ; in a word, the faith which Abram gave J" when he ' put his trust in God ' (iTTlrreMev rif Beu, LXX), was the same faith which later He sought in vain at the hapds of His people (Nu 14", cf. Dt l»^ 2K 17"), and the notion of which the Psalmist explains in the parallel, ' They believed not in God, and trusted not in his salvation' (Ps 78^). To believe in God, in the OT sense, is thus not merely to assent to His word, but with firm and unwavering confidence to rest in security and trustfulness upon Him.
In the Greek of the LXX Tnarevdv takes its place as the re^lar rendering of I'C^sn. and is very rarely set aside m favour of another word expressing trust (Pr 26* ireWeadai.). In a few cases, however, it is strengthened by composition with a preposition (Dt V", Jg 11=», 2Ch 20™, cf. Sir l" 2'» ete., 1 Mac 1*> 7" etc., i/JLTiffTfiiew ; Mic 7°, KaTainrTeveiv) ; and in a few others it is construed with prepositions {(•> nvi, Jer 12«, Ps 78^, Dn 6^, 1 S 27'^ 2 Ch 20», Mic 7», Sir 35*' ; ^H nva. Is 28" (?), 3 Mac 2' ; iirl Tiw, AVis 12^ ; efs riva. Sir 38" ; (coTd riva, Job 4" 15" 24-).
It was by being thus made the vehicle for ex- pressing the high religious faith of OT that the word was prepared for its NT use. For it had the slightest possible connexion with religious faith in classical speech. Resting ultimately on a root with the fundamental sense of 'binding,' and standing in classical Greek as the common term for ' trusting,' ' putting faith in,' ' relying upon,' shading down into ' believing,' it was rather too strong a term for ordinary use of that ungenial rela- tion to the gods which was characteristic of Greek thought, and which was substantively expressed by Triirris — the proper acknowledgment in thought and act of their existence and rights. For uiis foid^tiv was the usual term, and the relative strength of the two terms may be observed in their use in the opening sections of Xenophon's Memorahilia (I. i. 1 and 5), where Socrates is charged with not believing in the gods whom the city owned (voidt;tiv tous $eovs), but is affirmed to have stood in a much more intimate relation to them, to have trusted in them (7ricrTfi5en'Tor5 deo'ci). Some- thing of the same depth of meaning may lurk in the exhortation of the Epinomis (980 C), IIio-Ttucras Toit SeoU eOxov. But ordinarily irurreueiv roit deoU appears as the synonym of voixL^civ rois Seoris, and imports merely the denial of atheism (Pint. <ie Superst. ii. ; Arist. Rhet. ii. 17). It was only by its adoption by the writers of the LXX to express
the faith of OT that it was fitted to take its plac« in NT as the standing designation of the attitude of the man of faith towards God.
This service the LXX could not perform for ttIoth also, owing to the almost complete absence of the noun ' faith ' in the active sense from OT ; but it was due to a Hellenistic development on the basis of OT religion, and certainly not without influence from Gn 15' and Hab 2* that this term, too, was prepared for NT use. In classical Greek irloris is aitplied to belief in the gods chiefly as implying that such belief rests rather on trust than on sight (Plut. Mor. 756 B). Though there is no suggestion in this of weakness of conviction (for Trfcrns expresses a strong conviction, and is therefore used in con- trast with 'impressions'), yet the word, wlien referring to the gods, very rarely rises abo%'e intellectual conviction into its naturally more con- genial region of moral trust (Soph. Ocd. Bex, 146, 147). That this, its fuller and more characteristic meaning, should come to its rights in the religious sphere, it was necessary that it should be trans- ferred into a new religious atmosphere. The usage of Philo bears witness that it thus came to its rights on the lips of the Greek-speaking Jews. It is going too far, to be sure, to say tliat Philo's usage of 'faith' is scarcely distinguishable from that of NT writers. The gulf that separates the two is very wide, and has not been inaptly described by saying that with Philo, faith, as the queen of the virtues, is the righteousness of the righteous man, while with St. Paul, as the abnegation of all claim to virtue, it is the righteousness of the un- righteous. But it is of the utmost signilic.nnce that, in the pages of Philo, tlie conception is filled with a content which far transcends any usage ot the word in heathen Greek, and which is a refraction of the religious conceptions of OT. Fundamental to his idea of it as the crowning virtue of the godly man, to be attained only with the supremest difficultj^, especially by creatures akin to mortal things, is his conception of it as essentially a changeless, unwavering ' standing by God ' (Dt 5"), — binding us to God, to the exclusion of every other object of desire, and making us one with Him. It has lost that soteriological content which is the very heart of faith in OT ; though tliere does not absolutely fail an occasional reference to God as Saviour, it is, with Philo, rather the Divinity, t4 if, upon which faith rests, than the God of grace and salvation ; and it therefore stands with liira, not at the beginning but at the end of the religious life. But we can perceive in the usage of Philo a development on Jewish ground of a use of the word ttIcttis to describe that complete detach- ment from earthly things, and that firm convic- tion of the reality and supreme significance of the things not seen, which underlies its whole NT use.